The foundations of the nineteenth century

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The basics of the XIX. Century is the name of the most famous work of the British-German writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain . The book first appeared in 1899, saw numerous new editions and was his greatest sales success. For its part, it became an ideological basis for the völkisch movement and racist anti-Semitism in Germany in the 20th century.

Table of contents

General

Chamberlain completed the 1200-page work, which was divided into two halves, in just 19 months and dedicated it to Julius Wiesner . The book contains numerous quotations and allusions to authors from the field of race theories popular in the 19th century , including Gobineau and his attempt on the inequality of human races.

As a basic idea the author explains that the western civilization arose under the strong influence of the Germanic peoples. Although Chamberlain notes that “the existence of an Aryan race is being questioned from different quarters”, he is personally convinced that all Europeans - not only Germans, but also Celts, Slavs, Greeks and Latins - belong to the “Aryan race “Belong to an heir of the ancient Proto-Indo-European culture. The Germanic peoples or northerners, characterized by “hard work and enterprise”, are therefore at the forefront of this race and thus of all other races. Chamberlain devotes almost half of his fundamentals to the study of antiquity , with Greece with its importance for philosophy and art, Rome as the founder of law and imperial thought, and the Jews being reinterpreted in lengthy explanations in a folkish sense. The ancient Greeks and Romans are equated with the Germans or the world-ruling "Aryan race", to which the Jews are compared as a negative counter-image.

Aryans and Jews

Without using Nietzsche's term “ Übermensch ” or the National Socialist counter-term “ Untermensch ” and without calling for the extermination of the Jews, Chamberlain presents “the Jews” as a negative counter-image to transfigured Germanism. Extensive, pseudoscientific explanations of skull and nose shapes, especially the "Jewish nose" of Amorites , Canaanites , Syrians and Jews, can be found on numerous pages . It is said that “children who have no idea what a 'Jew' is, or that there is such a thing at all, start to howl as soon as a real racial Jew comes near them!” The “modern Jew "Appears as a" product of a mixture "between Hittites , a tribe of" Homo syriacus ", and the" true Semite ", i.e. H. the Arab Bedouin . Although Jesus Christ belonged to the Jewish religion, he probably did not come from the Jewish people. Chamberlain admits to certain Jews "nobility in the fullest sense of the word". The dedicatee Julius Wiesner, Rector of the University of Vienna , was also Jewish. At the same time, however , The Basics emphasize the inability of the Jews or Semites to establish a state and their inferiority to the Aryan race.

“Certain anthropologists wanted to teach us that all human races are equally gifted; we referred to the book of history and answered: you are lying! [...] Physically and mentally, the Aryans tower above all people; therefore by right they are masters of the world. [...] Not all historians tell us that the Semites and half-Semites, in spite of their great intelligence, were never able to form a permanent state, namely because everyone always tried to seize all power, thus showing that they were only despotism and anarchy, the two opposites of freedom and ability? "

- HS Chamberlain

additional

In the fifth chapter of the second part "Politics and Church" Chamberlain criticizes the centuries-old compulsion to confess exercised by the Catholic Church , misses a complete separation of church and state and describes the Russian minister and chairman of the Holy Synod Pobedonoszew as "the perfect type of reactionary ". In the chapter “Progress and Degeneration” the author takes a stand against Darwinism . In connection with the social Darwinism popular at the time , he speaks of "development mania and ... pseudoscientific dogmatism of our century" and describes Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution and the struggle for existence described by John Fiske as a "summary worldview".

The chapter "Meaning of Race" begins as follows:

"Anyone who belongs to an outspoken, pure race feels it every day."

