Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Hitler's John the Baptist

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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 Ossietzky 1932 essay "Anti-Semitic"

“”[...]Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain's hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians. [...] But in his anxiety to claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michaelangelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that they are Teutons, but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos.

—Theodore Roosevelt

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (September, 9 1855–January 9, 1927), also going by H.S. Chamberlain, was an Anglo-German writer whose work specialized in political philosophy and natural sciences, being considered one of the most influential theorists on the field of Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism. As follower of Arthur de Gobineau’s thought, 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.

Chamberlain's best-known work is his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 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. He also wrote books on Richard Wagner, Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Biography

Early life

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. His family had various military figures, with his father being admiral William Charles Chamberlain and his uncle being Marshal Neville Bowles Chamberlain. Basil Hall Chamberlain, known later in his life as a noted Japanologist, was his elder brother.

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. 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. 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

Chamberlain tries to do an intellectual pose, instead looks like he's falling asleep, 1895.

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.

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 wagnérienne with the Frenchman Édouard Dujardin. Then in 1888 he became one of the editors of the Bayreuther Blätter, 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 Century (the second one was published 1911), which was originally commissioned by Munich-based publisher Hugo Bruckmann (an notable völkisch activist who would later publish Hitler's 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, after Emperor Wilhelm II called "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" as a "monograph of the greatest importance". Regardless of Wilhelm II's praise, the book was already well received and popular amongst 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.

Later life

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 Verband and carried out vicious propaganda against England, his country of origin. He received the Iron Cross for his efforts. Nevertheless, he publicly distanced himself from Ernst Lissauer'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. 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.

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

1913 French edition of Foundations' Volume II.

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was Chamberlain's major work, and his most notorious. Having set himself the task of revealing the foundations on which the nineteenth century rested, Chamberlain wrote that European culture was the result of the fusion of five components:

• the art, literature, and philosophy of Ancient Greece;
• the legal system and form of government of Ancient Rome;
• Christianity in its Protestant form;
• the reviving creativity of the Teutonic spirit;
• and the "repulsive and destructive influence" of the Jews and Judaism in general.

In Volume I of his book, Chamberlain examines events up to year 1200, the legacy of the ancient world. Chamberlain wrote that Hellenism provided a breakthrough in human intelligence. The Greeks created everything; the language, religion, politics, philosophy, science, history, geography. The pinnacle of this creative spirit was Homer. But the legacy of the Hellenes also included dark sides: cruel, short-sighted democracies, the absence of high politics, outdated morality and the decline of religion.

The world is indebted to the Romans, who freed it from Semitic-Arab enslavement and allowed "Indo-Teutonic Europe to become the beating heart and thinking brain of all mankind." Greece, unlike Rome, according to Chamberlain, gravitated toward Asia. Despite its two-thousand-year legacy, Rome was unable to resist the disintegration of its vast territory. It shifted the center of gravity of civilization toward the West, unknowingly completing an act of world significance. But Rome left behind an incredible hodgepodge of different types and races. Among this chaos of nations, there were the Jews, the only race that managed to preserve the purity of their blood. History chose the "Aryans" as the force opposing the tiny but influential Jewish nation.

In Volume II, Chamberlain analyzes the revival of the new German world and the struggle for world domination. According to Chamberlain, three religious ideals participate in this struggle: the East (the Greeks), the North (the Aryans), and Rome. In the north of the former Roman Empire, the Aryans managed to create a new culture, which is "undoubtedly the greatest of all that mankind has achieved to date." The Jews became the heirs of the Roman racial chaos; the "Aryan race" turned out to be responsible for the spiritual salvation of mankind. All the achievements of science, industry, political economy, and art were stimulated and advanced by the "Aryans."

Two main themes run through Chamberlain's entire book: the "Aryans" as creators and bearers of civilization, and the Jews as a negative racial force, a destructive and degenerating factor in history. Chamberlain viewed the "Aryans" as the only support for world development. The Jews deserved to be condemned, not from a position of hatred or suspicion, but from a position of unattainable heights of "Aryan" superiority.

Chamberlain calls the birth of Christ the most important date in the history of mankind. Chamberlain wrote that "it should be obvious to everyone" that "Christ was not a Jew", there was not a drop of Jewish blood in him, and those who called him a Jew were simply ignorant or hypocritical people.

Impact

The leaders and ideologists of Nazi Germany highly valued Chamberlain's ideas, which formed he basis of the racial doctrine of Nazism. In particular, Joseph Goebbels had called him "the father of our spirit." Chamberlain carried out a de facto synthesis of the anti-Semitic schools that existed during Pan-Germanism with the dominant position of racism. William Shirer in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" emphasized Chamberlain's influence on the ideology of the Nazis, especially regarding the effect he had on Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler.

See also

• Oswald Spengler: another pseudo-historical crank that influenced the Nazis.