Draft:Houston Stewart Chamberlain

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“”Intellectual anti-Semitism was the special prerogative of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, concretized the fantasies of Count Arthur de Gobineau, which had penetrated to Bayreuth. He translated them from the language of harmless snobbery into [the language] of a modernized, seductive mysticism. [...] Today there is a strong smell of blood in the air. Literary anti-Semitism forges the moral weapon for murder. Sturdy and honest lads will take care of the rest.
—From Carl von OssietzkyWikipedia 1932 essay "Anti-Semitic"[1]

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (September, 9 1855–January 9, 1927), also going by H.S. Chamberlain, was Anglo-German writer whose work specialized in political philosophy and natural sciences, who is considered one of the most influential theorists of the Pan-German and anti-Semitic movements.[2] As follower of Arthur de Gobineau’s though, he reaffirmed, developed and exalted the concept of "Aryan race", which he deemed to find its most authentic representatives in the peoples of Germanic ethnicity, predestined to govern Europe.[3]

Chamberlain's best-known work is his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth CenturyWikipedia[note 1], which was widely read in the pan-German circles of the völkisch movement of the early twentieth century and which later also had a decisive influence on racial anti-Semitism and racial policy in Nazi Germany.[4] He also wrote books on Richard Wagner, Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von GoetheWikipedia.

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in Portsmouth in the Southsea district and came from a wealthy aristocratic family. Chamberlain's mother died soon after his birth.[5] His family had various military figures, with his father being admiral William Charles ChamberlainWikipedia[6] and his uncle being Marshal Neville Bowles ChamberlainWikipedia. Basil Hall ChamberlainWikipedia, known later in his life as a noted Japanologist, was his elder brother. [7]

Chamberlain and his father, remained strangers to each other throughout their lives, which was mainly because Chamberlain and his brothers spent the next ten years in Versailles with their grandmother and an aunt and hardly saw their father. At first Houston Stewart Chamberlain was meant to enter the army or navy, by having him study at a military school, but his poor health prevented such plans.[5] He was instead sent to schools in France and Geneva where French became his first language. Having spent most of his youth between Italy, Switzerland and the south of France, he eventually started to "not feeling English" anymore. For the first thirty years of his life, he spoke mainly French, while feeling like a foreigner in France.

From age 14, he began living in Germany, after his family had sent him there to treat his frail health. At age 15, a tutor named Otto Kuntze (1841-1931) was hired to teach him German language. Studying under him for four years, Kuntze convinced H.S. the history of Prussia, which enthralled him, and led him to develop a passion for Germanic culture.[8] At the age of 19, Chamberlain fell in love with the Prussian Anna Horst, who also became his first wife. After studying natural sciences (which he would use to give an "scientific aura" to his racist theories), he became interested in philosophy, reading Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer.

Enter Wagner[edit]

But it was the discovery of the Wagnerian universe that constituted a decisive turning point in his life. After attending the Bayreuth Festival in 1882, he became a regular in Wagnerian intellectual circles. In 1905 Chamberlain divorced his Anna Horst and in 1908 married Eva Wagner, Richard Wagner's daughter. Together they settled in Wahnfried near Bayreuth.[9]

Chamberlain was hypersensitive and neurotic and had repeated nervous breakdowns. He had a tendency to see demons, which drove him to new studies on various subjects that resulted in a voluminous writing. On his way home from a stay in Italy, he had to get off the train in Gardona because of a spirit vision. He locked himself in a hotel room for eight days and wrote a biology paper. The results he arrived at, would become the core of his continuing specialty: race and history.

He then gradually imposed a biased, nationalist, reactionary and even anti-Semitic reading of his father-in-law's texts and of Wagnerian mythology, the seed of Wagner's recovery by Nazi ideologues, and making it a "glorification of the Germanic soul in all its primitive force". Thusly becoming a sort of prophet of Greater Germany, he deemed Bayreuth as a place of worship and Wagnerism as his mission.

