Houston Stewart Chamberlain Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Chamberlain (1855–1927) is widely regarded as an important contributor to German nationalist thought and anti-Semitic racism, and he had a direct influence on Adolf Hitler. His writings depict Jews as destroyers of civilization who represent absolute evil and Germans as a chosen people with a mission to defeat the Jews and rescue civilization.

Chamberlain was born in England. His mother died before he was a year old, and relatives in France raised him. His father, a rear admiral in the British navy, wanted him to follow a military career, but the young Chamberlain rejected this path. He was influenced by his Prussian private tutor to favor all things German: history, literature, and philosophy, and, later, the music of Richard Wagner. His formal university studies led to a degree in science, but he chose a career as an author.

Chamberlain’s writings express his mission to save the world from the menace of Semitic materialism. Even his writings on Kant (1905) and Goethe (1912) reflect this perspective. The major thrust of his principal work first published in 1899, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, is that race dominates history. Nations are political entities that create the context for the historical expression of a race. In his view, racial character determines the history of a people. At the center of world history through the ages is the clash between the Aryan or Germanic culture and the Semitic perspective, which Chamberlain regarded as materialistic and without cultural value.

The superiority of Western civilization stems largely from the positive influence of the Germanic races on history. For Chamberlain, these races included, inexplicably, Slavs, Celts, Greeks, and Latins as well as Germans—all heirs to ancient Greece and Rome. Semitic races, particularly the Jews, and institutions influenced by them, such as the Catholic Church, have typically acted to undermine Germanic superiority, as they once subverted the Roman Empire. Chamberlain uses spurious conjecture to conclude that Jesus was not a Jew, and he thinks that the Catholic Church diverted Christianity from its true path, a mistake not corrected until the Germanic influence of thinkers like Martin Luther emerged.

After England entered World War I (1914–1918) as an ally of those nations opposing Germany, Chamberlain accused his native country of treason to the Germanic ideal, and during the war he wrote a series of propaganda pieces favorable to the German cause. For this work he was awarded an Iron Cross, and the following year (1916) he became a German citizen.

In 1923, five years after Germany’s defeat in World War I, Chamberlain met with Hitler, who was then head of the fledgling Nazi party. Chamberlain considered Hitler to be the promised leader he had earlier prophesied would rein fuse Germany with the spirit needed to reemerge as a world power. Later, in Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed his high regard for Chamberlain’s views. In addition to Hitler, other leaders of Nazi Germany who claimed to have been influenced by Chamberlain include Hess, Goebbels, Himmler, and Rosenberg.

Bibliography:

Chamberlain, Anna. Meine Erinnerungen an Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Munich: Beck, 1923.
Chamberlain, Houston S. Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Lees, 2 vols. London: John Lane/The Bodley Head, 1910.
Munich:Verlag, 1912.
Immanuel Kant. Munich: Bruckmann, 1905.
Field, Geoffrey G. Evangelist of Race:The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.