Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a British-German-French philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, scientific racism, and Nordicism; he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published in 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements of the early 20th century, and later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy. In the early 1920s, Chamberlain met and encouraged Adolf Hitler: he has been referred to as "Hitler's John the Baptist".
Born in Hampshire, he emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of an adoration for composer Richard Wagner. He married Eva von Bülow, Wagner's biological daughter, in December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death. As a long admirer of French culture, he settled in Paris in 1884. He was later naturalised as a French citizen in 1914. During World War I, Chamberlain sided with Germany against his country of birth. He took German citizenship in 1916.
Early life and education
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 deeply disliked Cheltenham College, and felt lonely and out of place there. The young Chamberlain was "a compulsive dreamer", more interested in the arts than in the military, and he developed a fondness for nature and a near-mystical sense of self.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".
Embracing conservativism
During his youth, Chamberlain – while not entirely rejecting at this point his liberalism – became influenced by the romantic conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution. Bemoaning the loss of "Merry Old England", this view argued for a return to a highly romanticized period of English history, with the people living happily in harmony with nature on the land overseen by a benevolent, cultured elite. In this critique, the Industrial Revolution was seen as a disaster which forced people to live in dirty, overcrowded cities, doing dehumanizing work in factories while society was dominated by a philistine, greedy middle class.The prospect of serving as an officer in India or elsewhere in the British Empire held no attraction for him. In addition, he was a delicate child with poor health. At the age of fourteen he had to be withdrawn from school. After Cheltenham, Chamberlain always felt out of place in Britain, a society whose values Chamberlain felt were not his values, writing in 1876: "The fact may be regrettable but it remains a fact; I have become so completely un-English that the mere thought of England and the English makes me unhappy". Chamberlain travelled to various spas around Europe, accompanied by a Prussian tutor, Mr Otto Kuntze, who taught him German and interested him in German culture and history. Fascinated by Renaissance art and architecture, Chamberlain learned Italian and planned to settle in Florence for a time.
University of Geneva and racial theory
Chamberlain attended the University of Geneva, in French-speaking Switzerland. There he studied under Carl Vogt, who was a supporter of racial typology, 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, 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.
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, 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. Chamberlain rejected Darwinism, evolution and social Darwinism and instead emphasized "Gestalt" which he said derived from Goethe.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 he put later, it was then he realized the full "degeneracy" of the French culture that he had so admired compared to the greatness of the German culture that had produced Wagner, whom Chamberlain viewed as one of the great geniuses of all time. In the music of Wagner, Chamberlain found the mystical, life-affirming spiritual force that he had sought unsuccessfully in British and French cultures. Further increasing his love of Germany was that he had fallen in love with a German woman named Anna Horst. 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. By contrast, Chamberlain regarded Germany as the romantic "land of love", a place whose people had human feelings like love, and whose culture was infused with a special spirituality that brought out the best in humanity.In 1883–1884, Chamberlain lived in Paris and worked as a stockbroker. Chamberlain's attempts to play the Paris bourse ended in failure as he proved to be inept at business, and much of his hatred of capitalism stemmed from his time in Paris. More happily for him, Chamberlain founded the first Wagner society in Paris and often contributed articles to the Revue wagnérienne, the first journal in France devoted to Wagner studies. Together with his friend, the French writer Édouard Dujardin, Chamberlain did much to introduce Wagner to the French, who until then had largely ignored Wagner's music.
Thereafter he settled in Dresden, where "he plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of Wagnerian music and philosophy, the metaphysical works of the Master probably exercising as strong an influence upon him as the musical dramas". Chamberlain immersed himself in philosophical writings, and became a Völkisch author, one of those concerned more with a highly racist understanding of art, culture, civilisation and spirit than with quantitative physical distinctions between groups. 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.
Chamberlain's status as an immigrant to Germany always meant he was to a certain extent an outsider in his adopted country – a man who spoke fluent German, but always with an English accent. Chamberlain tried very hard to be more German than the Germans, and it was his efforts to fit in that led him to völkisch 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. Chamberlain's friend Hermann Keyserling later recalled that Chamberlain was an eccentric English "individualist" who "never saw Germany as it really is", instead having an idealized, almost mythic view. 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 , an analysis of Wagner's drama, and a biography, 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.
During his time in Dresden, Chamberlain like many other völkisch activists became fascinated with Hindu mythology, and learned Sanskrit to read the ancient Indian epics like the Vedas and the Upanishads in their original form. 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 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.