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| Houston Stewart Chamberlain |
Through his highly influential Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century that interpreted the history of the West as a racial struggle, the
expatriate Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain provided an ideological
blueprint that inspired both Kaiser Wilhelm ΙΙ and Adolf Hitler. By selectively recasting Wagner’s prose to
give it a more xenophobic and racist appearance, the “prophet of race” elevated
the cachet of the Bayreuth cult. Chamberlain formulated a Germanic worldview
without the master’s art and ambiguities, and most surprisingly, without a role
for music drama. His writings, the product of descent into the miasma of Volkisch politics—that potent and
seductive stew of rural nostalgia, anti-urbanism, racism, anti-intellectualism,
ultra-nationalism, xenophobia and Teutonic Christianity with an Aryan
Christ—provided an ideological bridge between the Second Empire under Wilhelm
ΙΙ and National Socialism of the Third Reich. They also unconsciously reveal how Chamberlain resorted to Gothic tropes and conventions, notably the demonization of the other and the doppelganger, as a mechanism for externalizing his inner tumult by projecting it onto an external enemy—the Jews—and by weaving it into a phantasmagorical history.
A transplanted Englishman whose childhood associations with
his country of birth were that of humiliation and chaos, Chamberlain embraced
Germany in general and Bayreuth in particular for its order, hierarchical
social order and its racial and cultural community. During World War Ι,
Chamberlain illustrated the sharp contrast between the two societies when he
provided German readers with a retrospective view of his excitement that he
experienced when he alighted for the first time on German soil in 1870. In
contrast to a philistine Britain with its “chattering parliamentarians and
weak-kneed ministers,” stood “heroic Germany...with (its) insuperable power of
right and its knightly cadres commanded by immortal heroes.” It would be tempting to dismiss this
idealized image of Germany with its disdain for the British political process
as wartime propaganda, but this embellished memory does reveal something significant:
an adolescent Teutonic fantasy that Chamberlain never outgrew. His life and
writing illustrate the clash between external reality and internal frustration
that challenges the fantasy of a heroic Germany: a young “idealistic” German by
choice, burdened with a fragile constitution that rendered him sickly and prone
to mental breakdowns, gained acceptance by producing a prodigious tome that
provided the intellectual cachet for National Socialism by offering a stark
choice between racial homogeneity and “chaos.”
A scientific career aborted by a breakdown, the heady
atmosphere of Bayreuth was just the tonic that breathed new life into
Chamberlain. After meeting Cosima Wagner in 1888, he fell under the enchanting
spell of Bayreuth, not so much for its Wagnerian musical venue, but for the
Bayreuth circle’s vision of itself as the epicentre of Germany’s potential
future, one that would eliminate the present political wrangling and class
struggles with a mephitic über-nationalist, racist ideology. A combination of
the elitist and intolerant atmosphere of Bayreuth and living in Dresden
hardened his anti-Semitism to envelop every facet of political, economic and
cultural life. In the late 1880s, Chamberlain’s attitude toward Jews was
revealed in a particularly vicious letter he wrote to his aunt after the death
of the Anglophile liberal Kaiser Frederick ΙΙΙ. Proclaiming that only the Jews
lamented his death and assailing him for his disastrous liberal policies, he
focused upon the “powerful” Jews “who feed upon [Germans] and suck out—at every
grade of society—their very life blood.”
The vampiric image of the Jews became a stock feature of anti-Semitic
hatred in Wilhelmine Germany.
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| Chamberlain and Cosima Wagner |
The ideas of a reactionary fringe movement combined with the
conditions in the more heterogeneous Hapsburg Empire under the stolid Franz
Joseph fuelled the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The chaos that
emanated from the multi-racial Empire mirrored Chamberlain’s own inner turmoil,
and the rigid authoritarianism embedded in the subtext of his work paralleled
his own psychic needs for a secure identity that left no room for doubt or
ambiguity. In 1878, he experienced humiliation when an article in the Bayreuther
Blätter opined that only a German could understand Wagnerian art because he
desperately craved acceptance by a people with a culture that revered art and
endorsed rigid social and political structures. He rejoined the periphery of
the community when he visited Bayreuth, and that was followed by a meeting with
Cosima a few years later that invited him into the Wagnerian community and
facilitated his need for acceptance and security.
