Racial Theories of History and Politics: the Example of Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Abstract

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was an Englishman, born near Portsmouth in 1855; after years of a peripatetic existence in France, Italy and Switzerland, he settled in Germany, carried out pro-German propaganda during the First World War and became a naturalised German. He was a Wagnerite, eventually marrying the composer’s daughter Eva, was an intimate of and an influence upon Wilhelm II, and was one of the first to hail Adolf Hitler as the future saviour of Germany. His reputation rests largely upon his role as precursor and source of much of National Socialist ideology, and his most notorious work was Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’),¹ an exposition of his racial theory of history. In fact the range of his thought was much broader than this, encompassing such fields as botany, astronomy, anthropology, philology, musicology, philosophy, politics and religion.