Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (; 9 September 1855 – 9 January 1927) was a British-German philosopher who wrote works about political philosophy and natural science. His writing promoted German ethnonationalism, antisemitism, and scientific racism; and he has been described as a "racialist writer". His best-known book, the two-volume ''Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts'' (''The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century''), published 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 referred 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.Eva von Bulow's mother, Cosima Wagner, was still married to Hans von Bülow when Eva was born – but her biological father was Wagner.

Early life and education

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in Southsea, Hampshire, England, the son of Rear Admiral William Charles Chamberlain, RN. His mother, Eliza Jane, daughter of Captain Basil Hall, RN, died before he was a year old, leading to his being brought up by his grandmother in France. His elder brother was Japanologist and Tokyo Imperial University 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 on the continent, 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 grew up in a self-confident, optimistic, Victorian atmosphere that celebrated the nineteenth century as the " Age of Progress"; a time of growing wealth, scientific discoveries, technological advances and democratic political reforms; a world that many Victorians expected to get progressively better and better with Britain leading the way for the rest of the world.

Chamberlain grew up 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 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.Mosse (1968), p.ix

Chamberlain's major interests in his studies at Cheltenham were the natural sciences, especially astronomy.Field (1981), p.24 Chamberlain later recalled: "The starlight exerted an indescribable influence on me. 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 portrait of a mythic, bucolic period of English history that had never existed, 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 then 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.Redesdale (1913), p. vi In 1881, he earned a ''baccalauréat ès sciences physiques et naturelles'' ("baccalaureate in physical and natural sciences").

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'' ("Studies on rising sap"), but this publication did not culminate in any further academic qualifications. In his preface, Chamberlain quoted from a letter by Prof. Julius Wiesner of the University of Vienna praising Chamberlain's work.

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'' ("vital force").

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 on the subject.

Still Liberal: Accusing Disraeli of ruining England

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.Field (1981), p.353 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". In 1881, he wrote to his family in Britain, praising William Ewart Gladstone for introducing the Land Bill to bring in "fair rents" in Ireland and withdrawing from the Transvaal.

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 (''sic'')". The main landowning classes in Ireland then were Anglo-Irish gentiles, though at this stage of his life his anti-Semitic remarks were few and far between.

Support of World Ice Theory

Chamberlain was an early supporter of Hanns Hörbiger's ''Welteislehre'' ("World Ice Theory"), the theory that most bodies in our Solar System are covered with ice. Due in part to Chamberlain's advocacy, this became official cosmological 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.Buruma (2000) p.219 It was only at the age of twenty three in November 1878, when he first heard the music of Richard Wagner—which struck him with all the force of a religious revelation—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 finally found the mystical, life-affirming spiritual force that he had been unsuccessfully seeking to find 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, and she with him.Field (1981), p.33 As Chamberlain's wealthy, elitist family back in Britain objected to him marrying the lower middle-class Horst on the grounds that she was socially unsuitable for him, 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. His knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche is demonstrated in that work (p. 183) and in ''Foundations'' (p. 153n). 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 Britain. 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. June 1888 was an auspicious month for Chamberlain. Besides the death of the "Jew-lover" Friedrich III, June 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.Field (1981), p.75 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.

Saxony was a center of ''völkisch'' activity in the late 19th century, and in the elections to the Saxon ''Landtag'' in 1893, ''völkisch'' candidates won 6 out of the 16 seats. 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. In a classic case of being ''plus royaliste que le roi'' (more royalist than the king), 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.Field (1981), p.331 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 of Germany and the Germans.Field (1981), p.320 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. To compensate, Chamberlain became "überdeutsch", the man who wanted to be more German than the Germans.

By this time Chamberlain had met his first wife, the Prussian 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 '' ("Notes on Lohengrin") (1892), an analysis of Wagner's drama (1892), and a biography (1895), 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.Field (1981), p.133 Chamberlain in his Wagner biography went to considerable lengths to distort the Master's love-life such as implying that Wagner's relationship with Cosima von Bülow only started after the death of her first husband.

During his time in Dresden, Chamberlain like many other ''völkisch'' activists became fascinated with Hindu mythology and legend, and learned Sanskrit in order to read the ancient Indian epics like the ''Vedas'' and the ''Upanishads'' in their original form.Field (1981), p.304 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 ("light ones") 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, stating "in the night of the inner life ... the Indian ... finds his way in the dark more surely than anyone". 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. The popularity of the Hindu texts with the ''völkisch'' movement explains why the swastika, an ancient Indian symbol, was adopted by the ''völkisch'' activists as one of their symbols.

Champion of Wagnerism

In 1889, he moved to Austria. During this time it is said his ideas on race 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.Chase, Allan (1977) ''The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism'' New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp.91–92 In his book ''Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines'', the aristocratic Gobineau, who had an obsessive hatred of commoners, had developed the theory of an Aryan master race 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 not accept Gobineau's theory 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 all in the world in regards to Jew-hatred and offer a form of "redemption" for the anti-Semitic.Friedländer (1998), p.87 Chamberlain had attended Wagner's Bayreuth Festival in 1882 and struck up a close correspondence 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 member 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.Friedländer (1998), p.89 Chamberlain explained his work in promoting the Wagner cult as an effort to cure modern society of its spiritual ills that he claimed were caused by capitalism, industrialisation, materialism, and urbanisation. Chamberlain wrote about modern society in the 1890s:

Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from each other, continually further from the 'firm ground of nature'; soon it must fling us out into empty nothingness.Field (1981), p.150

In another letter, Chamberlain stated:

If we do not soon pay attention to Schiller's thought regarding the transformation from the state of Need into the Aesthetic State, then our condition 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 purpose 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.

Vienna years

In September 1891, Chamberlain visited Bosnia and Herzegovina as a journalist. In 1878, the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina had been occupied by Austria-Hungary; though the two provinces remained nominally Ottoman until 1908, in practice they were part of the Austrian empire from 1878 onwards. Because Bosnia-Herzegovina was still officially part of the Ottoman Empire, neither province was represented in the Austrian ''Reichsrat'' or the Hungarian Diet, and instead the two provinces were in practice a colony of Austria-Hungary. Chamberlain had been commissioned by the Austrian government to write propaganda glorying its colonial rule of Bosnia-Herzegovina for a Geneva newspaper. Chamberlain's articles about Bosnia reveal his increasing preference for dictatorship over democracy, with Chamberlain praising the Austrians for their utterly undemocratic rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina.Field (1981), p.100 Chamberlain wrote that what he had seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the perfect example of Wagner's dictum: "Absolute monarch – free people!" Chamberlain declared that the Bosnians were extremely lucky not to have the shambles and chaos of a democratic "parliamentary regime", instead being ruled by an idealist, enlightened dictatorship that did what was best for them. Equally important in Chamberlain's Bosnian articles was his celebration of "natural man" who lived on the land as a small farmer as opposed to what Chamberlain saw as the corrupt men who lived in modern industrial, urban society.Field (1981), p.101 At the time Chamberlain visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, the provinces had been barely touched by modernization, and for the most part, Bosnians continued to live much as their ancestors had done in the Middle Ages. Chamberlain was enchanted with what he saw, and forgetting for the moment that the purpose of his visit was to glorify Austrian rule, expressed much sadness in his articles that the "westernization" being fostered by the Austrians would destroy the traditional way of life in Bosnia. Chamberlain wrote about the average Bosnian:

