Houston Stewart Chamberlain

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Houston Stewart Chamberlain (September 9, 1855 - January 9, 1927) was a British-born, naturalized German author of popular scientific books (amongst others about Richard Wagner, Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe) as well as proponent of a nationalist, pangermanic and racist anti-Semitism. His bookThe Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) became one of the standards of the racist and ideological antisemitism in Germany of the early 20th century.

1 Early life
2 Works
3 See also
4 External source

[edit] Early life

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born on September 9, 1855, in Southsea, England. His mother, Eliza Jane Hall, died before he was a year old. He was raised by his grandmother in France. Chamberlain's father, Rear-Admiral William Charles Chamberlain, had planned a military career for his son and at 11 he was sent to a public school for future army and navy officers. But the young Chamberlain was more interested in studying music, literature and astronomy, and the prospect of serving as an officer in India or elsewhere in the British Empire held no attraction for him. Health concerns put a convenient end to Chamberlain's military prospects.

Beginning at age 14 he suffered from seriously poor health and travelled to various spas around Europe, accompanied by a Prussian tutor who taught him German and interested him in German culture and history. He then moved to Germany, becoming an important member of the "Bayreuth Circle" of German nationalist intellectuals influenced by the ideas of Richard Wagner, including antisemitism. He married Eva Wagner, the daughter of the composer.

[edit] Works

In 1899 he wrote his most important work, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century). The work focuses on the controversial notion that Western civilization is deeply marked by the influence of the Germanic peoples. Chamberlain grouped all European peoples—Celts, Germans, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins—into the "Aryan race", a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. At the helm of the Aryan race was the Nordic or Germanic breed. Chamberlain's goal was to create a movement that would revive the recognition of Germanic blood. To do this, he incorporated not just the Teutonic peoples but all tribes with northern origins into a Germanic race. This included the Celts, Germans, and Slavs, all of whom Chamberlain considered to be of Germanic stock.

Chamberlain's works focused on the claim that the Germanic peoples were the heirs to the empires of Greece and Rome. He argued that when the Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire, Jews and other non-Europeans already dominated it. The Germans, therefore, saved Western civilization from Semitic domination. Chamberlain's thoughts were influenced by the writings of Gobineau, who had argued for the superiority of the Aryan race, a term that was increasingly being used to describe white peoples, excluding Jews (whose language implied origins other than the Proto-Indo-Europeans). For Chamberlain the concept of an "Aryan" race was not simply defined by ethno-linguistic origins. It was also an abstract ideal of a racial elite (see Racism). The Aryan, or "noble" race was always in the process of creation as superior peoples supplanted inferior ones in evolutionary struggles for survival.

Chamberlain used a now discredited notion of the ethnic make up of Galilee to argue that, while Jesus may have been Jewish by religion, he was not Jewish by race. During the Nazi period certain pro-Nazi theologians developed these ideas as part of the manufacture of an Aryan Jesus.

He was also an early supporter of Hanns Hörbiger's Welteislehre, the theory that most bodies in our solar system are covered with ice.

During his lifetime, Chamberlain's works became widely popular around Europe, especially in Germany. He was invited to stay at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. His works would later have a marked effect upon German nationalist movements, such as Adolf Hitler's National Socialism.

Chamberlain was at ease in the German language and wrote in it. During World War I, he published several propaganda texts against his country of origin—Kriegsaufsätze (Wartime Essays)—, and became a citizen of Germany in 1916.

Adolf Hitler was a student of his works, and praised him as "The Prophet of the Third Reich".