Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in Southsea, Hampshire, England, the son of Rear Admiral William Charles Chamberlain. His mother, Eliza Jane, daughter of Captain Basil Hall, died before he was a year old, leading to his being brought up by his grandmother in France. His elder brother was professor Basil Hall Chamberlain. Chamberlain's poor health frequently led him to being sent to the warmer climates of Spain and Italy for the winter. This constant moving about made it hard for Chamberlain to form lasting friendships. Cheltenham College Chamberlain's education began at a lycée in Versailles and continued mostly in continental Europe, but his father had planned a military career for his son. At the age of eleven he was sent to Cheltenham College, an English boarding school that produced many Army and Navy officers. Chamberlain grew up in a self-confident, optimistic, Victorian atmosphere that celebrated the nineteenth century as the "Age of Progress", a world that many Victorians expected to get progressively better with Britain leading the way for the rest of the world. He was supportive of the Liberal Party, and shared the general values of 19th-century British liberalism such as a faith in progress, of a world that could only get better, of the greatness of Britain as a liberal democratic and capitalist society. Chamberlain's major interests in his studies at Cheltenham were the natural sciences, especially astronomy. Chamberlain later recalled: "The stars seemed closer to me, more gentle, more worthy of trust, and more sympathetic – for that is the only word which describes my feelings – than any of the people around me in school. For the stars, I experienced true friendship". as well as under chemist Carl Gräbe, botanist Johannes Müller Argoviensis, physicist and parapsychologist Marc Thury, astronomer Emile Plantamour, and other professors. Chamberlain's main interests as a student revolved around systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body. In 1881, he earned a baccalaureate in physical and natural sciences. During his time in Geneva, Chamberlain, who always despised Benjamin Disraeli, came to hate his country more and more, accusing the Prime Minister of taking British life down to what Chamberlain considered to be his extremely low level. During the early 1880s, Chamberlain was still a Liberal, "a man who approached issues from a firmly Gladstonian perspective and showed a marked antipathy to the philosophy and policies of British Conservatism". Chamberlain often expressed his disgust with Disraeli, "the man whom he blamed in large measure for the injection of selfish class interest and jingoism into British public life in the next decades". An early sign of his anti-Semitism came in 1881 when he described the landlords in Ireland affected by the Land Bill as "blood-sucking Jews". The main landowning classes in Ireland then were gentiles. At this stage of his life his anti-Semitic remarks were few and far between. Botany dissertation: theory of vital force In Geneva, Chamberlain continued working towards a doctorate in botany, but he later abandoned that project due to ill health. The text of what would have been Chamberlain's doctoral dissertation was published in 1897 as Recherches sur la sève ascendante ("Studies on rising sap"), but this publication did not culminate in any further academic qualifications. Chamberlain's book was based on his own experimental observations of water transport in various vascular plants. Against the conclusions of Eduard Strasburger, Julius von Sachs, and other leading botanists, he argued that his observations could not be explained by the application of the fluid mechanical theories of the day to the motion of water in the plants' xylem conduits. Instead, he claimed that his results evidenced other processes, associated with the action of living matter and which he placed under the heading of a force vitale ("vital force"). Chamberlain summarised his thesis in the book's introduction: In response to Strasburger's complaint that a vitalistic explanation of the ascent of sap "sidesteps the difficulties, calms our concerns, and thus manages to seduce us", Chamberlain retorted that "life is not an explanation, nor a theory, but a fact". Although most plant physiologists currently regard the ascent of sap as adequately explained by the passive mechanisms of transpirational pull and root pressure, some scientists have continued to argue that some form of active pumping is involved in the transport of water within some living plants, though usually without referring to Chamberlain's work. Support of World Ice Theory Chamberlain was an early supporter of Hanns Hörbiger's Welteislehre ("World Ice Theory"), the theory that most bodies in the Solar System are covered with ice. Due in part to Chamberlain's advocacy, this became official dogma during the Third Reich. Anti-scientific claims Chamberlain's attitude towards the natural sciences was somewhat ambivalent and contradictory – he later wrote: "one of the most fatal errors of our time is that which impels us to give too great weight to the so-called 'results' of science." Still, his scientific credentials were often cited by admirers to give weight to his political philosophy. ==Wagnerite==

An ardent Francophile in his youth, Chamberlain had a marked preference for speaking French over English. It was only at the age of twenty three in November 1878, when he first heard the music of Richard Wagner, that Chamberlain became not only a Wagnerite, but an ardent Germanophile and Francophobe. As Chamberlain's wealthy, elitist family back in Britain objected to him marrying the lower middle-class Horst, this further estranged him from Britain, a place whose people Chamberlain regarded as cold, unfeeling, callous and concerned only with money. This is evidenced by his huge treatise on Immanuel Kant with its comparisons. It was during his time in Dresden that Chamberlain came to embrace völkisch thought through his study of Wagner, and from 1884 onwards, anti-Semitic and racist statements became the norm in his letters to his family. In 1888, Chamberlain wrote to his family proclaiming his joy at the death of the Emperor Friedrich III, a strong opponent of anti-Semitism whom Chamberlain called a "Jewish liberal", and rejoicing that his anti-Semitic son Wilhelm II was now on the throne. 