he Bosnian peasantbuilds his house, he makes his shoes, and plough, etc.; the woman weaves and dyes the stuffs and cooks the food. When we have civilized these good people, when we have taken from them their beautiful costumes to be preserved in museums as objects of curiosity, when we have ruined their national industries that are so perfect and so primitive, when contact with us has destroyed the simplicity of their manner—then Bosnia will no longer be interesting to us.

Chamberlain's awe and pride in the tremendous scientific and technological advances of the 19th century were always tempered with an extremely strong nostalgia for what he saw as the simpler, better and more innocent time when people lived on the land in harmony with nature. In his heart, Chamberlain was always a romantic conservative who idealised the Middle Ages and was never quite comfortable with the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. In Bosnia, Chamberlain saw an essentially medieval society that still moved to the ancient rhythm of life that epitomized his pastoral ideal. Remembering Bosnia several years later, Chamberlain wrote:

The spirit of a natural man, who does everything and must create everything for himself in life, is decidedly more universal and more harmoniously developed than the spirit of an industrial worker whose whole life is occupied with the manufacturing of a single object ... and that only with the aid of a complicated machine, whose functioning is quite foreign to him. A similar degeneration is taking place amongst peasants: an American farmer in the Far West is today only a kind of subordinate engine driver. Also among us in Europe it becomes every day more impossible for a peasant to exist, for agriculture must be carried out in "large units"—the peasant consequently becomes increasingly like an industrial worker. His understanding dries up; there is no longer an interaction between his spirit and surrounding Nature.

Chamberlain's nostalgia for a pre-industrial way of life that he expressed so strongly in his Bosnia articles earned him ridicule, as many believed that he had an absurdly idealized and romanticized view of the rural life that he never experienced first-hand.

In 1893, after receiving a letter from Cosima Wagner telling him that he had to read Gobineau's ''Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines'', Chamberlain, who was fluent in French, duly complied with her request. Chamberlain accepted Gobineau's belief in an Aryan master-race, but rejected his pessimism, writing that Gobineau's philosophy was "the grave of every attempt to deal practically with the race question and left only one honorable solution, that we at once put a bullet through our heads".Buruma (2000), p. 220 Chamberlain's time in Vienna shaped his anti-Semitism and Pan-Germanism. Despite living in Vienna from 1889 to 1909, when he moved to Bayreuth, Chamberlain had nothing but contempt for the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Habsburg empire, taking the viewpoint that the best thing that could happen to the Austrian empire would be for it to be annexed by Germany to end the ''Völkerchaos'' (chaos of the peoples). Vienna had a large Jewish population (until 1938, Vienna was about 10% Jewish), and Chamberlain's time in Vienna may have been the first time in his life when he actually encountered Jews. Chamberlain's letters from Vienna constantly complain about how he was having to meet and deal with Jews, every one of whom he detested. In 1894 after visiting a spa, Chamberlain wrote: "Unfortunately like everything else ... it has fallen into the hands of the Jews, which includes two consequences: every individual is bled to the utmost and systematically, and there is neither order nor cleanliness."Field (1981), p.116 In 1895, he wrote:

However, we shall have to move soon anyway, for our house having been sold to a Jew ... it will soon be impossible for decent people to live in it ... Already the house being almost quite full of Jews, we have to live in a state of continual warfare with the vermin which is a constant and invariable follower of this chosen people even in the most well-to-do classes.

In another letter of 1895, Chamberlain wrote he was still influenced by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's critique of the Jews as mindlessly materialistic, writing that Proudhon was "one of the most acute minds of the century" and "I find many points of contact between the Wagner-Schiller mode of thought and the anarchism of Proudhon." At the same time, Chamberlain's marriage to Anna began to fall apart, as his wife was frequently sick and though she assisted her husband with his writings, he did not find her very intellectually stimulating. Chamberlain started to complain more and more that his wife's frequent illnesses forced him to tend to her and were holding back his career.

Though Chamberlain consistently remained supportive of German imperialism, he frequently expressed hostile views towards the British Empire; Chamberlain viewed Britain as world's most frequent aggressor, a view he expressed more vehemently at the tail end of the 19th century. In 1895, Chamberlain wrote to his aunt about the Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire during 1894–96:

The Armenian insurrection f 1894with the inevitable retaliation of massacres and persecution (of course ''enormously exaggerated'' by those greatest liars in creation, backed by their worthy friends the English journalists) was all got up at the precise moment when English politics required a "diversion".

In 1896, Chamberlain wrote to his aunt:

The English press is the most insufferably arrogant, generally ignorant, the most passionately one-sided and narrow-minded in its judgments that I know; it is the universal ''bully'', always laying down the law for everybody, always speaking as if it were umpire of the universe, always abusing everybody all round and putting party spirit in all its judgments, envenoming thus the most peaceful discussions. It is this and this only which has made England hated all the world over. During the whole year 1895, I never opened an English newspaper without finding ''War'' predicated or threatened—No other nation in the world has wanted war or done anything but pray for peace—England alone, the world's bully, has been stirring it up on all sides.

During the 1890s, Chamberlain was an outspoken critic of British policies in South Africa, writing to his uncle in 1898:

At the time of the Second Boer War, Chamberlain privately expressed support for the cause of the Boers, although he also expressed regret over "white men" fighting each other at a time when Chamberlain believed that white supremacy around the world was being threatened by the alleged "Yellow Peril".Field (1981), p. 357 In July 1900, Chamberlain wrote to his aunt:

One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men and threatens destruction … The fact that a tiny nation of peasants absolutely untrained in the conduct of war, has been able to keep the whole united empire at bay for months, and has only been overcome—and ''has'' it been overcome?—by sending out an army superior in number to the whole population including women and children, has lowered respect for England beyond anything you can imagine on your side of the water, and will certainly not remain lost on the minds of those countless millions who have hitherto been subdued by our prestige only.

Chamberlain seized upon the fact that some of the Randlords were Jewish to argue in his letters to Cosima Wagner that the war was a case of Anglo-Jewish aggression against the Germanic Afrikaners.Field (1981), pp. 357–58 Wagner wrote back to Chamberlain: "This extermination of one of the most excellent Germanic races is so horrible that I know of nothing I have experienced which is comparable to it."