After his marriage to
Eva Wagner in 1908 and the retirement of Cosima, Chamberlain increasingly
radicalized Bayreuth into an aggressive crusading venue as its publications
“became oracles of militantly nationalistic, ardently anti-democratic and
viciously anti-Semitic views.” His
powerful position enabled him to interpret and adjust Wagner’s writings so that
later they could be reshaped to be more compatible with Nazism. His worldview
was the outward expression of a psychic craving for political authoritarianism
and racial exclusivity. The antithesis was chaos, which he always considered
the most dangerous enemy whether it was embodied by throngs of Russians, the
“soulless yellow race” or the intellectually inferior and primitive blacks, who
he believed were arming themselves for a racial war.
The chaos that was projected onto the external world resided
within him. Even the Jew, the Devil incarnate, personified for him that
internal chaos when he recognized that “the ‘Jewish peril’ lay not in its
people, but in the hearts and minds of Germans themselves, and it was here that
the challenge would have to be overcome.” One of the tangled skeins of that inner turmoil was his own
self-loathing and guilt. His first wife was the daughter of a converted Jew and
those feelings can be decoded from “we were criminal abettors of the Jew…and we
were false to that which every, lowest inhabitant of the ghetto considered
sacred, the purity of inherited blood.” Although he referred to fighting a war
with cannons, it was clear that the main struggle of cleansing the Jewish spirit
was internal, but Chamberlain never fathomed how that soul-robbing spirit could
be overcome within his being. After he became a national celebrity, he recorded
two dreams about Jews, who had kidnapped and were planning to kill him; in the
dreams, he experiences ineffable fear and helplessness. Because he was utterly incapable of
self-reflection, he could not mine the rich vein from the dreams except the
obvious manifest content, which only reinforced his feelings of impotence against the surging undercurrent of fear. It would never have
occurred to him to reflect upon whether the Jews represented only an external
personification of the turmoil that resided in his psyche. Instead, because
his mechanism for coping with his own psychic disturbances precluded any sort
of internal exploration, he attempted to contain or defend those fears by
obsessively writing, ostensibly because of his conviction that he had a
literary mission to fulfil. Intellectual toughness would counteract “an almost
pathological human softness.” Underpinning that literary function was a powerful need to still that
turbulence expressed in the dreams by re-enacting its antithesis—a Peter Pan
fantasy transplanted to the realm of Siegfried—who dons the armour of a
Teutonic knight waging a life and death struggle for national glory and order.
Historian Roderick Stackelberg, (Idealism Debased: From Völkish Ideology to National Socialism, Kent State Press, 1981) has perceptively commented, “Neurotically addicted to purity and
order, he sought to create a nation from which reformist change, social
conflict, and political dissent were forever barred, a nation united in
collective narcissism.” In the
reincarnation of the medieval Manichean world of knights and devils, orthodox
believers and dangerous heretics, there could be no alternative to a worldview
that demanded unquestioning absolute loyalty to the Volk. The price for this
bipolar national and global outlook was—what Chamberlain had hoped for—the
eclipse of reason.
The singularity of Foundations
was Chamberlain’s selective reading of history overlaid with a blend of
scientific empiricism and Romantic mysticism that pandered to the worldview of
Germans, particularly privileged Germans. His thesis was simple: the
cross- breeding of inferior races with Aryans produced mongrelized peoples whose
civilizations collapsed or suffered because of interracial breeding. This
catastrophe could only be reversed by restoring the “purity of Aryan blood”
through careful selective breeding. Taking his cue from German Romanticism,
Chamberlain postulated that there was a Germanic religion “which bestowed
infinite vistas upon the German soul,” and that it took priority over rationalism
because it revealed inner truths that allowed Germans to determine the meaning
of the external world. This was the kind
of language that a future demagogue could seize upon to rebuke reasoned
argument and empirical evidence if it clashed with his own absolute sense of
destiny.
Written in the fin-de-siècle climate of Vienna against a
backdrop of German fears of Slavic encirclement and the scuttlebutt of Jewish
conspiracies, Chamberlain’s didactic purpose was to demonstrate that mankind
could be redeemed provided that a racially conscious Germany was its saviour.