1888 also saw Chamberlain's first visit to the Wahnfried to meet Cosima Wagner, the reclusive leader of the Wagner cult. Chamberlain later recalled that Cosima Wagner had "electrified" him as he felt the "deepest love" for Wagner's widow while Wagner wrote to a friend that she felt a "great friendship" with Chamberlain "because of his outstanding learning and dignified character". Wagner came to regard Chamberlain as her surrogate son. Under her influence, Chamberlain abandoned his previous belief that art was a separate entity from other fields and came to embrace the völkisch belief of the unity of race, art, nation and politics. Likewise, his anti-Semitism allowed him to define himself as a German in opposition to a group that allegedly threatened all Germans, thereby allowing him to integrate better into the Wagnerian circles with whom he socialized most of the time. This was especially the case as initially the German Wagnerites had rejected Chamberlain, telling him that only Germans could really understand Wagner, statements that very much hurt Chamberlain. By this time Chamberlain had met Anna Horst, whom he would divorce in 1905 after 28 years of marriage. Chamberlain was an admirer of Richard Wagner, and wrote several commentaries on his works including Notes sur Lohengrin ("Notes on Lohengrin") (1892), an analysis of Wagner's drama (1892), and a biography (1895), emphasising in particular the heroic Teutonic aspects in the composer's works. Stewart Spencer, writing in Wagner Remembered, described Chamberlain's edition of Wagner letters as "one of the most egregious attempts in the history of musicology to misrepresent an artist by systematically censoring his correspondence". In particular, Wagner's lively sex life presented a problem for Chamberlain. Wagner had abandoned his first wife Minna, had an open affair with the married woman Mathilde Wesendonck and had started sleeping with his second wife Cosima while she was still married to her first husband. Chamberlain in his Wagner biography went to considerable lengths to distort these details. In these stories about ancient Aryan heroes conquering the Indian subcontinent, Chamberlain found a very appealing world governed by a rigid caste system with social inferiors firmly locked into their place; full of larger-than-life Aryan gods and aristocratic heroes and a world that focused on the spiritual at the expense of the material. Since by this time, historians, archaeologists and linguists had all accepted that the Aryans ("noble ones") of Hindu legend were an Indo-European people, Chamberlain had little trouble arguing that these Aryans were in fact Germanic peoples, and modern Germans had much to learn from Hinduism. For Chamberlain the Hindu texts offered a body of pure Aryan thought that made it possible to find the harmony of humanity and nature, which provided the unity of thought, purpose and action that provided the necessary spirituality for Aryan peoples to find true happiness in a world being destroyed by a soulless materialism. ==Champion of Wagnerism==

In 1889, he moved to Austria. During this time it is said his ideas on race began taking shape, influenced by the concept of Teutonic supremacy he believed embodied in the works of Wagner and the French racist writer Arthur de Gobineau. In his book ''Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines'', the aristocratic Gobineau, who had an obsessive hatred of commoners, had developed the theory of an Aryan master race. Wagner was greatly influenced by Gobineau's theories, but could not accept Gobineau's theory of inevitable racial decay amongst what was left of the "Aryan race", instead preferring the idea of racial regeneration of the Aryans. The Franco-Israeli historian Saul Friedländer opined that Wagner was the inventor of a new type of anti-Semitism, namely "redemptive anti-semitism". In 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death, Chamberlain married Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Franz Liszt's granddaughter and Richard Wagner's daughter (Wagner had started fathering children by Cosima while she was still married to Hans von Bülow – despite her surname, Eva was actually Wagner's daughter). The next year he moved to Germany and became an important member of the "Bayreuth Circle" of German nationalist intellectuals. As an ardent Wagnerite, Chamberlain saw it as his life's mission to spread the message of racial hatred which he believed Wagner had advocated. Chamberlain explained his work in promoting the Wagner cult as an effort to cure modern society of its spiritual ills that he claimed were caused by capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation. Chamberlain wrote about modern society in the 1890s: Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from each other, continually further from the 'firm ground of nature'; soon it must fling us out into empty nothingness. In another letter, Chamberlain stated: If we do not soon pay attention to Schiller's thought regarding the transformation from the state of Need into the Aesthetic State, then our condition will degenerate into a boundless chaos of empty talk and arms foundries. If we do not soon heed Wagner's warning—that mankind must awaken to a consciousness of its "pristine holy worth"—then the Babylonian tower of senseless doctrines will collapse on us and suffocate the moral core of our being forever. In Chamberlain's view, the purpose of the Wagner cult was nothing less than the salvation of humanity. As such, Chamberlain became engulfed in the "redemptive anti-semitism" that was at the core of both Wagner's worldview and of the Wagner cult. ==Vienna years==

In September 1891, Chamberlain visited Bosnia and Herzegovina. Chamberlain had been commissioned by the Austrian government to write propaganda glorying its colonial rule of Bosnia-Herzegovina for a Geneva newspaper. Chamberlain's articles about Bosnia reveal his increasing preference for dictatorship over democracy, with Chamberlain praising the Austrians for their utterly undemocratic rule. Chamberlain wrote that what he had seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the perfect example of Wagner's dictum: "Absolute monarch – free people!" At the time Chamberlain visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, the provinces had been barely touched by modernization, and for the most part, Bosnians continued to live much as their ancestors had done in the Middle Ages. Chamberlain was enchanted with what he saw, and forgetting for the moment that the purpose of his visit was to glorify Austrian rule, expressed much sadness in his articles that the "westernization" being fostered by the Austrians would destroy the traditional way of life in Bosnia. Chamberlain wrote: [The Bosnian peasant] builds his house, he makes his shoes, and plough, etc.; the woman weaves and dyes the stuffs and cooks the food. When we have civilized these good people, when we have taken from them their beautiful costumes to be preserved in museums as objects of curiosity, when we have ruined their national industries that are so perfect and so primitive, when contact with us has destroyed the simplicity of their manner—then Bosnia will no longer be interesting