As a leading Wagnerite in Vienna, Chamberlain befriended a number of other prominent Wagnerites, such as Prince Hohenhohe-Langenburg, Ludwig Schemann, Georg Meurer, and Baron Christian von Ehrenfels. The most important friendship that Chamberlain made during his time in Vienna was with German Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, who shared Chamberlain's love of Wagnerian music. Besides being a passionate Wagnerite, Eulenburg was also an anti-Semite, an Anglophobe and a convinced enemy of democracy who found much to admire in Chamberlain's anti-Semitic, anti-British and anti-democratic writings.

''Die Grundlagen'' (''The Foundations'')

In February 1896, the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a leading ''völkisch'' activist who was later to publish ''Mein Kampf'' commissioned Chamberlain to write a book that was intended to summarize all of the achievements of the 19th century.

In October 1899 Chamberlain published his most famous work, ''Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,'' in German. ''The Foundations'' is a pseudo-scientific "racial history" of humanity from the emergence of the first civilizations in the ancient Near East to the year 1800. It argues that all of the "foundations" of the great 19th century, which saw huge economic, scientific and technological advances in the West, were the work of the "Aryan race".Field (1981), p.180 ''Die Grundlagen'' was only the first volume of an intended three-volume history of the West with the second and third volumes taking up the story of the West in the 19th century and the looming war for world domination in the coming 20th century between the Aryans on one side vs. the Jews, blacks and Asians on the other side.

Chamberlain never wrote the third volume, much to the intense annoyance of Cosima Wagner, who was upset that ''Die Grundlagen'' stopped in 1800 before Wagner was born, and thus omitted her husband. The book argued that Western civilisation is deeply marked by the influence of Teutonic peoples.

Peoples defined as Aryans

Chamberlain grouped all European peoples – not just Germans, but Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Latins – into the "Aryan race", a race built on the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. In fact, he even included the Berber people of North Africa in the Aryan race: "The noble Moor of Spain is anything but a pure Arab of the desert, he is half a Berber (from the Aryan family) and his veins are so full of Gothic blood that even at the present day noble inhabitants of Morocco can trace their descent back to Teutonic ancestors."

At the helm of the Aryan race, and, indeed, all races, according to Chamberlain, were the Germanic or Teutonic peoples, who had best preserved the Aryan blood.Field (1981), p.223 Chamberlain used the terms Aryan, Indo-European and Indo-Germanic interchangeably, but he went out of his way to emphasise that purest Aryans were to be found in Central Europe and that in both France and Russia miscegenation had diluted the Aryan blood. The Russians in particular had become a semi-Asian people on the account of the rule of the Golden Horde. Much of Chamberlain's theory about the superiority of the Aryan race was taken from the writings of the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau, but there was a crucial difference in that Gobineau had used the Aryan race theory as a way of dividing society between an Aryan nobility vs. racially inferior commoners whereas Chamberlain used the Aryan racial theory as a way of uniting society around its supposed common racial origins.

Aryan race virtues

Everything that Chamberlain viewed as good in the world was ascribed to the Aryans. For an example, in ''The Foundations'' Chamberlain explained at considerable length that Jesus Christ could not possibly be a Jew, and very strongly implied that Christ was an Aryan.

Chamberlain's tendency to see everything good as the work of the Aryans allowed him to claim whoever he approved of for the Aryan race, which at least was part of the appeal of the book in Germany when it was published in 1899. Chamberlain claimed all of the glories and achievements of ancient Greece and Rome as due entirely to Aryan blood. Chamberlain wrote that ancient Greece was a "lost ideal" of beautiful thought and art that the modern Germans were best placed to recover if only the German people could embrace Wagner.

Chamberlain praised Rome for its militarism, civic values, patriotism, respect for the law and reverence for the family as offering the best sort of Aryan government.Field (1981), p.182 Reflecting his opposition to feminism, Chamberlain lamented how modern women were not like the submissive women of ancient Rome whom he claimed were most happy in obeying the wills of their husbands. Chamberlain asserted that Aryans and Aryans alone are the only people in the entire world capable of creating beautiful art and thinking great thoughts, so he claimed all of the great artists, writers and thinkers of the West such as Homer, Dante, Giotto, Donatello, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Ludwig van Beethoven, Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as part of one long glorious tradition of beautiful Aryan art and thought, which Chamberlain planned to have culminate with the life-changing, racially regenerating music of Richard Wagner in the 19th century. As the British historian George Peabody Gooch wrote, here was "a glittering vision of mind and muscle, of large scale organization, of intoxicating self-confidence, of metallic brilliancy, such as Europe has never seen".

The antithesis of the heroic Aryan race with its vital, creative life-improving qualities was the "Jewish race", whom Chamberlain presented as the inverse of the Aryan. Every positive quality the Aryans had, the Jews had the exact opposing negative quality. The American historian Geoffrey Field wrote:

To each negative "Semitic" trait Chamberlain counter-posed a Teutonic virtue. Kantian moral freedom took the place of political liberty and egalitarianism. Irresponsible Jewish capitalism was sharply distinguished from the vague ideal of Teutonic industrialism, a romantic vision of an advanced technological society which had somehow managed to retain the ''Volksgemeinschaft'', cooperation and hierarchy of the medieval guilds. The alternative to Marxism was "ethical socialism", such as that described by Thomas More, "one of the most exquisite scholars ever produced by a Teutonic people, of an absolutely aristocratic, refined nature". In the rigidly elitist, disciplined society of ''Utopia'' with its strong aura of Christian humanism, Chamberlain found an approximation of his own nostalgic, communal ideal. "The gulf separating More from Marx," he wrote, "is not the progress of time, but the contrast between Teuton and Jew."

The Jewish wars claim

Chamberlain announced in ''The Foundations'' that "all the wars" in history were "so peculiarly connected with Jewish financial operations".Field (1981) p.190 Chamberlain warned that the aim of the Jew was "to put his foot upon the neck of all nations of the world and be Lord and possessor of the whole earth".Field (1981), p.189

As part of their plans to destroy Aryan civilization, Chamberlain wrote: "Consider, with what mastery they use the law of blood to extend their power." Chamberlain wrote that Jewish women were encouraged to marry Gentiles while Jewish men were not, so the male line "remained spotless ... thousands of side-branches are cut off and employed to infect Indo-Europeans with Jewish blood." In his account of the Punic wars between "Aryan Rome" and "Semitic Carthage", Chamberlain praised the Romans for their total destruction of Carthage in 146 BC at the end of the Third Punic War as an example of how Aryans should deal with Semites.