In 1885, he founded La Revue wagnérienneWikipedia with the Frenchman Édouard DujardinWikipedia. Then in 1888 he became one of the editors of the Bayreuther BlätterWikipedia, the main newspaper in Bayreuth. His marriage to the composer's daughter, making him a member of the Wagner family, would be for him like a fulfillment of his destiny.

In 1899, he published the first volume of his most famous book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth CenturyWikipedia (the second one was published 1911), which was originally commissioned by Munich-based publisher Hugo BruckmannWikipedia (an notable völkisch activist who would later publish Mein Kampf) to summarize all of the achievements of the 19th century. In it, Chamberlain argued that the superior race described by Gobineau (the Indo-European "race" that Chamberlain called the "Aryan race") was the ancestor of all the ruling classes of Europe and Asia, that it had not ceased to exist and that it subsisted in a pure state in Germany. Chamberlain included in the Aryan race the Celtic and Nordic peoples whom he considered to belong to the same Germanic family as well as the Berbers of North Africa.

During his lifetime, Chamberlain's works were read throughout Europe and especially in Germany. His reception was particularly favorable among the conservative German elite. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany patronized him warmly, corresponding with him, inviting him to stay at his court, distributing copies of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century among the German Army (the Deutsches Heer), and placing copies of the book in German libraries, as well as including it in school curriculum.[3][10]

Later life[edit]

Chamberlain tried to become "more German than the native Germans". In 1916 he officially became a German citizen. During the First World War, he joined the Alldeutscher VerbandWikipedia and carried out vicious propaganda against England, his country of origin.[11] He received the Iron Cross for his efforts. Nevertheless, he publicly distanced himself from Ernst LissauerWikipedia's song "Hassgesang gegen England". A selection of his letters was published in 1928.

H.S. was not happy that Germany lost the war, being further appalled by the German revolution of 1918–1919, which ended up toppling the monarchist regime of the country. He would subsequently become a bitter enemy of the Weimar Republic.[12] Chamberlain was one of the first to believe that Adolf Hitler had a great future and that the Germans would have new opportunities if they followed him. They had met in Bayreuth in 1923 and Chamberlain would support him from 1923 to his death. He remained as one of the leading representatives of Pan-Germanism and devoted several monographs to German figures such as Richard Wagner, Heinrich von Stein, Kant and Goethe. His writings inspired Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler, who were one of the few people present at his funeral in 1927.[13]

Impact[edit]

TBA

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published in two volumes.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Kaes, Anton; Dimendberg, Edward; Jay, Martin (1994). The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press. p. 276. ISBN 9780520067752. 
  2. ↑ Levy, Richard S.: Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, p. 113–115. (Volume 1) ABC-Clio, 2000. ISBN: 1851094393
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chase, Allan (1977) The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 91–92
  4. ↑ The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (September 5, 2024).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gregor, A. James (2012). Totalitarianism and Political Religion:An Intellectual History. Stanford University Press. p. 188. ISBN 9780804783682. 
  6. ↑ Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, edited by Peter Townend, 105th edition, London, 1970.
  7. ↑ Ota, Y. (2012). Basil Hall Chamberlain: Portrait of a Japanologist. Taylor & Francis. Page 202. ISBN: 9781136638671
  8. ↑ Bohnenkamp, Klaus E. (2020) (in German). Rudolf Kassner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Briefe und Dokumente einer Freundschaft. LIT. p. 290. ISBN 9783643144515. 
  9. ↑ Friedländer, Saul (1998) Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939, New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 0060928786
  10. ↑ Stackelberg, Roderick; Winkle, Sally A. (2013). The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. Taylor & Francis. p. 84-85. ISBN 9781134596935. 
  11. ↑ Lasswell, H. D. (1971). Propaganda Technique In World War I.: M.I.T. Press. Page 92. ISBN: 9780262620185
  12. ↑ Field, Geoffrey G. (1981), Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, New York: Columbia University Press, Page 396-419 ISBN: 978-0-231-04860-6
  13. ↑ Shirer, William L.. Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 1990. Page 109. ISBN: 9780671728687


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