by Peter Watson
In 1903 Spengler failed his doctoral thesis. He managed to pass the following year, but in Germany’s highly competitive system his first-time failure meant that the top academic echelon was closed to him. In 1905 he suffered a nervous breakdown and wasn’t seen for a year. He was forced to teach in schools, rather than university, which he loathed, so he moved to Munich to become a fulltime writer. Munich was then a colorful city very different from the highly academic centres such as Heidelberg and Göttingen. It was the city of Stefan George and his circle of poets, of Thomas Mann, just finishing Death in Venice, of the painters Franz Marc and Paul Klee.3
For Spengler the defining moment, which led directly to his book, occurred in 1911. It was the year he moved to Munich, when in May the German cruiser Panther sailed into the Moroccan port of Agadir in an attempt to stop a French takeover of the country. The face-off brought Europe to the edge of war, but in the end France and Britain prevailed by forcing Germany to back down. Many, especially in Munich, felt the humdiation keenly, none more so than Spengler.4 He certainly saw Germany, and the German way of doing things, as directly opposed to the French and, even more, the British way. These two countries epitomised for him the rational science that had arisen since the Enlightenment, and for some reason Spengler saw the Agadir incident as signalling the end of that era. It was a time for heroes, not traders. He now set to work on what would be his life’s project, his theme being how Germany would be the country, the culture, of the future. She might have lost the battle in Morocco, but a war was surely coming in which she, and her way of life, would be victorious. Spengler believed he was living at a turning point in history such as Nietzsche had talked of. The first title for his book was Conservative and Liberal, but one day he saw in the window of a Munich bookshop a volume entitled The Decline of Antiquity and at once he knew what he was going to call his book.5
The foreboding that Germany and all of Europe was on the verge of a major change was not of course confined to Spengler. Youth movements in France and Germany were calling for a ‘rejuvenation’ of their countries, as often as not in militaristic terms. Max Nordau’s Degeneration was still very influential and, with no wholesale war for nearly a century, ideas about the ennobling effects of an honourable death were far from uncommon. Even Ludwig Wittgenstein shared this view, as we have seen.6 Spengler drew on eight major world civdisations – the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Indians, the pre-Columbian Mexicans, the classical or Graeco-Roman, the Western European, and the ‘Magian,’ a term of his own which included the Arabic, Judaic, and Byzantine – and explained how each went through an organic cycle of growth, maturity, and inevitable decline. One of his aims was to show that Western civilisation had no privileged position in the scheme of things: ‘Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return.’7 For Spengler, Zivilisation was not the end product of social evolution, as rationalists regarded Western civilisation; instead it was Kultur’s old age. There was no science of history, no linear development, simply the repeated rise and fall of individual Kulturs. Moreover, the rise of a new Kultur depended on two things – the race and the Geist or spirit, ‘the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” ‘For Spengler, rational society and science were evidence only of a triumph of the indomitable Western will, which would collapse in the face of a stronger will, that of Germany. Germany’s will was stronger because her sense of ‘we’ was stronger; the West was obsessed with matters ‘outside’ human nature, like materialistic science, whereas in Germany there was more feeling for the inner spirit. This is what counted.8 Germany was like Rome, he said, and like Rome the Germans would reach London.9
The Decline was a great and immediate commercial success. Thomas Mann compared its effect on him to that of reading Schopenhauer for the first time.10 Ludwig Wittgenstein was astounded by the book, but Max Weber described Spengler as a ‘very ingenious and learned dilettante.’ Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche read the book and was so impressed that she arranged for Spengler to receive the Nietzsche Prize. This made Spengler a celebrity, and visitors were required to wait three days before he could see them.11 He tried to persuade even the English to read Nietzsche.12
From the end of the war throughout 1919, Germany was in chaos and crisis. Central authority had collapsed, revolutionary ferment had been imported from Russia, and soldiers and sailors formed armed committees, called ‘soviets.’ Whole cities were ‘governed’ at gunpoint, like Soviet republics. Eventually, the Social Democrats, the left-wing party that installed the Weimar Republic, had to bring in their old foes the army to help restore order; this was achieved but involved considerable brutality – thousands were killed. Against this background, Spengler saw himself as the prophet of a nationalistic resurgence in Germany, concluding that only a top-down command economy could save her. He saw it as his role to rescue socialism from the Marxism of Russia and apply it in the ‘more vital country’ of Germany. A new political category was needed: he put Prussianism and Socialism together to come up with National Socialism. This would lead men to exchange the ‘practical freedom’ of America and England for an ‘inner freedom,’ ‘which comes through discharging obligations to the organic whole.’13 One of those impressed by this argument was Dietrich Eckart, who helped form the German Workers’ Party (GWP), which adopted the symbol of the Pan-German Thule Society Eckart had previously belonged to. This symbol of ‘Aryan vitalism,’ the swastika, now took on a political significance for the first time. Alfred Rosenberg was also a fan of Spengler and joined the GWP in May 1919. Soon after, he brought in one of his friends just back from the front, a man called Adolf Hitler.
