After noting that the European lacks the intuitive cultural perspective of the Asian, Spengler goes on to detail the “storm of facts” that Germany was caught up in, that her geography provided no natural boundary anchors, that, “Our past is having its revenge—seven hundred years of the petty provincial regime of small states with never a greatness, an idea, an aim.”

Spengler is hinting at the fact that in ancient times Germany was great because it was a thing of the spirit—a nation of tribes that identified with a cohesive purpose, at least in the breach, when it came to dealing with Rome, the Huns, the Magyars. But that feudalism stifled not so much the economy of Germany—which did well enough during the relatively self-contained economic life of the Middle Ages—but its spirit; that Germany had become a land of near horizons and small spheres; a nation where, “facts were seen but not grasped.”

Spengler decries the folly of relying on revolution, the surplus of eager candidates for dictator, and that the German outlook was “shallow and cramped, stupid and parochial.”

He continues with a discussion of how the everyday Englishman at least had a grasp on the exploitive basis for his material existence, and a realization that prosperity at home meant risks and violent exploitation abroad in the contexts of the global mercantile economy, of which Germany was a mere satellite, despite its geographical central position.

Spengler concludes this section nicely:

“And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.”

Oswald Spengler continues to set a dark circumscribed stage for a nationalist Germany, with the alternative seemingly a passive road to oblivion, which, in retrospect from our vantage, and the impossibility of German victory in the conflict he was predicting, marks him as an insightful doomsayer. Despite his contention that there would be a way whereby Germany could free itself from the plight of being shackled to a global world order to which it was a pariah nation, in the context of its traditional position in Europe as Guardian Against the East, Spengler thought that Germany, as a nation, at least had youth on its side, and might yet be able to rise.

For those who have not read much European history set before the Thirty Years War, Germany had a function in regards to the greater Western Europe during the Middle Ages similar to the function of Rohan, to Gondor in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings.

With the rise of the Soviet Union, an aggressive communist nation bent on exporting its politics worldwide, historical minded people like Spengler, looked to the east and saw, what was to them, a later day Mongol Horde, ready to be set loose by their Dark Lord, Stalin.

At the time Spengler wrote the evil status currently attributed to Hitler in the wake of the Jewish genocide was then attributed to Stalin. At this point it was a sure thing that whoever won the coming conflict, either Stalin or Hitler would emerge as the biggest monster in human history. As of this writing, Hitler was merely emerging as the foremost candidate to fight the monster, not the monster himself.