Background
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born on September 9, 1855 in Southsea, England. He was the son of an English captain, later admiral. Two of his uncles were generals, and a third was a field marshal.
(In Aryan Worldview Houston Chamberlain discusses the impo...)
In Aryan Worldview Houston Chamberlain discusses the importance of Indology in the effort to gain deeper insight into the essence of Indo-European thought. Relying on Sanskrit being part of the Indo-Aryan, and thereby part of the Indo-European, family of languages, from which he supposes a common ancestry, he deems Europeans can benefit greatly from a study of the Vedic texts, the latter expressing another facet of the Indo-European ancestral soul; this facet he sets in contradistinction, and as complementary, to the Hellenic: while the Hellenes were concerned with form, the Aryans were concerned with substance. Chamberlain rejects Buddhism as un-Aryan and, most importantly and for the same reason, he rejects the teachings of the Christian Church, which he deems to have had a distorting effect on European thought through its foundations in the Hebraic tradition. This is not to say that Chamberlain was anti-Christian, or anti-Christ; along with Émile Burnouf and Paul de Lagarde, the Biblical scholar, he was rather a forerunner of Positive Christianity, a 'purified' form of the religion that was wholly in harmony with the ancient German tradition, right into its pagan past. As with Positive Christianity, Chamberlain's text falls within the tradition of 19th-century Higher Criticism: it is call to understand the world behind the ancient texts. Needless to say, Chamberlain's ideas are unfashionable today: firstly, in death he was heavily promoted by the National Socialists, and, secondly, they belong to an intellectual tradition and approach to the humanities that has since fallen into obscurity, having given way to egalitarian or universalist discourses of emancipation. However, his influence was significant and essential to understanding the history of ideas in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries: his magnum opus, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published a few years earlier, enjoyed curricular status in German education and numerous reprints until the end of Word War II; and Aryan Worldview, though brief and introductory, is, in a way, an addendum to some of the themes explored in that work. Rendered in a superbly clear translation, this is the first official English-language edition of Chamberlain's text since its original publication in German in 1905. With a translator's foreword, footnotes, and a full index, this volume will serve as a reference for both students and scholars alike.
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(Houston Stewart Chamberlain attended his first Wagner ope...)
Houston Stewart Chamberlain attended his first Wagner opera at the age of 23. Though disappointed, he was undeterred, and soon became completely immersed Wagner's work, going on to become the intellectual leader of the Bayreuth Circle, centred on the composer's widow; Wagner's biographer; and, in 1909, Wagner's son-in-law. Published in 1892, The Wagnerian Drama was Chamberlain's first book. The work builds on his previous essays commenting on individual Wagner operas-'Notes sur Lohengrin' (1882), his first published essay; 'Notes sur Parsifal' (1886); 'Notes sur Tristan' (1887); and 'Die Sprache in Tristan und Isolde und ihr Verhältnis zur Musik' (1888)-and is a commentary on the whole of Wagner's dramatic work, focusing on its heroic Germanic elements, and intended to inspire a deeper appreciation for the great master. The Wagnerian Drama was self-financed, and went unnoticed upon initial publication, selling only five copies altogether, which were bought by the author himself. Nevertheless, it would eventually go through six German editions during Chamberlain's lifetime and would see translations into French, Catalan, English, Spanish, and Italian. This second English edition comes 90 years after the first, and is the first with cover artwork by Alex Kurtagic, annotations, and an index.
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(First published in German as "Die Grundlagen des neunzehn...)
First published in German as "Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" in 1899, this book is an intellectual tour de force which juxtaposes European Christian civilization-under the leadership of the Teutonic, or Germanic peoples, against the Semitic world. Volume 1 starts by sketching the origin of present-day European civilization in the ancient systems developed by classical Greece and Rome. It then moves on to an in-depth discussion of the figure of Jesus Christ and his message, which the author differentiates from the history of the Christian Church. Although widely regarded as purely anti-Semitic, the book actually posits the Teutons against the entire Semitic world-Jewish and non-Jewish (Muslim) alike-and adopts a stridently pro-Christian stance, endeavouring at length to show that Jesus Christ was not Jewish in spirit or origin. It then moves on to discuss the effect of Jews on Western civilization from the time of the decline of the Roman Empire to the nineteenth century, and finally the effect of the Teutonic peoples during the same time period, positing all of history as a struggle between these two groups. Along the way, it discusses race, using an early cranial classification to differentiate between races, and remarking as follows on racial differences: "Certain anthropologists would fain teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan."-from Chapter 6. The Foundations was a best-seller which went into eight editions and sold more than a quarter of a million copies by 1938. This new edition is not a facsimile, but has been fully reset and contains the complete original text.