Later, Chamberlain argued that the Romans had become too tolerant of Semites like the Jews, and this was the cause of the downfall of the Roman empire. Chamberlain argued that it was due to miscegenation that the Jews had caused the Aryan Roman Empire to go into decline and collapse. Chamberlain wrote that the "African half breed soldier emperor" Caracalla had granted Roman citizenship to all the subjects in the Empire regardless of race or religion in 212 AD, and as result of this, the Romans had freely mixed with Semitic and African peoples, leading Chamberlain to conclude: "Like a cataract the alien blood poured down into the depopulated city of Rome and soon the Romans ceased to exist." As such, the destruction of the Western Roman Empire by the Germanic peoples was merely an act of liberation from the ''Völkerchaos'' ("Chaos of the Peoples") that the Roman empire had become.

Theories of Jewish conspiracy

Jewish race domination claim

The ultimate aim of the Jew, according to Chamberlain, was to create a situation where "there would be in Europe only a single people of pure race, the Jews, all the rest would be a herd of pseudo-Hebraic mestizos, a people beyond all doubt degenerate physically, mentally and morally."

Catholicism a Jewish invention

As part of their plans to destroy the Aryans, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews had founded the Roman Catholic Church, which only preached a "Judaized" Christianity that had nothing to do with the Christianity created by the Aryan Christ.Field (1981), p.192

At least some historians have argued that ''The Foundations'' are actually more anti-Catholic than anti-Semitic, but this misses the point that the reason why Chamberlain attacked the Catholic Church so fiercely was because he believed the Papacy was controlled by the Jews.

Chamberlain claimed that in the 16th century the Aryan Germans under the leadership of Martin Luther had broken away from the corrupt influence of Rome, and so laid the foundations of a "Germanic Christianity".

Democracy a failed Jewish invention

Chamberlain claimed that the natural and best form of government for Aryans was a dictatorship, and so he blamed the Jews for inventing democracy as part of their plans for destroying the Aryans. In the same way, Chamberlain blamed capitalism – which he saw as a very destructive economic system – as something invented by the Jews to enrich themselves at the expense of the Aryans while at the same time crediting the Jews with inventing socialism with its message of universal human equality as a cunning Jewish stratagem to divert attention away from all the economic devastation wrought by Jewish financiers.

Jewish fault for Chinese lack of culture

Chamberlain had a deep dislike of the Chinese, and in ''The Foundations'' he announced that Chinese civilization had been founded by the Jews because just like the Jews the Chinese had "... the total absence of all culture and the one-sided emphasizing of civilization". For Chamberlain, this was more than sufficient proof that the Jews had created Chinese civilization.

Jewish race – not religion

The Franco-Israeli historian Saul Friedländer described ''The Foundations'' – with its theory of two "pure" races left in the world, namely the German and Jewish locked into a war for world domination which could only end with the complete victory of one over the other – as one of the key texts of "redemptive anti-semitism". Because Chamberlain viewed Jews as a race, not a religion, Chamberlain argued the conversion of Jews was not a "solution" to the "Jewish Question", stating Jewish converts to Christianity were still Jews. In taking this stance, Chamberlain was going beyond his hero Wagner. Dutch journalist Ian Buruma wrote:

Wagner himself, like Luther, still believed that a Jew could, as he put it with his customary charm, "annihilate" his Jewishness by repudiating his ancestry, converting and worshiping at the shrine of Bayreuth. So in theory a Jew could be a German ... But to the mystical chauvinists, like Chamberlain, who took a tribal view of Germanness, even radical, Wagnerian assimilation could never be enough: the Jew was an alien virus to be purged from the national bloodstream. The more a Jew took on the habits and thoughts of his gentile compatriots, the more he was to be feared.

Leaving "the solution" to the reader

Chamberlain did not advocate the extermination of Jews in ''The Foundations''; indeed, despite his determination to blame all of the world's problems on the Jews, Chamberlain never proposed a solution to this perceived problem.Field (1981), p. 222 Instead, Chamberlain made the cryptic statement that after reading his book, his readers would know best about how to devise a "solution" to the "Jewish Question".

Friedländer has argued that if one were to seriously take up the theories of "redemptive anti-semitism" proposed in ''The Foundations'', and push them to their logical conclusion, then inevitably one would reach the conclusion that genocide might be a perfectly acceptable "solution" to the "Jewish Question". Friedländer argued that there is an implied genocidal logic to ''The Foundations'' as Chamberlain argued that Jews were a race apart from the rest of humanity; that evil was embedded within the genes of the Jews, and so the Jews were born evil and remained evil until they died, indeed a Jew could never stop being evil even if he or she wanted to; and that for these biological reasons alone, the Jews would never cease their endless attempts to destroy all that was good within the world.

Follow up book by Josef Remier

Inspired by ''The Foundations'', one ''völkisch'' writer, Josef Remier, published ''Ein Pangermanisches Deutschland'' ("A Pan-Germanic Germany") in 1905, which used ''The Foundations'' to advocate that Germany conquer the Russian Empire, after which special commissions of doctors, anthropologists and "breeding experts" were to divide the population into three categories; ethnic Germans, those capable of being "Germanized", and those incapable of "improvement", with all Slavs and Jews being included in the last category.Field (1981), p. 230

Field wrote that Remier's vision anticipated the "war of extermination" that was Operation Barbarossa in 1941 in "many horrifying aspects".

''The Foundations'' sales, reviews and acceptance

''The Foundations'' sold well: eight editions and 60,000 copies within 10 years, 100,000 copies by the outbreak of World War I and 24 editions and more than a quarter of a million copies by 1938.

The success of ''The Foundations'' after it was published in October 1899 made Chamberlain into a celebrity intellectual.Field (1981), p. 227 The popularity of ''The Foundations'' was such that many ''Gymnasium'' (high school) teachers in the Protestant parts of Germany made '' Die Grundlagen'' required reading for their students.Field (1981), p. 232

One teacher remembered: "I myself read the whole book in one go when as a young ''Gymnasium'' teacher in Nürnberg it fell into my hands. And with a flushed face I put it aside full of excitement. I can picture the scene today 927and can reawaken the old feeling."Field (1981), p. 132 The book sold very well, but reviews in Germany were very mixed.

Conservative and National Liberal newspapers gave generally friendly reviews to ''The Foundations''. ''Völkisch'' newspapers gave overwhelming positive reviews to ''The Foundations'' with many ''völkisch'' reviewers calling ''Die Grundlagen'' one of the greatest books ever written.