to us. Chamberlain accepted Gobineau's belief in an Aryan master-race, but rejected his pessimism, writing that Gobineau's philosophy was "the grave of every attempt to deal practically with the race question and left only one honorable solution, that we at once put a bullet through our heads". Chamberlain's time in Vienna shaped his anti-Semitism and Pan-Germanism. Despite living in Vienna from 1889 to 1909, when he moved to Bayreuth, Chamberlain had nothing but contempt for the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Habsburg empire, taking the viewpoint that the best thing that could happen to the Austrian empire would be for it to be annexed by Germany to end the (chaos of the peoples). Vienna had a large Jewish population, and Chamberlain's time in Vienna may have been the first time in his life when he actually encountered Jews. Chamberlain's letters from Vienna constantly complain about how he was having to deal with Jews, every one of whom he detested. In 1894 after visiting a spa, Chamberlain wrote: "Unfortunately like everything else ... it has fallen into the hands of the Jews, which includes two consequences: every individual is bled to the utmost and systematically, and there is neither order nor cleanliness." In 1895, he wrote: However, we shall have to move soon anyway, for our house having been sold to a Jew ... it will soon be impossible for decent people to live in it ... Already the house being almost quite full of Jews, we have to live in a state of continual warfare with the vermin which is a constant and invariable follower of this chosen people even in the most well-to-do classes. In July 1900, Chamberlain wrote to his aunt: One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men and threatens destruction ... The fact that a tiny nation of peasants absolutely untrained in the conduct of war, has been able to keep the whole united empire at bay for months, and has only been overcome—and has it been overcome?—by sending out an army superior in number to the whole population including women and children, has lowered respect for England beyond anything you can imagine on your side of the water, and will certainly not remain lost on the minds of those countless millions who have hitherto been subdued by our prestige only. As a leading Wagnerite in Vienna, Chamberlain befriended a number of other prominent Wagnerites, such as Prince Hohenhohe-Langenburg, Ludwig Schemann, Georg Meurer, and Baron Christian von Ehrenfels. The most important friendship that Chamberlain made during his time in Vienna was with German Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, who shared Chamberlain's love of Wagnerian music. Eulenburg was also an anti-Semite, an Anglophobe and a convinced enemy of democracy who found much to admire in Chamberlain's anti-Semitic, anti-British and anti-democratic writings. ==Die Grundlagen (The Foundations)==

In February 1896, the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a leading völkisch activist who was later to publish Mein Kampf, commissioned Chamberlain to write a book summarizing the achievements of the 19th century. In October 1899, Chamberlain published his most famous work, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, in German. The Foundations is a pseudo-scientific "racial history" of humanity from the emergence of the first civilizations in the ancient Near East to the year 1800. It argues that all of the "foundations" of the 19th century, which saw huge economic, scientific and technological advances in the West, were the work of the "Aryan race". Die Grundlagen was only the first volume of an intended three-volume history of the West, with the second and third volumes taking up the story of the West in the 19th century and the looming war for world domination in the coming 20th century between the Aryans on one side vs. the Jews, blacks and Asians on the other side. Chamberlain never wrote the second or third volumes, much to the intense annoyance of Cosima Wagner, who was upset that Die Grundlagen stopped in 1800 before Wagner was born, and thus omitted her husband. The book argued that Western civilisation is deeply marked by the influence of Teutonic peoples. Peoples defined as Aryans Chamberlain grouped all European peoples – not just Germans, but Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins – into the "Aryan race", a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. In fact, he even included the Berber people of North Africa. At the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, according to Chamberlain, were the Germanic or Teutonic peoples, who had best preserved the Aryan blood. Chamberlain used the terms Aryan, Indo-European and Indo-Germanic interchangeably, but he emphasised that purest Aryans were to be found in Central Europe and that in both France and Russia miscegenation had diluted the Aryan blood. Much of Chamberlain's theory about the superiority of the Aryan race was taken from the writings of Gobineau, but there was a crucial difference in that Gobineau had used the Aryan race theory as a way of dividing society between an Aryan nobility versus racially inferior commoners whereas Chamberlain used the Aryan racial theory as a way of uniting society around its supposed common racial origins. Aryan race virtues Everything that Chamberlain viewed as good in the world was ascribed to the Aryans. For an example, in The Foundations, Chamberlain explained at considerable length that Jesus Christ could not possibly be a Jew, and very strongly implied that Christ was an Aryan. Chamberlain's tendency to see everything good as the work of the Aryans allowed him to claim whoever he approved of for the Aryan race, which at least was part of the appeal of the book in Germany when it was published in 1899. Chamberlain claimed all of the glories and achievements of ancient Greece and Rome as due entirely to Aryan blood. Reflecting his opposition to feminism, Chamberlain lamented how modern women were not like the submissive women of ancient Rome whom he claimed were most happy in obeying the wills of their husbands. Chamberlain warned that the aim of the Jew was "to put his foot upon the neck of all nations of the world and be Lord and possessor of the whole earth". As part of their plans to destroy Aryan civilization, Chamberlain wrote: "Consider, with what mastery they use the law of blood to extend their power." Some historians have argued that The Foundations are actually more anti-Catholic than anti-Semitic, but this misses the point that the reason why Chamberlain attacked the Catholic Church so fiercely was because he believed the Papacy was controlled by the Jews. Leaving "the solution" to the reader Chamberlain did not advocate the extermination of Jews in The Foundations; indeed, despite his determination