Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (/ˈtʃeɪmbərlɪn/; 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, scientific racism, and Nordicism; 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 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. During World War I, Chamberlain sided with Germany against his country of birth. He took German citizenship in 1916.

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.

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".

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.

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".