Discrimination of Jews following the book

German universities were hotbeds of ''völkisch'' activity in the early 20th century, and ''The Foundations'' was extremely popular on university campuses with many university clubs using ''The Foundations'' as a reason to exclude Jewish students from joining.Field (1981), pp. 231–32

Likewise, military schools were centers of ''völkisch'' thought in the early 20th century, and so ''The Foundations'' was very popular with officer cadets; though since neither the Navy nor the Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg armies accepted Jewish officer candidates, ''Die Grundlagen'' did not lead to Jews being excluded. The only exceptions to the otherwise total exclusion of German Jews from the officer corps were the Bavarian and Saxon armies, which were prepared to accept Jews as reserve officers. Liberal and Social Democratic newspapers gave the book extremely poor reviews with reviewers complaining of an irrational way of reasoning in ''The Foundations'', noting that Chamberlain quoted the writings of Goethe out of context in order to give him views that he had not held, and that the entire book was full of an obsessive anti-Semitism which they found extremely off-putting.

Catholic and Protestant responses

Because of Chamberlain's anti-Catholicism, Catholic newspapers all published very hostile reviews of ''The Foundations'', though Catholic reviewers rarely faulted ''Die Grundlagen'' for its anti-Semitism.

Protestant ''völkisch'' newspapers gave ''The Foundations'' very good reviews, while more orthodox Protestant newspapers were disturbed by Chamberlain's call for a racialized Christianity.

One Protestant reviewer, Professor Baentsch of Jena, wrote that Chamberlain had systematically distorted the Book of Job, the Psalms, the Prophets, and other books of the Old Testament, leading him to conclude that it was no surprise that Chamberlain found so little common ground between Christianity and Judaism given the way he had misrepresented the entire Old Testament.Field (1981), p. 236

Jewish response

One German Jewish reviewer, the Berlin banker Heinrich Meyer-Cohn, wrote that ''The Foundations'' was "bad, unclear, and illogical in its train of thought and unpleasing in style, full of false modesty and genuine superciliousness, full of real ignorance and false affectation of learning".

German Jewish groups like the ''Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens'' and the ''Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus'' repeatedly issued statements in the early 20th century that the popularity of ''The Foundations'' was a major source of concern for them, noting that ''Die Grundlagen'' had caused a major increase in anti-Semitism with many German Jews now finding themselves the objects of harassment and sometimes violence.

The German Jewish journalist Moritz Goldstein wrote in 1912 that he had become a Zionist because he believed there was no future for Jews in Germany, and one of the reasons for that belief was: "Chamberlain believes what he says and for that very reason his distortions shock me. And thousands more believe as he does for the book goes one edition after another and I would still like to know if many Germanic types, whose self-image is pleasantly indulged by this theory, are able to remain critical enough to question its countless injustices and errors?"

Goldstein added that the case of Chamberlain showed his views as typical of those of "the best spirits, clever, truth-loving men who, however, as soon they speak of Jews, fall into a blind, almost rabid hatred".

Evangelist of race

Visit to England and attack on its Jews

In 1900, for the first time in decades, Chamberlain visited Britain, a place he disparagingly called "the land of the Boer-eaters".Field (1981), p. 359 Writing to Cosima Wagner from London, Chamberlain stated sadly that ''his'' Britain, the Britain of aristocratic rule, hard work and manly courage, the romanticized "Merry Old England" of his imagination was no more; it had been replaced by what Chamberlain saw as a materialist, soulless society, atomized into individuals with no sense of the collective purpose and entirely dominated by greed.Field (1981), p. 358 Chamberlain wrote that since the 1880s Britain had "chosen the service of Mammon", for which he blamed the Jews, writing to Wagner: "This is the result, when one has studied politics with a Jew for a quarter century." The "Jew" Chamberlain was referring to was Disraeli, whom Chamberlain had always hated with a passion. Chamberlain concluded: "My old England was nowhere recognizable." Chamberlain declared in his letter that all British businessmen were now dishonest; the middle class, smug and stupid; small farmers and shops were no longer able to compete with Jewish-owned big business; and the monarchy was "irretrievably weakened" by social change. In short, for Chamberlain Britain was no longer his country.

German superiority to rule the world

In the summer of 1900, Chamberlain wrote an essay in the magazine ''Jugend'', where he declared that: "The reign of Wilhelm II has the character of the dawning of a new day." Chamberlain went on to write that Wilhelm was "in fact the first German Kaiser" who knew his mission was to "ennoble" the world by spreading "German knowledge, German philosophy, German art and—if God wills—German religion. Only a Kaiser who undertakes this task is a true Kaiser of the German people." To allow Germany to become a world power, Chamberlain called for the ''Reich'' to become the world's greatest sea power, as Chamberlain asserted that whatever power rules the seas also rules the world.Röhl (2004), p. 1041 Chamberlain wrote that "without a fleet nothing can be done. But equipped with a great fleet, Germany is embarking on the course to which Cromwell showed England the way, and she can and must steer resolutely towards the goal of becoming the first power in the world. She has the moral justification for it and therefore also the duty."

Kaiser Wilhelm II

In early 1901, the German Emperor Wilhelm II read ''The Foundations'' and was immensely impressed with the book.Field (1981), p. 249 The Imperial Grand Chamberlain at the court, Ulrich von Bülow, the brother of the Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow, wrote in a letter to a friend in January 1901 that the Kaiser was "studying the book a second time page by page". In November 1901, Chamberlain's friend, the German diplomat and courtier Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, who happened to be the best friend of Wilhelm II, introduced Chamberlain to the Kaiser. Chamberlain and Wilhelm first met at Eulenburg's estate at Liebenberg and soon became very good friends, maintaining a regular correspondence which continued until Chamberlain's death in 1927.

To reach Liebenberg from Vienna, Chamberlain had first to take a train to Berlin, and then board another train to Liebenberg. Chamberlain's meeting with the Kaiser was considered so important that when Chamberlain reached Berlin, he was met by the Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who joined him on the trip to Liebenberg. During the train ride, Bülow and Chamberlain had a long discussion about ''The Foundations'' and then French literature. Upon reaching the gates of Liebenberg in the evening, Chamberlain and Bülow were met by Wilhelm and Eulenburg who were surrounded by servants carrying torches.Field (1981), p. 250 When he met Chamberlain for the first time, Wilhelm told him: "I thank you for what you have done for Germany!" The next day, Eulenburg wrote to a friend that the Emperor "stood completely under the spell of this man hamberlain whom he understood better than any of the other guests because of his thorough study of ''The Foundations''".

Until Chamberlain's death, he and Wilhelm had what the American historian Geoffrey Field called "a warm, personal bond", which was expressed in a series of "... elaborate, wordy letters, full of mutual admiration and half-baked ideas". The Wilhelm–Chamberlain letters were full of "the perplexing thought world of mystical and racist conservatism". They ranged far and wide in subject matter: the ennobling mission of the Germanic race, the corroding forces of Ultramontanism, materialism and the "destructive poison" of ''Judentum'' were favorite themes. Other subjects often discussed in the Wilhelm-Chamberlain letters were the dangers posed to the ''Reich'' by the "Yellow Peril", "Tartarized Slavdom", and the "black hordes".