From 18 January 1919 the former belligerent nations met in Paris at a peace conference to reapportion those parts of the dismantled Habsburg and German Empires forfeited by defeat in war, and to discuss reparations. Six months later, on 28 June, Germany signed the treaty in what seemed the perfect location: the Hall of Mirrors, at the Palace of Versailles, just outside the French capital.
Adjoining the Salon de la Guerre, the Galérie des Glaces is 243 feet in length, a great blaze of light, with a parade of seventeen huge windows overlooking the formal gardens designed in the late seventeenth century by André Le Nôtre. Halfway along the length of the hall three vast mirrors are set between marble pilasters, reflecting the gardens. Among this overwhelming splendour, in an historic moment captured by the British painter Sir William Orpen, the Allied leaders, diplomats, and soldiers convened. Opposite them, their faces away from the spectator, sat two German functionaries, there to sign the treaty. Orpen’s picture perfectly captures the gravity of the moment.14
In one sense, Versailles stood for the continuity of European civilisation, the very embodiment of what Spengler hated and thought was dying. But this overlooked the fact that Versailles had been a museum since 1837. In 1919, the centre stage was held not by any of the royal families of Europe but by the politicians of the three main Allied and Associated powers. Orpen’s picture focuses on Georges Clemenceau, greatly advanced in years, with his white walrus moustache and fringe of white hair, looking lugubrious. Next to him sits a very upright President Woodrow Wilson – the United States was an Associated Power – looking shrewd and confident. David Lloyd George, then at the height of his authority, sits on the other side of Clemenceau, his manner thoughtful and judicious. Noticeable by its absence is Bolshevik Russia, whose leaders believed the Allied Powers to be as doomed by the inevitable march of history as the Germans they had just defeated. A complete settlement, then, was an illusion at Versailles. In the eyes of many it was, rather, a punishment of the vanquished and a dividing of the spoils. For some present, it did not go unnoticed that the room where the treaty was signed was a hall of mirrors.
Barely was the treaty signed than it was exploded. In November 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace scuttled what public confidence there was in the settlement. Its author, John Maynard Keynes, was a brilliant intellectual, not only
a theorist of economics, an original thinker in the philosophical tradition of John Stuart Mill, but a man of wit and a central figure in the famous Bloomsbury group. He was born into an academically distinguished family – his father was an academic in economics at Cambridge, and his mother attended Newnham Hall (though, like other women at Cambridge at that time, she was not allowed to graduate). As a schoolboy at Eton he achieved distinction with a wide variety of noteworthy essays and a certain fastidiousness of appearance, which derived from his habit of wearing a fresh boutonnière each morning.15 His reputation preceded him to King’s College, Cambridge, where he arrived as an undergraduate in 1902. After only one term he was invited to join the Apostles alongside Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, G. Lowes Dickinson and E. M. Forster. He later welcomed into the society Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was among these liberal and rationalist minds that Keynes developed his ideas about reasonableness and civilisation that underpinned his attack on the politics of the peace settlement in The Economic Consequences.
Before describing the main lines of Keynes’s attack, it is worth noting the path he took between Cambridge and Versailles. Convinced from an early age that no one was ever as ugly as he – an impression not borne out by photographs and portraits, although he was clearly far from being physically robust – Keynes put great store in the intellectual life. He also possessed a sharpened appreciation for physical beauty. Among the many homosexual affairs of his that originated at Cambridge was one with Arthur Hobhouse, another Apostle. In 1905 he wrote to Hobhouse in terms that hint at the emotional delicacy at the centre of Keynes’s personality: ‘Yes I have a clever head, a weak character, an affectionate disposition, and a repulsive appearance … keep honest, and – if possible – like me. If you never come to love, yet I shall have your sympathy – and that I want as much, at least, as the other.’16 His intellectual pursuits, however, were conducted with uncommon certainty. Passing the civil service examinations, Keynes took up an appointment at the India Office, not because he had any interest in India but because the India Office was one of the top departments of state.17 The somewhat undemanding duties of the civil service allowed him time to pursue a fellowship dissertation for Cambridge. In 1909 he was elected a fellow of King’s, and in 1911 he was appointed editor of the Economic Journal. Only twenty-eight years old, he was already an imposing figure in academic circles, which is where he might have remained but for the war.