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(This book, "Richard Wagner: Mit zahlreichen Porträts, Fa...)
This book, "Richard Wagner: Mit zahlreichen Porträts, Faksimiles, Illustrationen und .", by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is a replication of a book originally published before 1896. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible. This book was created using print-on-demand technology. Thank you for supporting classic literature.
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(" As I believe in God, so do I believe in the holy German...)
" As I believe in God, so do I believe in the holy German language," is the text of one of Mr. Chamberlain's essays. In another article he writes in all seriousness, "My conviction is that in all Germany during the last forty years there has not lived a single German who has wished for warnot one. Who puts forward the contrary view, lies either deliberately or unintentionally." In a third paper he asks, " Why do all nations hate Germany and the Germans ?" Mr. Chamberlain argues that this is due partly to envy, partly to misconception. The cor¬rect explanation is, however, to be found in another direction. Germany is hated because it can produce writers who are so fatuous as to put forward such opinions as are con¬tained in this book, for it must be remem-bered that while the words are Mr. Cham¬berlain's, the sentiments he voices are those of almost the entire educated and " cultured " classes in the unhappy country which has adopted him.
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(This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische ...)
This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische Ideale (1915) reveals the historical significance of Chamberlain in German conservative political philosophy. Contrasting the vital nationalistic state with the sterile commercialism of liberal democracies, moral freedom with the unruly selfishness of democratic parties, and the decaying culture of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with the relatively pure Teutonic, Chamberlain evokes in this work, with the deftest of strokes, the principal elements of a genuinely conservative state. Apart from studying the salient points of Chamberlain's political doctrine of state-formation, the Introduction to this translation surveys the Prussian intellectual antecedents of Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and Heinrich von Treitschke. The works also examines the legacy of Chamberlain's political thought in the Neoconservatism and Prussianism of the Weimar conservatives, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Edgar Julius Jung, as well as in the work of the National Socialist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.
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Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born on September 9, 1855 in Southsea, England. He was the son of an English captain, later admiral. Two of his uncles were generals, and a third was a field marshal.
During the 18806 Chamberlain studied natural sciences in Geneva and Vienna.
He wrote a dissertation on plant structure, which was accepted by the University of Vienna in 1889, but he never sought an academic position.
Educated in England and France, he suffered from poor health throughout his life. This prevented him from entering the British military service and led him to take cures in Germany, where he became an ardent admirer of the composer Richard Wagner.
Thereafter he lived at Bayreuth, England.
Chamberlain preferred to write in German, and his major works were composed in that language. His first published books were studies of Wagner: The Wagnerian Drama (1892) and the biography Richard Wagner (1896). Chamberlain's most significant work is The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which demonstrates his thesis that the history of a people or race is determined by its racial character and abilities. He conceives of race in terms of attitudes and abilities rather than physical characteristics. In general he views abilities and attributes of personality as inherited.
He became a German citizen in 1916.
Chamberlain applies the term "Aryan" only to a language group and doubts the existence of an elite Aryan race. Instead he views the Teutons as the superior European race. For him the Teutons include most importantly the Germanic peoples, but also the Celts and certain Slavic groups. He holds that the Jews are fundamentally alien in spirit to the Teutons and believes that they should be allowed no role in German history. Foundations, despite its scientific underpinnings, is essentially an eloquent, even poetic, vision of the German people. The modern reader may justly criticize this work as self-contradictory and sometimes nonsensical, but it had deep meaning for the Germans of Chamberlain's day. By 1942 Foundations had gone through 28 editions. During World War I Chamberlain advocated the German cause, and his pro-German, anti-English writings were published in English as The Ravings of a Renegade (1916). Chamberlain met the young Hitler in 1923 and wrote several articles favorable to him.
(First published in German as "Die Grundlagen des neunzehn...)
(This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische ...)
(In Aryan Worldview Houston Chamberlain discusses the impo...)
(" As I believe in God, so do I believe in the holy German...)
(This book, "Richard Wagner: Mit zahlreichen Porträts, Fa...)
(Houston Stewart Chamberlain attended his first Wagner ope...)
(Houston Stewart Chamberlain - Geboren am 9. September 185...)
Chamberlain married Anna Horst in 1878. Later he married Eva von Bülow in December 1908.