In 1901, Wilhelm informed Chamberlain in a letter that: "God sent your book to the German people, just as he sent you personally to me, that is my unshakably firm conviction."Röhl (2004), p. 205 Wilhelm went on to praise Chamberlain as his "comrade-in-arms and ally in the struggle for Teutons against Rome, Jerusalem, etc." In 1902, Wilhelm wrote another letter in which he told Chamberlain: "May you save our German ''Volk'', our ''Germanentum'', for God has sent you as our helper!" Chamberlain in his turn advised Wilhelm to create "a racially aware ... centrally organised Germany with a clear sense of purpose, a Germany which would 'rule the world'".

In 1903, Chamberlain wrote to Wilhelm to claim that as in the last decadent days of Rome, "the ''civis britannicus'' is now become a purely political concept" with no racial content being involved.Buruma (2000) p.221 Chamberlain wrote with disgust how for two shillings and a sixpence, "every Basuto nigger" could now carry a British passport. Chamberlain went on to predict within the next fifty years "the English aristocracy will be nothing but a money oligarchy, without a shred of racial solidarity or relation to the throne." Chamberlain went on to deplore the practice of raising businessmen to the peerage in Britain, contemptuously declaring that in Britain mere "brewers, ink manufacturers and ship-owners" now sat in the House of Lords. Chamberlain ended his letter to the Kaiser by calling the general British public "a herd which has no will and which a few newspapers and handful of politicians manipulate as they wish". Wilhelm's later concept of "Juda-England", of a decaying Britain sucked dried by Jewish capitalists, owed much to Chamberlain.

The Dutch journalist Ian Buruma described Chamberlain's letters to the Kaiser as pushing his "… Anglophobic, anti-Semitic, Germanophile ideas to the point of murderous lunacy". The liberal ''Berliner Zeitung'' newspaper complained in an editorial of the close friendship between Wilhelm II and such an outspoken racist and anti-Semite as Chamberlain, stating this was a real cause for concern for decent, caring people both inside and outside Germany.

Admiring England and loathing it

For Wilhelm, all pride about being German had a certain ambivalence, as he was in fact half-British.Buruma (2000) pp. 210–11 In an age of ultra-nationalism with identities being increasingly defined in racial terms, his mixed heritage imposed considerable psychological strain on Wilhelm, who managed at one and the same time to be both an Anglophile and Anglophobe; he was a man who both loved and hated the British, and his writings about the land of his mother displayed both extreme admiration and loathing. Buruma observed that for all his much-vaunted beliefs in public about the superiority of everything German, in private Wilhelm often displayed signs of an inferiority complex to the British, as if he really felt deep down that it was Britain, not Germany, that was the world's greatest country. For Wilhelm, someone like Chamberlain, the Englishman who came to Germany to praise the Fatherland as the world's greatest nation, and who had "scientifically" proven that "fact" in ''The Foundations'', was a "dream come true" for him. Writing about the Chamberlain-Wilhelm relationship, Field stated:

Chamberlain helped place Wilhelm's tangled and vaguely formulated fears of Pan Slavism, the black and yellow "hordes", Jews, Ultramontanes, Social Democrats, and free-thinkers to a global and historical framework copiously footnoted and sustained by a vast array of erudite information. He elevated the Emperor's dream of a German mission into an elaborate vision of divinely ordained, racial destiny. The lack of precision, the muddle, and logical flaws that are so apparent to modern readers of ''The Foundations'' did not bother Wilhelm: he eagerly submitted to its subjective, irrational style of reasoning. ... And if the Kaiser was a Prussian with an ingrained respect for English values and habits, Chamberlain was just as much an Englishman who was deeply ambivalent about his own birthplace and who revered German qualities and Prussian society. Almost unconsciously, as his vast correspondence shows, he adopted an obsequious, scraping tone when addressing the lowliest of Prussian army officers. If Wilhelm was drawn to the very Englishness of Chamberlain, the author of ''The Foundations'' saw in the Hohenzollern prince—at least until the World War—the very symbol of his idealized ''Deutschtum''.

Chamberlain, who in the words of Buruma was "an English fetishist of German blood" who wrote long pseudo-scientific articles about how "Germanic racial genius" manifested itself in the cultural works of Richard Wagner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ludwig van Beethoven, and William Shakespeare (Chamberlain considered Shakespeare to be a "Germanic playwright" who properly belonged to Germany), was the "perfect match" for Wilhelm. Chamberlain frequently wrote to an appreciative and admiring Wilhelm telling him that it was only the noble "German spirit" which was saving the world from being destroyed by a "deracinated Yankee-Anglo-Jewish materialism". Finally, Wilhelm was also a Wagnerite and found much to admire in Chamberlain's writings praising Wagner's music as a mystical, spiritual life-force that embodied all that was great about the "German spirit".

'The Foundations' book success

The success of ''The Foundations'' made Chamberlain famous all over the world. In 1906, the Brazilian intellectual Sílvio Romero cited Chamberlain together with Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Arthur de Gobineau as having proved that the blond "dolichocephalic" people of northern Europe were the best and greatest race in the entire world, and urged that Brazil could become a great nation by a huge influx of German immigrants who would achieve the ''embranquecimento'' (whitening) of Brazil. Chamberlain received invitations to lecture on his racial theories at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities, but turned them down on the grounds that he had no wish to visit what he viewed as a culturally and spiritually debased nation like the United States.

Not family with Joseph and Neville Chamberlain

When the book was first published, reviewers often asked who this Chamberlain was, and there was much fevered speculation in the German press as to whether Chamberlain was related to Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary who, as the principal author of the British forward policy in South Africa, was one of the most detested men in the ''Reich''. Several German magazines mistakenly printed pictures of Joseph Chamberlain's sons, Austen Chamberlain and Neville Chamberlain, identifying them as the author of ''The Foundations''. Many Germans breathed a sigh of relief when it was established that Houston Stewart Chamberlain was not related to the famous Chamberlain family of Birmingham.

The Chamberlain circle

After the success of ''The Foundations'', a Chamberlain ''Kreis'' (circle) appeared in Vienna that comprised the Indologist Leopold von Schroeder, Count Ulrich von Bülow; Countess Melanie Metternich-Zichy, Countess Marietta von Coundenhove, Baroness Emma von Ehrenfels, the music critic and Wagnerite Gustav Schonaich, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count Hermann Keyserling and Rudolf Kassner who met weekly at Chamberlain's home to discuss his racial theories.

Personal life and financials

It was during this period that Chamberlain had an affair with Baroness von Ehrenfels, the wife of his friend Baron Christian von Ehrenfels and another affair with a Viennese showgirl, Lili Petri. In 1906, his marriage to Anna ended in divorce.

