Egon Spengler is not so much ashamed as "strongly" considers irrelevant, mainly because he sees science as relevant. Spengler's faith in science was also tested in one episode where the Ghostbusters get abducted to the ghost world by the ghost of Al Capone. Spengler's scientific equipment fails until he is told by former capos of Capone (who aid the Ghostbusters in revenge for Capone double-crossing them) that only magic can harm ghosts in the ghost world as opposed to science harming ghosts in the human world, thus forcing Spengler to accept the wizardry methods of his ancestors to defeat Capone. He is
Oswald Spengler in 1914, but publishing was delayed by World War I. Due to a congenital heart problem, Spengler was not called up for military service. During the war, however, his inheritance was largely useless because it was invested overseas; thus he lived in genuine poverty for this period. When "The Decline of the West" was published in the summer of 1918, it was a wild success. The perceived national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and later the economic depression around 1923 fueled by hyperinflation seemed to prove Spengler right. It comforted Germans because it seemingly rationalized their downfall as