Both the title and the contents of Oswald Spengler's most famous work, The Decline of the West, mark him as one of the major exponents of the anticivilizational mood of cultural criticism in the Weimar Republic. It is replete with the familiar catalogue of antimodernism, but it also presents a theme that has received less attention, namely, the reconciliation of romantic and irrationalist sentiments with enthusiasm for technical advance. Spengler's close personal ties to German industrialists and to the conservative revolutionaries in the June Club nurtured his ambiguous synthesis of technics and irrationalism that later afforded engineers a central role in the new elite whose task it was to rescue Germany from the liberalism of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, Spengler juxtaposed German Kultur and Western Zivilisation, but unlike Klages or Moeller van den Bruck, he sought to reconcile Kultur with twentieth-century German nationalism. In 1918 he wrote to a friend: “Truly our future lies on the one hand in Prussian conservatism after it has been cleansed of all feudal-agrarian narrowness and on the other hand in the working people after they have freed themselves from the anarchist-radical masses.” (emphasis added). He hoped that The Decline of the West would encourage the young generation to turn toward technology and politics instead of poetry and philosophy. In a number of essays and books, Spengler created an uneasy truce between right-wing romanticism and modern politics by celebrating modern technology with a language and symbolism adaptable to nationalist mass politics. Behind the smooth, lean surfaces of modern technical artifacts, Spengler saw at work the dark, elemental, demonic forces that had been the focus of so much previous (antiindustrial) romanticism in Germany.