Besides the income from sales of ''The Foundations'' and the essays he was constantly writing for newspapers and journals, Chamberlain was supported financially by a wealthy German piano-manufacturer, August Ludowici (who liked Chamberlain so much that he purchased a house for him), and by the Swiss industrialist Agénor Boissier, giving an annual income of about 30,000–40,000 marks (by contrast a German school-teacher had an annual income of 1,000 marks, while a professor made about 12,000 marks per year). In 1908, after Cosima Wagner suggested the match, Chamberlain married Wagner's daughter Eva von Bülow. He was extremely happy to be married to the daughter of his hero Wagner.

Chamberlain's character

Chamberlain, the self-proclaimed "Evangelist of Race", saw himself as a prophet, writing to the Kaiser: "Today, God relies only on the Germans. That is the knowledge, the sure truth, which has filled my soul for years; I have sacrificed my peace in serving it; for it I shall live and die." Eulenburg recalled that under his quiet demeanor Chamberlain had a "fiery spirit with those eyes and looks which speak volumes". The few who knew Chamberlain well described him as a quiet, reserved man full of urbane erudition and charm; a modest, genial character with elegant manners dressed in expensive suits who could talk brilliantly and with much wit about a great number of subjects for hours. But under his polished surface, Chamberlain had a "fanatical and obsessive" side. His copious notebooks and letters show a man with "a profoundly irrational mind", a markedly sadistic and deeply paranoid individual who believed himself to be the victim of a monstrous worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy him.Field (1981), pp. 325–26 Chamberlain's status as a semi-recluse came about because of his fear that the Jews were plotting his murder.

German world dominance by race

A strong imperialist, Chamberlain was naturally a fervent supporter of ''Weltpolitik'', under which Germany sought to become the world's dominant power, which he justified on racist grounds. In 1904, when the German government committed the Herero and Namaqua Genocide against the Herero and Namaqua peoples in German South-West Africa (modern Namibia), Chamberlain congratulated Wilhelm in a letter for his genocidal policies, praising the Kaiser for his "war of extermination", which was "a fine example" of how Aryans should deal with "niggers". In a 1906 letter to Wilhelm, Chamberlain announced that due to miscegenation caused by the Jews, Britain, France, Austria and Russia were all declining powers, and only the "pure" German ''Reich'' was capable of protecting the "life-giving center of Western Europe" from the "Tartarized Russians, the dreaming weakly mongrels of Oceania and South America, and the millions of blacks, impoverished in intellect and bestially inclined, who even now are arming for the war of the races in which there will be no quarter given". Thus, Chamberlain wrote to Wilhelm, German ''Weltpolitik'' was a "sacred mission" to protect the superior races and cultures from the inferior. Chamberlain concluded his letter that the ideas of white supremacy had "not only justified the vast aggressions of Russia and England in the 19th century, but it also sanctions beforehand all that Germany may choose to appropriate in the twentieth".

Antisemite Eulenburg's homosexuality

In 1908, the Harden–Eulenburg affair badly damaged Wilhelm's reputation when Wilhelm's and Chamberlain's mutual friend Eulenburg was exposed in the press as a homosexual. Since Eulenburg had been the Emperor's best friend since 1886, the scandal led to much gossip all over the ''Reich'' about whether Wilhelm and Eulenburg had been more than just best friends. Eulenburg was quite open about being homosexual when he was in the company of his closest friends, and he and Wilhelm had been the very best of friends for 22 years, leading the British historian John C. G. Röhl to conclude it was very unlikely that Wilhelm was ignorant of Eulenburg's sexual orientation as he claimed after Eulenburg was outed. After Eulenburg was exposed, the Kaiser wrote him a very cold letter saying that he could not stand the company of homosexuals, as such their friendship was now over and he never wanted to see or hear from Eulenburg again. Chamberlain was never as close to Eulenburg as Wilhelm was, and seemed genuinely shocked to learn of the allegations that Eulenburg was homosexual. The Eulenburg affair played a role in Germany very similar to the Dreyfus affair in France, except that the victim in this case was the prominent anti-Semite Eulenburg. During the scandal, practically the entire ''völkisch'' movement came out in support of Eulenburg whom they portrayed as an Aryan heterosexual framed by false allegations of homosexuality by the Jews Max Bernstein and Magnus Hirschfeld. The German journalist Theodor Wolff wrote in 1906 about Eulenburg's role as one of Germany's chief anti-Semites:

I bet you ten to one that it was that ''skald'' ulenburg the friend and admirer of Gobineau, who first pointed his other friend, the Kaiser towards the racial prophet's most eager disciple, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The mystical notion of the "race that will bring order to the world" found its way from Gobineau via Eulenburg and Chamberlain to the Kaiser, and this notion in turn gave rise to the thought that "the world should be healed by the German spirit."

In a letter to Chamberlain, Wilhelm wrote that entire scandal had emerged because of "Jewish cheek, slander and lies".Röhl (2004), p. 206 In the same letter, an enraged Wilhelm told Chamberlain that Maximilian Harden, the German Jewish convert to Lutheranism and the journalist who had outed Eulenburg was a "loathsome, dirty Jewish fiend" and a "poisonous toad out of the slime of hell, a disgraceful stain on our ''Volk''". However, despite his strongly held anti-Semitism and his frequently expressed wish to expel the entire German Jewish community, the Kaiser held back under the grounds that if he expelled all of the Jews from Germany, it would set the German economy back by a century, and as such, he had to grudgingly tolerate his Jewish subjects.

Toning down attacks on Catholicism

As a part of his role as the "Evangelist of Race", Chamberlain toned down his anti-Catholicism in the first decade of the 20th century, realizing belatedly that his attacks on the Catholic Church in ''The Foundations'' had alienated the German Catholic community from his message.

Themes: German unity and German science and philosophy

As a well-known public intellectual, Chamberlain wrote on numerous subjects in a vast array of newspapers and magazines. Besides attacking the Jews, one of the chief themes of Chamberlain's essays was the unity of German culture, language, race and art, and the need for the unity of German art with a racialized "Germanic Christianity".

The other major theme of Chamberlain's work was science and philosophy. Chamberlain was always keenly interested in modern science and saw himself as a scientist, but he was deeply critical of the claim that modern science could explain everything, believing there was a spiritual side to humanity that science could not explain. As such, Chamberlain believed that modern Germany was being destroyed by people losing their spiritual aspects owing to the materialist belief that science could explain all.

In his 1905 biography of one of his heroes, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Chamberlain argued that Kant had shown the limits of rationalism and reason for understanding the world.Field (1981), p. 283 Instead, Chamberlain argued that Kant had shown that the instinctive approach based on intuition was a far more valid way of understanding the world. Inevitably, Chamberlain's "Kantian" way of understanding science was used to attack the Jews, with Chamberlain writing:

::"In order to understand Kant we must ... begin by once and for all getting rid of the heavy burden of inherited and indoctrinated Jewish conceptions."