to blame all of the world's problems on the Jews, Chamberlain never proposed a solution to this perceived problem. Instead, Chamberlain made the cryptic statement that after reading his book, his readers would know best about how to devise a "solution" to the "Jewish Question". The success of The Foundations after it was published in October 1899 made Chamberlain into a celebrity intellectual. The popularity of The Foundations was such that many Gymnasium (high school) teachers in the Protestant parts of Germany made Die Grundlagen required reading. Conservative and National Liberal newspapers gave generally friendly reviews to The Foundations. newspapers gave overwhelming positive reviews to The Foundations, with many reviewers calling it one of the greatest books ever written. Liberal and Social Democratic newspapers gave the book extremely poor reviews with reviewers complaining of an irrational way of reasoning in The Foundations, noting that Chamberlain quoted the writings of Goethe out of context in order to give him views that he had not held, and that the entire book was full of an obsessive anti-Semitism which they found extremely off-putting. Because of Chamberlain's anti-Catholicism, Catholic newspapers all published very hostile reviews of The Foundations, though Catholic reviewers rarely faulted Die Grundlagen for its anti-Semitism. More orthodox Protestant newspapers were disturbed by Chamberlain's call for a racialized Christianity. German Jewish groups like the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens and the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus repeatedly issued statements in the early 20th century that the popularity of The Foundations was a major source of concern for them, noting that Die Grundlagen had caused a major increase in anti-Semitism with many German Jews now finding themselves the objects of harassment and sometimes violence. The German Jewish journalist Moritz Goldstein wrote in 1912 that he had become a Zionist because he believed there was no future for Jews in Germany, and one of the reasons for that belief was: Chamberlain believes what he says and for that very reason his distortions shock me. And thousands more believe as he does for the book goes one edition after another and I would still like to know if many Germanic types, whose self-image is pleasantly indulged by this theory, are able to remain critical enough to question its countless injustices and errors? Discrimination of Jews following the book German universities were hotbeds of activity in the early 20th century, and The Foundations was extremely popular on university campuses, with many university clubs using The Foundations as a reason to exclude Jewish students. Likewise, military schools were centers of völkisch thought in the early 20th century, and so The Foundations was very popular with officer cadets; though since neither the Navy nor the Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg armies accepted Jewish officer candidates, Die Grundlagen did not lead to Jews being excluded. , ==Evangelist of race==

Visit to England and attack on its Jews In 1900, for the first time in decades, Chamberlain visited Britain. Writing to Cosima Wagner from London, Chamberlain stated sadly that his Britain, the Britain of aristocratic rule, hard work and manly courage, the romanticized "Merry Old England" of his imagination was no more; it had been replaced by what Chamberlain saw as a materialist, soulless society, atomized into individuals with no sense of the collective purpose and dominated by greed. Chamberlain wrote that since the 1880s Britain had "chosen the service of Mammon", for which he blamed the Jews, writing to Wagner: "This is the result, when one has studied politics with a Jew for a quarter century." Chamberlain went on to write that Wilhelm was "in fact the first German Kaiser" who knew his mission was to "ennoble" the world by spreading "German knowledge, German philosophy, German art and—if God wills—German religion. Only a Kaiser who undertakes this task is a true Kaiser of the German people." To allow Germany to become a world power, Chamberlain called for the Reich to become the world's greatest sea power, as Chamberlain asserted that whatever power rules the seas also rules the world. Kaiser Wilhelm II In early 1901, the German Emperor Wilhelm II read The Foundations and was immensely impressed. The Imperial Grand Chamberlain at the court, Ulrich von Bülow, wrote in a letter to a friend in January 1901 that the Kaiser was "studying the book a second time page by page". When he met Chamberlain for the first time, Wilhelm told him: "I thank you for what you have done for Germany!" In 1901, Wilhelm informed Chamberlain in a letter that: "God sent your book to the German people, just as he sent you personally to me, that is my unshakably firm conviction." Wilhelm went on to praise Chamberlain as his "comrade-in-arms and ally in the struggle for Teutons against Rome, Jerusalem, etc." In an age of ultra-nationalism with identities being increasingly defined in racial terms, his mixed heritage imposed considerable psychological strain on Wilhelm, who managed at one and the same time to be both an Anglophile and Anglophobe; he was a man who both loved and hated the British, and his writings about the land of his mother displayed both extreme admiration and loathing. Writing about the Chamberlain-Wilhelm relationship, Field stated: Chamberlain helped place Wilhelm's tangled and vaguely formulated fears of Pan Slavism, the black and yellow "hordes", Jews, Ultramontanes, Social Democrats, and free-thinkers to a global and historical framework copiously footnoted and sustained by a vast array of erudite information. He elevated the Emperor's dream of a German mission into an elaborate vision of divinely ordained, racial destiny. The lack of precision, the muddle, and logical flaws that are so apparent to modern readers of The Foundations did not bother Wilhelm: he eagerly submitted to its subjective, irrational style of reasoning. ... And if the Kaiser was a Prussian with an ingrained respect for English values and habits, Chamberlain was just as much an Englishman who was deeply ambivalent about his own birthplace and who revered German qualities and Prussian society. Almost unconsciously, as his vast correspondence shows, he adopted an obsequious, scraping tone when addressing the lowliest of Prussian army officers. If Wilhelm was drawn to the very Englishness of Chamberlain, the author of The Foundations saw in the Hohenzollern prince—at least until the World War—the very symbol of his idealized . Chamberlain frequently wrote to an appreciative and admiring Wilhelm telling him that it was only the noble "German spirit" which was saving the world from being destroyed by a "deracinated Yankee-Anglo-Jewish materialism". Finally, Wilhelm was also a Wagnerite and found much to admire in Chamberlain's writings praising Wagner's music as a mystical, spiritual life-force that embodied all that was great about the "German spirit". Chamberlain received invitations to lecture on his racial theories at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities, but turned them down on the grounds that he had no wish to visit what he viewed as a culturally and spiritually debased nation like the United States. Chamberlain's status as a semi-recluse came about because of his fear that the Jews were plotting his murder. In a 1906 letter to Wilhelm, Chamberlain announced that due to miscegenation caused by the Jews, Britain, France, Austria and Russia were all declining powers, and only the "pure" German Reich was capable of protecting the "life-giving center of Western Europe" from the "Tartarized Russians, the dreaming weakly mongrels of Oceania and South America, and the millions of blacks, impoverished in intellect and bestially inclined, who even now are arming for the war of the races in which there will be no quarter given". Chamberlain was never as close to Eulenburg as Wilhelm was, and seemed genuinely shocked to learn of the allegations that Eulenburg was homosexual. During the scandal, practically the entire völkisch movement came out in support of Eulenburg whom they portrayed as an Aryan heterosexual framed by false allegations of homosexuality by the Jews Max Bernstein and Magnus Hirschfeld. The German journalist Theodor Wolff wrote in 1906 about Eulenburg's role as one of Germany's chief anti-Semites: I bet you ten to one that it was that skald [Eulenburg], the friend and admirer of Gobineau, who first pointed his other friend, the Kaiser towards the racial prophet's most eager disciple, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The mystical notion of the "race that will bring order to the world" found its way from Gobineau via Eulenburg and Chamberlain to the Kaiser, and this notion in turn gave rise to the thought that "the world should be healed by the German spirit." Toning down attacks on Catholicism As a part of his role as the "Evangelist of Race", Chamberlain toned down his anti-Catholicism in the first decade of the 20th century, realizing belatedly that his attacks on the Catholic Church in The Foundations had alienated the German Catholic community from his message. Themes: German unity and German science and philosophy As a well-known public intellectual, Chamberlain wrote on numerous subjects in a vast array of newspapers and magazines. Besides attacking the Jews, one of the chief themes of Chamberlain's essays was the unity of German culture, language, race and art, and the need for the unity of German art with a racialized "Germanic Christianity". The other major theme of Chamberlain's work was science and philosophy. Chamberlain was always keenly interested in modern science and saw himself as a scientist, but he was deeply critical of the claim that modern science could explain everything, believing there was a spiritual side to humanity that science could not explain. As such, Chamberlain believed that modern Germany was being destroyed by people losing their spiritual aspects owing to the materialist belief that science could explain all. In his 1905 biography of one of his heroes, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Chamberlain argued that Kant had shown the limits of rationalism and reason for understanding the world. Instead, Chamberlain argued that Kant had shown that the instinctive approach based on intuition was a far more valid way of understanding the world. The German Jewish journal Im deutschen Reich wrote in a review of Goethe that Chamberlain had appropriated Goethe in "a polemic about race politics, racial hygiene and racial worth from the standpoint of a monomaniacal Judeophobia". In his letter, Chamberlain dismissed France as a second-rate nation that could only fall further; Russia was a nation of "stupid" Slavs which was only just being held together because Nicholas II had German blood; without the German blood in the House of Romanov "nothing would remain but a decaying matière brute" in Russia; and Britain was clearly declining into a bottomless pit of greed, ineffective democratic politics and unrestrained individualism. Chamberlain called the United States a "Dollar dynasty", writing: From dollars only dollars can come, nothing else; spiritually America will live only so long as the stream of European spiritual power flows there, not a moment longer. That part of the world, it may be proven, creates sterility, it has as little of a future as it has a past. Chamberlain concluded his letter to Wilhelm that: "The future progress of mankind depends on a powerful Germany extending far across the earth." To this end, Chamberlain advocated German expansionism both in Europe and all over the world; building the High Seas Fleet which would break the British mastery of the seas; and restructuring German society along the lines advocated by the extreme right-wing völkisch Pan-German League. ==Propagandist of the World War==

Health and paralysis In August 1914, he started suffering from a progressive paralysis of the limbs. At the end of the war, Chamberlain's paralysis had already befallen much of his body; his chronically bad health had reached its final stage. Chamberlain went on to call the war "a life-or-death struggle ... between two human ideals: the German and the un-German". In his 1914 essay, "Whose Fault Is the War?", Chamberlain blamed the war on France, Russia and especially Britain. Initially Chamberlain expected the war to be over by the end of 1914, and was very disappointed when that did not occur. He had already begun propagandising on behalf of the German government and continued to do so throughout the war. His vociferous denunciations of his land of birth, it has been posited, were the culmination of his rejection of his native England's capitalism, in favour of a form of German Romanticism akin to that which he had cultivated in himself during his years at Cheltenham. Wartime Essays During World War I, Chamberlain published several propaganda texts against his country of birth—Kriegsaufsätze (Wartime Essays). In the first four tracts, he maintained that Germany is a nation of peace; England's political system is a sham, while Germany exhibits true freedom; German is the greatest and only remaining "living" language; and the world would be better off doing away with English and French-styled parliamentary governments in favour of German rule "thought out by a few and carried out with iron consequence". The final two discuss England and Germany at length. Chamberlain's basic argument was that democracy was an idiotic system