Keynes’s wartime life presents an ironic tension between the economic consequences of his expertise as a member of the wartime Treasury – in effect, negotiating the Allied loans that made possible Britain’s continuance as a belligerent – and the convictions that he shared with conscientious objectors, including his close Bloomsbury friends and the pacifists of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s circle. Indeed, he testified on behalf of his friends before the tribunals but, once the war was being waged, he told Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell, ‘There is really no practical alternative.’ And he was practical: one of his coups in the war was to see that there were certain war loans France would never repay to Britain. In 1917, when the Degas collection came up for sale in Paris after the painter’s death, Keynes suggested that the British government should buy some of the impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces and charge them to the French government. The plan was approved, and he travelled to Paris with the director of the National Gallery, both in disguise to escape the notice of journalists, and landed several bargains, including a Cézanne.18
Keynes attended the peace treaty talks in Versailles representing the chancellor of the exchequer. In effect, terms were dictated to Germany, which had to sue for peace in November 1918. The central question was whether the peace should produce reconciliation, reestablishing Germany as a democratic state in a newly conceived world order, or whether it should be punitive to the degree that Germany would be crippled, disabled from ever again making war. The interests of the Big Three did not coincide, and after months of negotiations it became clear that the proposals of the Armistice would not be implemented and that instead an enormous reparation would be exacted from Germany, in addition to confiscation of a considerable part of German territory and redistribution to the victors of her overseas empire.
Keynes was appalled. He resigned in ‘misery and rage.’ His liberal ideals, his view of human nature, and his refusal to concur with the Clemenceau view of German nature as endemically hostile, combined with a feeling of guilt over his noncombatant part in the war (as a Treasury official he was exempt from conscription), propelled him to write his book exposing the treaty. In it Keynes expounded his economic views, as well as analysing the treaty and its effects. Keynes thought that the equilibrium between the Old and New Worlds which the war had shattered should be reestablished. Investment of European surplus capital in the New World produced the food and goods needed for growing populations and increased standards of living. Thus markets must be freer, not curtailed, as the treaty was to do for Germany. Keynes’s perspective was more that of a European than of a nationalist. Only in this way could the spectre of massive population growth, leading to further carnage, be tamed.19 Civilisation, said Keynes, must be based on shared views of morality, of prudence, calculation, and foresight. The punitive impositions on Germany would produce only the opposite effect and impoverish Europe. Keynes believed that enlightened economists were best able to secure the conditions of civilisation, or at any rate prevent regression, not politicians. One of the most far-reaching aspects of the book was Keynes’s argument, backed with figures and calculations, that there was no probability that Germany could repay, in either money or kind, the enormous reparations required over thirty years as envisaged by the Allies. According to Keynes’s theory of probability, the changes in economic conditions simply cannot be forecast that far ahead, and he therefore urged much more modest reparations over a much shorter time. He could also see that the commission set up to force Germany to pay and to seize goods breached all the rules of free economic association in democratic nations. His arguments therefore became the basis of the pervasive opinion that Versailles inevitably gave rise to Hitler, who could not have taken control of Germany without the wide resentment against the treaty. It didn’t matter that, following Keynes’s book, reparations were in fact scaled down, or that no great proportion of those claimed were ever collected. It was enough that Germany thought itself to have been vengefully treated.
Keynes’s arguments are disputable. From the outset of peace, there was a strong spirit of noncompliance with orders for demilitarisation among German armed forces. For example, they refused to surrender all the warplanes the Allies demanded, and production and research continued at a fast pace.20 Did the enormous success of Keynes’s book create attitudes that undermined the treaty’s more fundamental provisions by putting such an emphasis upon what may have been a peripheral part of the treaty?21 And was it instrumental in creating the climate for Western appeasement in the 1930s, an attitude on which the Nazis gambled? Such an argument forms the basis of a bitter attack on Keynes published in 1946, after Keynes’s death and that of its author, Etienne Mantoux, who might be thought to have paid the supreme price exacted by Keynes’s post-Versailles influence: he was killed in 1945 fighting the Germans. The grim title of Mantoux’s book conveys the argument: The Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes.22
What is not in dispute is Keynes’s brilliant success, not only in terms of polemical argument but also in the literary skill of his acid portraits of the leaders. Of Clemenceau, Keynes wrote that he could not ‘despise him or dislike him, but only take a different view as to the nature of civilised man, or indulge at least a different hope.’ ‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen and his colleagues not least.’ Keynes takes the reader into Clemenceau’s mind: ‘The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed, as
in each preceding century, a trade rival; a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and France. Prudence required some measure of lip service to the “ideals” of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interest.’23
This striking passage leads on to the ‘foolish’ American. Woodrow Wilson had come dressed in all the wealth and power of mighty America: ‘When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’ Europe was dependent on the United States financially and for basic food supplies. Keynes had high hopes of a new world order flowing from New to Old. It was swiftly dashed. ‘Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewithal to bind the princes of this world…. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs. … But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary. … The President’s slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation in a glance … and was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of a Lloyd George.’ In this terrible sterility, ‘the President’s faith withered and dried up.’