With the contemporary, labyrinthine Hapsburg Empire in mind, riven by ethnic
and linguistic conflicts, he fastened on the historical precedent of the
collapse of the ancient Roman Empire. Centuries of miscegenation had sapped
Rome of its vitality and modern “Latins,” the progeny of chaos, remained in
thrall to the powerful Roman Catholic Church. The Germans had entered history
as saviours when the West was on the verge of disintegration. With their own
vitality, they were carriers of the best in the Greek and Roman civilizations,
the former with its art and philosophy, the latter with its jurisprudence and
engineering prowess.
The special German spirit that permeated Western culture
could only be maintained if Germans heeded the lessons of Rome and the Hapsburg
Empire with its predominance of “half-caste” Slavs. Both are a reminder that
“we have not succeeded in purging our blood of all the poisons of that
chaos.” Those poisons, a frequently invoked image, could only be eliminated
if a saviour cleansed society of the human embodiments of chaos, ambivalence
and degeneracy. These sentiments coincided with those of the young Hitler who
would arrive in the ancient city of Vienna less than ten years later.
Chamberlain asserted that the historical agent of that confusion
and subsequent degeneracy has been the Jew whose goal was “to put his foot upon
the neck of all the nations of the world and be Lord and possessor of the whole
Earth.” Before there could be any inspired breakthrough for the Aryan race, it
needed to wage a pitiless struggle against the only other pure race, the Jews.
Unwilling to concede that Jews comprised a religious community he steadfastly
maintained that they were a dangerous and alien race that was responsible for and
the beneficiary of the manifold turmoil in the world. All the pitfalls of
modernity—predatory capitalism, monopoly enterprise, mobile-unearned wealth and
international financial institutions—were assigned to the machinations and
extraordinary power of the Jews who collectively were the Devil incarnate.
Because the Jew was such a chameleon, his presence was ubiquitous: His
physiognomy and form changes...like the priest in his cowl, one doesn’t
recognize him; unnoticed he invades all circles. According to Chamberlain’s
overwrought verbiage, the Jews would thwart any effort to save humanity. Unless
preventive measures were taken “there would be in Europe only a single people
of pure race, the Jews, all the rest would be...a people beyond all doubt
degenerate physically, mentally and morally.
Unlike the enfeebled “half-caste” Slavs or the “Latins” who
were “mongrelized Aryans,” Chamberlain and his successors imputed to the Jews
an omnipotence, that possessed attributes at least as powerful as the Aryans.
Their strength largely stemmed from their unwillingness to assimilate:
daughters could marry outside the Israelite people but not their sons. In this
construct, the racial purity of the Jews has given it a “strength and
physiognomy” that inspired envy and fear, and for this reason Volkisch thinkers could not afford to
ascribe the traditional prejudice when they alluded to the Jew.
Jews demonstrated moral inferiority, cultural barrenness,
and lack of religious sensibility. According to Chamberlain, the blond Aryan
Jesus Christ could not be Jewish because heathen non-Jewish tribes had
inhabited Galilee. More importantly, Christ who exuded compassion, love and
honour possessed an Aryan soul. Having stripped the Jews of any spiritual
qualities, Chamberlain could herald the birth of a German-Christian religion
purged of its Jewish provenance, a breakthrough promising regeneration. Without
a trace of ambiguity, he served up a Manichean view of the world: a titanic
conflict between the noble, godlike Aryans and the evil, destructive Jews, and
elevated it to the central theme in world history “above all others a struggle
for life and death.” This abiding conflict was a continuation of the adolescent
fantasy of steely-eyed, Teutonic knights waging an apocalyptic war against the
forces of evil. Most significantly, he believed that he was offering a panacea
that could save Germany, the antidote of racial purity. Vigorous public policies that entailed inbreeding and artificial selection could only improve the blood strain. His
ability to meld religion with nationalism was a potent factor in enhancing his
appeal. Furthermore, because of his
scientific background, he suffused familiar stereotypes with a patina of
scholarship; therefore, Foundations became one of the principal texts, if not
the Bible of German Volkisch racism.
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