Oswald Spengler

Bio

From Encyclopedia.com :

"Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German universal historian, was born in Blankenburg, in the Harz mountains. Of Protestant parentage, he was descended on his father’s side from a line of mining engineers; his mother’s family was artistically inclined. Both inheritances came together in Spengler—in his scientific interests on the one hand and his stylistic ability and talent for bold, intuitive theoretical formulations on the other.

After attending a humanist Gymnasium in Halle, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle. He obtained his doctor’s degree at Halle with a dissertation on Heraclitus. Spengler’s preoccupation with this pre-Socratic Greek philosopher foreshadowed some of the main ideas of his major work: he was to translate “everything flows” into historical relativism and “war, the father of all things” into a self-consciously tough, “heroic” world view. Spengler was a lone wolf—a bachelor, and also an outsider to the German world of learning. Having taught at a number of schools, the last a Hamburg Realgymnasium, he moved to Munich as a private scholar in 1911, at which time he conceived the idea for the work which was to stir up the entire historical profession."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-european-biographies/oswald-spengler)