CHAMBERLAIN, HOUSTON STEWART

CHAMBERLAIN, HOUSTON STEWART (1855–1927), Anglo-German writer, cultural critic, and race theorist.

At his death in 1927 Houston Stewart Chamberlain was famous as the "renegade" Englishman who repudiated his native land and championed German nationalism. A leading race publicist, he occupied a special place in the pantheon of the Third Reich (1933–1945) as one its most important ideological forerunners.

Chamberlain was born at Southsea, England, on 9 September 1855. His father became an admiral and several of his uncles had distinguished military careers. Soon after Chamberlain's birth, his mother died and along with two brothers he lived with relatives in France. Since his health was poor, he was mostly privately tutored and lived a peripatetic life on the Continent, quickly becoming more at home in the cultural traditions of France and Germany than in his native England. His older brother, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), was also drawn to a foreign culture, Japan, where he lived for many years and achieved renown as a scholar of Japanese language and literature. In 1878 Houston married a Prussian girl and, after a brief ill-fated business venture on the Paris stock exchange, he completed a science degree at the University of Geneva and began a doctorate. A recurrence of bad health, probably a nervous breakdown, foreclosed his hopes for an academic career and for the rest of his life he lived as a private scholar, largely funded by family money, first in Dresden, later Vienna, and finally Bayreuth.

The chief intellectual influence on Chamberlain was the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) who at Bayreuth in Bavaria had established a festival for the performance of his music-dramas. Chamberlain attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1882 and soon after collaborated on the journal La Revue Wagnerienne whose aim was to publicize Wagner's music and ideas for French audiences. After the composer's death, Wagner's widow, Cosima, and an inner circle of advisors sought to establish control over the interpretation of Wagner and to promote Bayreuth as a shrine of German culture. By the 1890s, writing mostly in German, Chamberlain had completed two books and innumerable essays on Wagner and was a leading publicist of the growing cult. It was as a Wagnerite that he developed his views on politics, culture, and race; more than anyone he forged close links between the composer's legacy and the mainstream of German conservatism and racial nationalism. Under Bayreuth's spell Chamberlain became increasingly anti-Semitic and supportive of both an authoritarian political order and a German imperial mission.

International fame came to Chamberlain with the publication of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). Over one thousand pages in length, the book was testimony to its author's encyclopedic knowledge and eclecticism. It tried to substantiate two major ideas: that racial struggle was the chief propelling force of human culture and that a superior Germanic or Teutonic race (also called the Aryan race, a term more in vogue decades before) was the major architect of modern European civilization. Chamberlain traced Germanic achievements from ancient Greece and Rome to the formation of nation-states and modern accomplishments in industry, science, and art. The two negative forces in his historical drama were first, the Semitic races, in particular the Jewish race, which was depicted as the historical adversary of the Germanic type, and second, miscegenation between unrelated or dramatically different racial types. The fall of the Roman Empire was attributed to racial mixing and in the dark age that followed the Roman Catholic Church had corrupted Christianity. The Germanic race, Chamberlain argued, was the bearer of true Christianity and a long, involved chapter rejected the idea that Jesus was a Jew and asserted that his mortal heritage was Aryan. Chamberlain was claimed as a precursor by the Aryan or German Christian movement in the Nazi era. He was influenced by an acquaintance of Wagner's, the Frenchman Count Gobineau (On the Inequality of Human Races, 1853–1855). But whereas Gobineau saw racial decline as irreversible, The Foundations incorporated the dynamism of Darwinian struggle and eugenic theories of racial selection and improvement.

Endowing his book with an aura of science and scholarship, Chamberlain sustained the deepest prejudices of many of his readers: their pride in German culture and imperialism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and their readiness to see manifestations of decline in liberalism and socialism. The Foundations received thousands of reviews, sparked heated debate, and won many admirers. It was political ideology thinly veiled as cultural analysis. By 1915 sales exceeded 100,000 copies and a popular edition in 1906 sold over 10,000 copies in ten days; translations appeared in French and English. Its most famous enthusiast was William II, the German emperor, who gave out copies to visitors and members of his entourage. Soon Chamberlain was invited to court and the two men corresponded regularly for over twenty years.

The attentions of the emperor convinced Chamberlain—as nothing else could—of his mission as a German prophet. Two major studies followed: Immanuel Kant (1905) and Goethe (1912). They challenged the recent revival of academic interest in these two thinkers around 1900 and sought to harness them to a racist and conservative viewpoint. Kant's philosophy was interpreted as safeguarding an inner realm of idealism, faith, and subjectivity while clearly demarcating the outer limits of reason. The philosopher was used to bolster Chamberlain's race theory and attack the excessive claims of scientific rationalism. In Goethe's case Chamberlain focused on his neglected scientific writings rather than literary works, seeing in them the model for an alternative methodology to scientific positivism. Neither book achieved the acclaim of The Foundations. Now the most renowned writer associated with the Wagner cult, Chamberlain's personal connections to Bayreuth became even stronger when, after a painful divorce, in December 1908 he married Eva, the youngest daughter of Richard and Cosima Wagner, spending the rest of his life in Bayreuth.

During World War I Chamberlain became one of the most prolific and extreme propagandists for Germany. Hundreds of thousands of copies of his war essays were distributed to German soldiers and civilians. Attacked as a "turncoat" in Britain, he was awarded an Iron Cross and became a German citizen in 1916. The war brought him into close relations with numerous ultranationalist and anti-Semitic organizations, including the Pan German League and the Fatherland Party, founded in 1917 to mobilize opposition against peace negotiations. Chamberlain was prominent among those who insisted that "internal enemies"—liberals, socialists, and Jews—were stabbing Germany in the back, undermining its war effort. Fearful that without complete victory, Germany would be convulsed in revolution, his politics became increasingly radical and his racial rhetoric more vehement and prescriptive. After Germany's defeat, Chamberlain and the Bayreuth circle endorsed counterrevolutionary movements that sought to overthrow the newly established Weimar Republic. His health had deteriorated (probably from multiple sclerosis) but he continued writing political essays, an autobiography, and Man and God (1921). Meeting Adolf Hitler in Bayreuth in October 1923, Chamberlain was captivated by the Nazi leader and publicly announced his support. He never lived to see the Bayreuth Festival turned into a kind of Nazi rite, but Chamberlain became a fixture of the regime's hagiography and much cited by its leading ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946). Chamberlain's funeral—attended by Hitler and a Hohenzollern prince representing the deposed emperor—symbolized the direction of German politics with World War I; his career poses the question of the relationship between earlier German racism and the policies of the Third Reich. Chamberlain cannot be held directly responsible, but he helped forge the climate in which Nazi crimes were possible.

See alsoAnti-Semitism; Civilization, Concept of; Race and Racism; Wagner, Richard.

bibliography

Field, Geoffrey G. Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. New York, 1981.

Lindner, Erik. "Houston Stewart Chamberlain: The Abwehrverein and the 'Praeceptor Germaniae 1914–18'." In Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 37, edited by Arnold Paucker, 213–236. London, 1992.

Schüler, Winfried. Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Enstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära. Munster, 1971.

Spotts, Frederic. Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival. New Haven, Conn., 1994.

Geoffrey G. Field