World War I and the Russian October Revolution intensified the atmosphere of desolation that had been spreading throughout the middle-class elite of Europe since the turn of the century. Many contemporaries believed that their own armed conflicts and ideological disputes marked the end of global hegemony for Europe, and they tried to come to terms with this realization by bringing once more to the fore a cyclical interpretation of history, for which the fall of Rome stood as a historic paradigm. The most important and influential work of this sort was Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918-22), which was influenced by Seeck’s Geschichte as well as by the research of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Spengler interpreted Germany’s military defeat as a symptom of the defeat of Europe as a whole. No more than a gentleman scholar, he based his interpretation of world history on the assumption that every culture, in accordance with some natural law, advanced through the ages of man and underwent three phases: development, prosperity, and decline. Spengler regarded the Battle of Actium in 31 bc as the event that marked the end of antiquity. After that came an intermediate period of 1,000 years without any development, which Spengler saw characterized by a ‘‘magic’’ or ‘‘Arabian’’ culture. The structure of this culture was still organized as it had been in antiquity; its nature was, according to Spengler, the product of a supposedly ‘‘oriental’’ influence. The fate of the empire, the crisis of Late Antiquity, and the turmoil of the Volkerwanderung were consequences of the ossification of a once lively ancient culture - a process that had begun under Augustus. Spengler’s pseudo-scientific theory of the decline of cultures gave the past a modern touch, in order to aid the analysis of the political present. In the 1920s and 1930s, his absurd and offensive speculations fascinated not only sectors of the conservative and culturally pessimistic middle classes but also some students of the ancient world, who felt insecure due to the waning significance of their disciplines and the challenge presented by established scientific and political systems and who, consequently, wanted to restore to antiquity a forceful historical significance.
Some Italian and German scholars went on to support the fascist and National Socialist states, and individual ancient historians such as Wilhelm Weber (1882-1948) continued to interpret Late Antiquity by utilizing racist categories (christ 1982: 210-21; 2006: 69-74). Outside Italy and Germany, however, the image of the late empire was very much governed by the then current experience of violence, occupation, and expulsion. Ernst Stein (1891-1945) published the first volume of his famous Geschichte des spOtromischen Reiches in Vienna in 1928. After World War II, the work was translated into French, and a second volume was written in French (Stein 1949-59), for this highly esteemed liberal Jewish patriot of the Habsburg monarchy categorically refused to continue publishing in German after 1933.
In 1948, Pierre Courcelle (1912-80) published his Histoire litt'eraire des grandes invasions germaniques, in which numerous passages implied, or depended upon, reflection on the recent past. The account is divided into invasion, occupation, and liberation. The Vandal Huneric sets up a ‘‘concentration camp [camp de concentration]' for rebellious Catholics (1948: 183), and Hilderic pursues intermittently a ‘‘policy of appeasement [politique d’appaisement]' (1948: 195). In his book L’Empire chr'etien, written during the German occupation of France and first published in 1947, Andre Piganiol (1883-1968) disputed the theory of decadence and reestablished the disaster theory of the Italian humanists, who had considered the Germanic peoples as the destructive element responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire. Piganiol distanced himself from the National Socialist Germanenverklarung, the romanticization of the Germanic peoples, and made the famous point, ‘‘Roman civilization did not die of its own accord: it was assassinated” (1947: 422; 1972: 466). Arnaldo Momigliano aptly referred to this statement as the ‘‘cri de coeur of a valiant Frenchman against boches and collaborationists” (Momigliano 1969: 646).
World History