as equality was a myth—humans were very different with different abilities and talents, so democratic equality where the opinions of one voter mattered much as the opinions of the next was a completely flawed idea. Quoting the French scientist Gustave Le Bon, Chamberlain wrote the vast majority of people were simply too stupid to properly understand the issues, and as such Germany with its rule by elites was a much better governed nation than France. In Germany, Chamberlain asserted, true freedom existed, as freedom came from the state alone which made it possible for society to function, not the individual as was the case in Britain and France, which Chamberlain claimed was a recipe for chaos. Field summarized Chamberlain's thesis: the essence of German freedom was the willing submission as a matter of conscience to legitimately constituted authorities; it implied duty more than rights and was something spiritual and internal for which each moral being had to strive. Consigning 'liberty' to an inner, 'nonpolitical' moral realm, Chamberlain closed off any discussion of the specific conditions for a free society and simply asserted that freedom was perfectly compatible with an authoritarian system of government. Until the United States entered the war in 1917, the Auswärtiges Amt worked hard to prevent Chamberlain's essays with their strong anti-American content from appearing abroad out of the fear that they would offend opinion in America. In 1915, an unauthorised translation of Chamberlain's wartime essays was published in London under the title of The Ravings of a Renegade. It was for this reason that Chamberlain alleged that Britain had started World War I in 1914 to destroy Germany. By this time, Chamberlain's obsessive anti-Semitism had reached the point that Chamberlain was suffering from nightmares in which he was kidnapped and sentenced to death by the Jews. As such, Chamberlain worked closely with the Pan-German League, the Conservatives and the völkische groups to mobilise public support for the maximum war aims he sought. In a letter to his friend Prince Maximilian of Baden, Chamberlain wrote: I learned today from a man who is especially well-placed to observe these things—even when they go on secretly—that the Jews are completely intoxicated by their success in Germany—first from the millions they have gained through the war, then because of the praise showered on them in all official quarters, and thirdly from the protection they and their machinations enjoy from the censor. Thus, already they are beginning to lose their heads and reach a degree of insolence which may allow us to hope for a flood-tide of reaction. May God grant it!. In Chamberlain's opinion, if only Germany were to wage the war more ruthlessly and brutally, then the war would be won. Chamberlain loathed Bethmann Hollweg whom he saw as an inept leader who simply did not have the will to win. Chamberlain was also a very public supporter of Zeppelin raids to destroy British cities. The aims included making a vassal state of Belgium, annexing Luxembourg and portions of France, expanding German colonies in Africa and increasing German influence in Eastern Europe at the expense of the Russian Empire. Bethmann Hollweg's refusal to support the annexationists in public was due to pragmatic political considerations, namely, his need for majority Social Democratic co-operation in the Reichstag as opposed to being against the annexationists as Chamberlain mistakenly believed. Much of Chamberlain's strident, aggressive and embittered rhetoric reflected the fact that the annexationists were a minority in Germany, albeit a significant, vocal, well organised minority with many influential members inside and outside the government, but a minority nonetheless. Chamberlain regarded the refusal of the democratic parties like the left-wing SPD, the right-of-the-centre Zentrum and the liberal Progressives to join the annexationist movement as essentially high treason. By 1917 Bethmann Hollweg had turned against the idea of annexations. At the 23 April Kreuznach conference on war aims, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff pressured him to agree to annexations in France, Belgium and Russia, he refused. In July 1917 Hindenburg and Ludendorff, with the support of a significant portion of the Reichstag, successfully maneuvered to have Bethmann Hollweg dismissed and replaced with Georg Michaelis as Chancellor. Chamberlain's preferred candidate as Chancellor, Admiral Tirpitz, was passed over. Tirpitz was an intelligent, media-savvy, charismatic political intriguer with a desperate hunger for political power, but the duumvirate of Hindenburg and Ludendorff regarded Tirpitz as Chancellor as too much of a threat to their own power. The Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917—in which the SPD, Zentrum and the Progressives all joined forces to vote for a resolution asking the government to start peace talks at once on the basis of a return to the status quo of 1914—"inflamed the paranoia and desperation of the right. The annexationists prepared for a war to the knife against ... domestic "traitors"." Chamberlain was disappointed that Tirpitz had not been appointed Chancellor; however, he was overjoyed with Bethmann Hollweg's resignation and welcomed the increased power of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in political affairs as giving Germany the sort of government it needed. Chamberlain was always inclined to hero worship, and for him, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the greatest of a long line of German heroes. Chamberlain wanted to see the Spirit of 1914 made permanent, to convert the wartime Burgfrieden ("peace within a castle under siege") into a peacetime Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). The entire German people (except for the Jews, whom Chamberlain believed did not belong in Germany) were to be united by a common loyalty to the Emperor. A fanatical monarchist, Chamberlain saw the monarchy as the bedrock of German life, writing in his 1915 book Politische Ideale: "Whoever speaks of a republic in Germany belongs on the gallows; the monarchical idea is here a holy law of life." At the same time, Chamberlain envisioned a Germany that would somehow remain the leading industrial power at the forefront of modern technology while at the same time become a romantic, agrarian society where ordinary people would work the land and retain their traditional deference to the aristocracy. Chamberlain was also vague about how this could be achieved, writing only that a "planned economy", "scientific management" and an economically interventionist state committed to social reforms would make it all possible. Chamberlain wrote back to Wilhelm on 20 January 1917: England has fallen totally into