Der Untergang des Abendlandes
"The Decline of the West" was a successful work and was widely read by German intellectuals. It has been suggested that it intensified a sense of crisis in Germany following the end of World War I. The critic George Steiner has suggested that the work can be seen as one of several books that resulted from the crisis of German culture following Germany's defeat in World War I, comparable in this respect to the philosopher Ernst Bloch's "The Spirit of Utopia" (1918), the theologian Franz Rosenzweig's "The Star of Redemption" (1921), the theologian Karl Barth's "The Epistle to the Romans" (1922), Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" (1925), and the philosopher Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927).