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very near to those of Spengler, is perhaps the only exception. He
certainly was the first to conceive of both rise and decline as
necessary elements of the historical process.... Now one of the
first and basic achievements of Spengler was this that he demon–
strated, with a great wealth of material, that the nation is not the
right sort of subject for developing general laws of rise and de–
cline. The nation is something specifically Western. No other
civilization knew it, not at least as the basic political unit. ...
Spengler was the first to develop a firm grasp of the fact that the
basic units of history are "civilizations," and that the first task of
the philosopher of history is to identify them .
This is vintage Borkenau, going down much better than table
wine, but not like the best Burgundy .
It
is a
monumental curiosity
dis–
playing Borkenau's range, depth, and passion. We have here the
sustained
cri de coeur
of a polymath, who would guide us away from
the monadic, not to say polygenist, Spenglerian concept of civiliza–
tions and towards a vision of humanity beginning to transcend cul–
ture cycles. The shadow which falls across this elevating path is the
shadow of the mushroom cloud, for Borkenau lived to see nuclear
bipolarity as well as the Suez conflict of 1956 . The former increased
his fears for Western civilization; the latter fit into his Zionist hopes,
however qualified they were by his awareness of deep Ashkenazi–
Sephardic tensions in Israel. What the Benedictines and the
Scoti
had
done in a previous barbaric age, Israel might do in a post-nuclear–
war age. So One can sense, in
End and Beginning,
that the psychohis–
tory of the first millennium
A.D.
served as a gigantic metaphor for
working out concerns of mind and heart.
This work of impressive range has also been described by the
late medievalist, Professor Dempf, as a study of the Teutonification
(Germanisierung)
of Christianity (in
Stimmen der Zeit,
1960). It is im–
portant, in these hawkish decades, not to misread the work as a
highbrow, cold-war treatise. Its emphasis On east-west rather than
north-south differences in European culture echoes and general–
izes the
Ostmark
or Eastern Marches function of old Austria, which
Borkenau had stressed in the thirties in his
Austria and After.
Yet that
emphasis falls outside the distinctive core of the work which, by an
unprecedented and multidisciplinary method, practically constitutes
a major new historical subject. No One could have written this book
before Spengler and Freud: for, by a selective synthesis, Borkenau
substitutes primal crime, primal guilt, and superego development