In the same way, Chamberlain's 1912 biography of another of his heroes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was used to pass on the same message. Chamberlain depicted Goethe as a "Kantian" man who had correctly embraced both the rational, scientific approaches to life and the instinctive, mystical approach to achieve a synthesis that embraced the best of both worlds. Again, Chamberlain used Goethe as a way of attacking the Jews, with Chamberlain claiming that Goethe had favored banning sexual relations between Aryans and Jews and was a man who would not have "suffered among us" the Jewish artists, journalists, and professors of modern Germany.Field (1981), p. 290

The German Jewish journal ''Im deutschen Reich'' wrote in a review of ''Goethe'' that Chamberlain had appropriated Goethe in "a polemic about race politics, racial hygiene and racial worth from the standpoint of a monomaniacal Judeophobia".

Embracing Treitschke

The policies of ''Weltpolitik'', especially the Tirpitz Plan, brought about a period of Anglo-German tension in the first years of the 20th century. Chamberlain, who detested the land of his birth, had no trouble taking sides in the emerging Anglo-German antagonism. Chamberlain, who came to hate Britain, expressed his approval of the writings of the Anglophobic and anti-Semitic German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, whose view of Britain as a grasping, greedy nation of cheap traders dishonestly vacuuming up the world's wealth was the same as his own. In another letter to Wilhelm, Chamberlain wrote: "There are periods, when history is, as it were, woven on a loom ... in such a way that the warp and woof are established and are essentially unalterable; but then come times when the threads are introduced for a new fabric, when the time of material and the design must first be determined. ... We find ourselves in such a time today."Field (1981), pp .359–60

Necessary German power

Chamberlain declared to Wilhelm that Germany now had to become the world's greatest power, both for its own good and for the good of the rest of the world.Field (1981), p. 360 In his letter, Chamberlain dismissed France as a second-rate nation that could only fall further; Russia was a nation of "stupid" Slavs which was only just being held together because Nicholas II had German blood; without the German blood in the House of Romanov "nothing would remain but a decaying ''matière brute''" in Russia; and Britain was clearly declining into a bottomless pit of greed, ineffective democratic politics and unrestrained individualism. Chamberlain was very anti-American and called the United States a "Dollar dynasty", writing:

From dollars only dollars can come, nothing else; spiritually America will live only so long as the stream of European spiritual power flows there, not a moment longer. That part of the world, it may be proven, creates sterility, it has as little of a future as it has a past.

Chamberlain concluded his letter to Wilhelm that: "The future progress of mankind depends on a powerful Germany extending far across the earth." To this end, Chamberlain advocated German expansionism both in Europe and all over the world; building the High Seas Fleet which would break the British mastery of the seas; and restructuring German society along the lines advocated by the extreme right-wing ''völkisch'' Pan-German League.

Propagandist of the World War

In August 1914, he started suffering from a progressive paralysis of the limbs. At the end of the war, Chamberlain's paralysis had already befallen much of his body; his chronically bad health had reached its final stage. By the time World War I started in 1914, Chamberlain remained British only by virtue of his name and nationality. When the war started, Chamberlain tried to enlist in the German Army, but was turned down on the account of his age (then 58) and bad health. In August 1914, Chamberlain wrote a letter to his brother, Basil Hall Chamberlain, explaining why he had sided with his adopted country that read: "No war has ever been simpler than this; England has not for a moment reduced her efforts to do everything humanly possible to bring it about and to destroy every peaceful impulse. ... Germany's victory will not be England's ruin; quite the contrary, it is the only hope for England's rescue from the total ruin in which she now stands. England's victory will be terrible for the whole world, a catastrophe." The same month, Chamberlain published an essay celebrating Wilhelm II as an "Aryan soldier-king" and as a "Siegfried" who had embraced the "struggle against the corroding poison of Jewry".Röhl (2004), p. 207 Chamberlain went on to call the war "a life-or-death struggle ... between two human ideals: the German and the un-German". Accordingly, the ''Reich'' must "for the next hundred years or more" strengthen all things German and carry out "the determined extermination of the un-German". Chamberlain happily welcomed the war, writing in September 1914 to his friend Prince Max of Baden: "I thank God that I have been allowed to experience these two exaltations—1870 and 1914—and that I was both times in Germany and saw the truth with my own eyes."Field (1981), p. 381 In his 1914 essay, "Whose Fault Is the War?", Chamberlain blamed the war on France, Russia and especially Britain. Chamberlain argued though St. Petersburg and Paris were both seeking war, it was London who had masterminded the war, and the French and Russians were just British puppets. Initially Chamberlain expected the war to be over by the end of 1914, and was very disappointed when that did not occur. In 1916 he also acquired German citizenship. He had already begun propagandising on behalf of the German government and continued to do so throughout the war. His vociferous denunciations of his land of birth, it has been posited, were the culmination of his rejection of his native England's capitalism, in favour of a form of German Romanticism akin to that which he had cultivated in himself during his years at Cheltenham. The British historian John C. G. Röhl wrote the war made the "brutality in general and anti-Semitism in particular" of people like the Kaiser and Chamberlain "more intense".

During World War I, Chamberlain published several propaganda texts against his country of birth—''Kriegsaufsätze'' (Wartime Essays). In the first four tracts, he maintained that Germany is a nation of peace; England's political system is a sham, while Germany exhibits true freedom; German is the greatest and only remaining "living" language; and the world would be better off doing away with English and French-styled parliamentary governments in favour of German rule "thought out by a few and carried out with iron consequence". The final two discuss England and Germany at length. Chamberlain's basic argument was that democracy was an idiotic system as equality was a myth—humans were very different with different abilities and talents, so democratic equality where the opinions of one voter mattered much as the opinions of the next was a completely flawed idea. Quoting the French scientist Gustave Le Bon, Chamberlain wrote the vast majority of people were simply too stupid to properly understand the issues, and as such Germany with its rule by elites was a much better governed nation than France. In Germany, Chamberlain asserted, true freedom existed, as freedom came from the state alone which made it possible for society to function, not the individual as was the case in Britain and France, which Chamberlain claimed was a recipe for chaos.Field (1981), p. 368 Field summarized Chamberlain's thesis "... the essence of German freedom was the willing submission as a matter of conscience to legitimately constituted authorities; it implied duty more than rights and was something spiritual and internal for which each moral being had to strive. Consigning 'liberty' to an inner, 'nonpolitical' moral realm, Chamberlain closed off any discussion of the specific conditions for a free society and simply asserted that freedom was perfectly compatible with an authoritarian system of government." Quoting—sometimes wildly out of context—various British, French and American authors, such as John Richard Green, William Edward Hartpole Lecky, John Robert Seeley, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Paul Bourget, Francis Delaisi, James Bryce, John Burgess, Woodrow Wilson, and H. G. Wells