Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Monika Maron’s Novel Artur Lanz

For Oswald Spengler, the dwindling power of resistance against any physical or psychical threat is a typical symptom of the late stage of every civilisation. Strangely at odds with the obvious violence of the World Wars, Spengler’s predictions seem to concord oddly enough with today’s phenomenon of “post-heroism.” In the following, we will examine this question from the angle of the work of the German writer Monika Maron, whose novel Artur Lanz (2020) is not only devoted to the crisis of heroism and masculinity in the modern West, but also explicitly refers to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a key source.