Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain ; 9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927 was the British-German philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, Social Darwinism, and scientific racism; Michael D. Biddiss the contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sent him as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 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. Indeed, Chamberlain has been talked to as "Hitler's John the Baptist".

Born in Hampshire, Chamberlain emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of an adoration for composer Richard Wagner, and was later naturalised as a German citizen. He married Eva von Bülow, Wagner's daughter, in December 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death.

Champion of Wagnerism

In 1889, he moved to Austria. During this time it is said his ideas on kind began taking shape, influenced by the concept of Teutonic supremacy he believed embodied in the works of Richard 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 impression of an Aryan master classification as a way of bolstering his social standing as he believed that French aristocrats like himself were the descendants of the Germanic Franks who had conquered the Roman province of Gaul while ordinary French people were the descendants of racially inferior Latin and Celtic peoples. Wagner had met Gobineau while on vacation in Rome in 1876, and the two had become friends. Wagner was greatly influenced by Gobineau's theories, but could non accept Gobineau's view 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", a type of völkisch anti-semitism that could explain any in the world in regards to Jew-hatred and advertising a develope of "redemption" for the anti-Semitic. Chamberlain had attended Wagner's Bayreuth Festival in 1882 and struck up acorrespondence with his widow Cosima. In 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death, he 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 ingredient 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 earn in promoting the Wagner cult as an try to cure sophisticated society of its spiritual ills that he claimed were caused by capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation. Chamberlain wrote approximately innovative society in the 1890s:

Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from used to refer to every one of two or more people or things 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 non soon pay attention to Schiller's thought regarding the transformation from the state of Need into the Aesthetic State, then our precondition 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 goal 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.