the hands of the Jews and the Americans. A person does not understand this war unless he realizes that it is in the deepest sense the war of Judentum and its near relative Americanism for the control of the world—a war against Christianity, against Bildung, moral strength, uncommercial art, against every idealist perspective on life, and for the benefit of a world that would include only industry, finance, and trade—in short, unrestricted plutocracy. All the other additional factors—Russian greed, French vanity, Italian bombast, the envious and cowardly spirit of the neutrals—are whipped up, made crazy; the Jew and the Yankee are the driving forces that operate consciously and in a certain sense have hitherto been victorious or at all events successful ... It is the war of modern mechanized "civilization" against the ancient, holy and continually reborn culture of chosen races. Machines will crush both spirit and soul in their clutches. The wounded veterans all declared that they were now against the war and had become pacifists. Between 1914 and 1918 about 1 million copies of Chamberlain's essays were sold, making Chamberlain one of Germany's best read writers during the war. In 1917 Chamberlain wrote about the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper: "No knowledgeable person, can doubt that the enemy is at work among us ... whenever England has something up her sleeve against the interests of Germany, she uses the Frankfurter Zeitung." Bernhard Guttmann, the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung sued Chamberlain for libel about that article. In August 1918, the sensational libel trial which attracted much media attention opened. Chamberlain was defended by Heinrich Class and Adolf Jacobsen. On 16 August 1918, the trial ended with the judge ruling that Chamberlain was guilty of libel and fined him 1,500 marks. The guilty verdict set off a storm in right-wing circles, who quickly held several successful fund-raisers to pay Chamberlain's fine. ==Hitler's mentor==

November Revolution In November 1918, Chamberlain was completely shattered by Germany's defeat in the war, a defeat he believed to be impossible, as well as by the November Revolution, which had toppled his beloved monarchy. Adding to his bitterness, Chamberlain was now so paralyzed that he could no longer leave his bed, something that he believed to be the result of poisoning by the British secret service. Chamberlain saw both the defeat and the revolution as the work of the Jews, writing in 1919 that Germany was now under the "supremacy of the Jews". In his last years, Chamberlain's anti-Semitic writings grew ever more violent and bloodthirsty. In March 1920, Chamberlain supported the Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic, which he called the Judenrepublik ("Jewish Republic"), and was even more embittered by its failure. The Kapp putsch was defeated by a general strike called by the Social Democrats which shut down the entire German economy. A young activist Josef Stolzing-Cerny and a Chamberlain protégé who had participated in the Kapp putsch wrote to Chamberlain after its failure: "Unfortunately Kapp was not all 'the man with the lion heart', much rather the man with the beer heart, for he continually used all his energies befuddling his brain with alcohol. ... In the same situation a Bismarck or a Napoleon would have hunted the whole Jewish-socialist republic to the devil." Hitler in his turn had read The Foundations, Chamberlain's biography of Wagner, and many of his wartime essays, and was much influenced by all that Chamberlain had written. British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, a biographer of Hitler, writes that Hitler "drew heavily for his ideas" from the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as well as from other antisemitic authors such as Adolf Wahrmund and Theodor Fritsch. The fact that Hitler was an ardent Wagnerite who adored Wagner's music gave Chamberlain and Hitler a mutual ground for friendship beyond their shared hatred of the Jews. During this period, Chamberlain, who was practically a member of the Wagner family, started to push for the Bayreuth Festival to become openly identified with politics, and to turn the previously apolitical festival into a rally. Despite his paralysis, Chamberlain whose mind was still sharp, remained active as a writer, maintaining a correspondence with a whole gamut of figures from Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the radical anti-Semitic journalist Theodor Fritsch, the leader of the völkisch Hammerbund ("Hammer League"). From his exile in the Netherlands, the former Kaiser wrote to Chamberlain in 1922 to tell him that thanks to his essays, he had become a Marcionist and now rejected the Old Testament. Wilhelm claimed that on the basis of Chamberlain's work, he now knew that what had become the Old Testament was in fact a Zoroastrian text from ancient Persia and was therefore "Aryan". In January 1924, Chamberlain published an essay praising Hitler as one of the "rare beautiful beings... a man of genuine simplicity with a fascinating gaze" whose words "always come directly from the heart". Chamberlain praised Hitler for embarking upon a "" ("war of destruction") against all of Germany's enemies. Chamberlain further wrote about Hitler—whom he viewed as the greatest of all his heroes—that: Because he [Hitler] is no mere phrasemonger, but consistently pursues his thought to an end and draws his conclusions from it, he recognizes and proclaims that one cannot simultaneously embrace Jesus and those that crucified him. That is the splendid thing about Hitler—his courage! ... In this respect he reminds one of Luther. And whence come the courage of these two men? It derives from the holy seriousness each has for the cause! Hitler utters no word he does not mean in earnest; his speeches contain no padding or vague, provisional statements ... but the result of this is that he is decried as a visionary dreamer. People consider Hitler a dreamer whose head is full of impossible schemes and yet a renowned and original historian called him "the most creative mind since Bismarck in the area of statecraft." I believe ... we are all inclined to view those things as impractical that we do not already see accomplished before us. He, for example, finds it impossible to share our conviction about the pernicious, even murderous influence of Jewry on the German Volk and not to take action; if one sees the danger, then steps must be taken against it with utter dispatch. I daresay everyone recognizes this, but nobody risks speaking out; nobody ventures to extract the consequences of his thoughts for his actions; nobody except Hitler. ... This man has worked like a divine blessing, cheering hearts, opening men's eyes to clearly seen goals, enlivening their spirits, kindling their capacity for love and for indignation, hardening their courage and resoluteness. Yet we still need him badly: May God who sent him to us preserve him for many years as a "blessing for the German Fatherland!" After the failure of the Munich Putsch, Hitler was convicted of high treason and imprisoned. When the 1924 Bayreuth Festival opened, Chamberlain's efforts to identify the festival with politics finally bore fruit. The Bayreuth Festspielhaus opera house and the way leading up to it were decorated with symbols like the swastika, parades by the nationalist were held outside the , prominent leaders like General Erich Ludendorff appeared on the stage to give a speech attacking the Weimar Republic before one of the operas was performed, and a petition was offered to the audiences demanding that Hitler be pardoned. Chamberlain died on 9 January 1927 and his ashes were buried at the Bayreuth cemetery in the presence of Hitler along with several highly ranked members of the Nazi Party. ==Impact of The Foundations==

During his lifetime Chamberlain's works were read widely throughout Europe, and especially in Germany. His reception was particularly favourable among Germany's conservative elite. Kaiser Wilhelm II patronised Chamberlain, distributing copies of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century among the German Army, and seeing that The Foundations was carried in German libraries and included in the school curricula. In 1932 in an essay entitled "Anti-Semitics" denouncing antisemitism, the "homeless left" German journalist Carl von Ossietzky wrote: 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. Ossietzky ended his essay with the warning: "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." Many of Chamberlain's ideas such as his emphasis on a racial struggle between Aryans vs. Jews for world domination; his championing of "world power status" for Germany; his call for a "planned economy" (something realized in 1936 when Hitler brought in the First Four Year Plan which saw the German state take over the economy); his vision of Germany becoming the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community"); his demand for a "third way" between capitalism and socialism; his total opposition to democracy; and his nostalgia for an agrarian lifestyle were central to Nazism. The only Nazi idea that Chamberlain missed was Lebensraum (living space), the perceived need for Germany to colonize Eastern Europe while displacing the existing population to make room for Aryan colonists. However, there were differences in that Chamberlain was always a monarchist and believed that when his friend Hitler came to power, he would restore the monarchy and put his other friend Wilhelm II back on the throne. Rosenberg had accompanied Hitler when he called upon Wagner's widow, Cosima, in October 1923 when he met her son-in-law. Hitler told the ailing Chamberlain he was working on his own book which, he intended, should do for Weimar-era Germany what Chamberlain's book had done for Imperial Germany. Beyond the Kaiser and the NSDAP, assessments were mixed. The French Germanic scholar Edmond Vermeil considered Chamberlain's ideas "essentially shoddy", but the anti-Nazi German author Konrad Heiden, despite objections to Chamberlain's racial ideas, described him as "one of the most astonishing talents in the history of the German mind, a of knowledge and profound ideas". In a 1939 work Martin Heidegger (himself a former Nazi) dismissed Chamberlain's work as presenting a subjective, individualistic (fabricated worldview). ==Works==

• (1892). Das Drama Richard Wagners. Eine Anregung, Breitkopf & Härtel. • (1895). Richard Wagner, F. Bruckmann. • (1899). Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Bruckmann. • (1903). Dilettantismus - Rasse - Monotheismus - Rom, Bruckmann. • (1905). Arische Weltanschauung, Bruckmann. • (1903). Heinrich von Stein und seine Weltanschauung, Georg Heinrich Meyer. • (1905). Immanuel Kant. Die Persönlichkeit als Einführung in das Werk, Berlin, Bard, Marquardt & Co. • (1912). Wehr und Gegenwehr. Vorworte zu dritten und zur vierten Auflage der Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Bruckmann. • (1913). Parsifal-Märchen, Bruckmann. • (1912). Goethe, Bruckmann. • (1914). Kriegsaufsätze, Bruckmann. • (1915). Worte Christi, Bruckmann. • (1915). Who is to blame for the War?, New York : German-American Literary Defense Committee • (1915). Wer hat den Krieg verschuldet?, Wiesbaden : Volksbildungsverein • (1915). Politische Ideale, Bruckmann. • (1915). England und Deutschland, Bruckmann. • (1915). Die Zuversicht, Bruckmann. • (1915). Who is to blame for the war?, The German-American Literary Defense Committee. • (1915). Neue Kriegsaufsätze, Bruckmann. • (1915). Bühnendichtungen, Bruckmann. • (1916). Deutsches Wesen, Bruckmann. • (1916). Ideal und Macht, Bruckmann. • (1916). Hammer oder Ambos, Bruckmann. • (1916). Demokratie und Freiheit, Bruckmann. • (1916). Der Wille zum Sieg, Hamburg : Deutschnationale Buchhandlung • (1918). Rasse und Nation, München : I. F. Lehmanns Verlag • (1918). Der demokratische Wahn : Zeugnisse aus England, Frankreich, den Vereinigten Staaten, Deutschland, Bruckmann. • (1919). Lebenswege meines Denkens, Bruckmann. • (1921). Mensch und Gott, Bruckmann. • (1922). ''Herrn Hinkebein's Schädel : Gedankenhumoreske'', Bruckmann. • (1923). Drei Vorworte, Bruckmann. • (1923). Rasse und Persönlichkeit, Bruckmann. • (1928). Natur und Leben, Bruckmann. • (1928). Briefe 1882-1924 und Briefwechsel mit Kaiser Wilhelm II, 2 Bände, Bruckmann. • (1933). Chamberlain der Seher des dritten Reiches: das Vermächtnis H. S. Chamberlain an das Deutsche Volk in einer Auslese aus seinen Werken, Bruckmann. • (1934). Houston Stewart Chamberlain - Auswahl aus seinen Werken, Breslau : Ferdinand Hirt • (1937). Mein Weg nach Bayreuth. Mit Einleitung von Paul Bülow, Bruckmann. Works in English translation • (1897). Richard Wagner, J.M. Dent & Co. (translated by G. Ainslie Hight) • (1911). The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols., John Lane, The Bodley Head (translated by John Lees) • "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." In Modern Political Ideologies, Oxford University Press, 1959. • (1914). Immanuel Kant, 2 vols., John Lane, The Bodley Head (translated by Lord Redesdale). • (1923). The Wagnerian Drama, John Lane, The Bodley Head. • (1915). The Ravings of a Renegade, Jarrold & Sons (translated by Charles H. Clarke) • (2005). Political Ideals, University Press of America (translated by Alexander Jacob) • (2012). Aryan World View, Aristeus books. • (2012). The Ravings of a Renegade, Aristeus Books (translated by Charles H. Clarke) • (2014). Richard Wagner, Aristeus Books (translated by G. Ainslie High) ==See also==