- HS Chamberlain

Reception in the 20th and 21st centuries

The basics became a bestseller , with 250,000 buyers. Ludwig Woltmann was one of the first admirers and supporters of Chamberlain's work . Another avid reader was Kaiser Wilhelm II , who awarded Chamberlain the Iron Cross in 1915 . At the emperor's request, the Prussian school libraries bought a copy of the book. Three years after the publication of the basics , the Frankfurter Zeitung had to admit that the work had "caused more ferment than any other phenomenon on the book market in recent years". In Meyer's Konversations-Lexikon , 5th edition from 1905, the basics are mentioned in a prominent place along with other works by Chamberlain . In the second edition of the music lexicon by Hans Joachim Moser (1943) there is the following description by the author: “Ch. was a dilettante in a great sense; Stimulating polyhistor , original in the way of looking, but also inclined to subject them to a strong will to interpret due to the further distance from the objects. His worldview had a fruitful effect on contemporary German music policy. "

With the collapse of religious certainties in the wake of the Enlightenment and the dwindling plausibility purely philosophically based theories of history the need for orientation of was educated classes in the 19th century, has continued to grow. This explains the immense sales success of a book entitled The Foundations of the 19th Century . Alfred Rosenberg's main work, The Myth of the 20th Century , was conceived as a continuation of Chamberlain's foundations . In 1928, one year after Chamberlain's death, Rosenberg published a book entitled Houston Stewart Chamberlain as Herald and Founder of a German Future . By 1944 the basics had seen 24 new editions, which appeared almost every year. In a 1951 report by UNESCO, the Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas (1900–1979) pointed out that Gobineau's racist theses were given an openly nationalistic twist in Chamberlain's work, and that European civilization, also in Slavic and Latin countries, was the work of “ teutonic race ". Wanda Kampmann comments on the book's outstanding success: “At the end of the positivist century, one was tired of detailed research and its contradicting results. (...) and then it was probably the enthusiasm for culture, the glorification of art, culture and religion as the creative achievement of the Germanic spirit, which accommodated the educational enthusiasm of a broad readership, furthermore the racial theory that strengthened an insecure generation in their self-esteem and not least the persuasive power of simplification at all times. "

The Jewish origin of the dedicatee, Rector Julius Wiesner, is still partly contested today. It cannot be clarified beyond doubt due to the files, but it is more than likely. In the new editions of the foundations from 1933 onwards, Chamberlain's dedication can no longer be found in the usual place. It was moved from the first page after the title behind the table of contents, where it could easily be overlooked. This can only have taken place at the request of the National Socialist censors. As an additional indication, it should be noted that the Jewish Museum Vienna lists Julius Wiesner as a Jew.

A particular weakness in the Third Reich was "humaneism", that is, enthusiastic, exaggerated demands on humanity, a term that already appeared in Chamberlain. In his first speech in Poznan on October 4, 1943, Himmler emphasized : "After the war, it will be possible to see what a blessing it was for Germany that we locked this entire criminal underclass of the German people in the concentration camps in spite of all the humanity drudgery."

In England the book appeared in an English translation in 1910, with an introduction and a privately printed positive review by Lord Redesdale , grandfather of Unity Mitford , who became an admirer of Hitler. Redesdale Chamberlain proudly reported that Winston Churchill had the book open on his desk and praised it profusely to him. In a 1911 issue of The Fabian News , George Bernard Shaw stated that the book was "really a great manifesto for all Fabians to read."

“What is almost paradoxical about this process is that Chamberlain's work itself by no means appears“ barbaric ”: it is evidence of diverse knowledge; The author argues mostly carefully in the individual historical points and polemicises almost consistently in an elegant, impersonal way against what he sees as another, contrary and not all human possibilities exhaustive ideology and race type. His concept of race itself is by no means crude biological. Gobineau, for example, who regards “pure race” as something given, not something given up, something to be fought for, is sharply criticized. The question is how this romantic and enthusiastic book could inaugurate an attitude that soon ended in bestiality. "

- Harald Landry

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ p. VII
  2. ↑ p. 378
  3. ↑ p. 144
  4. ↑ p. 695
  5. ↑ Johann Chapoutot: From Humanism to Nazism: Antiquity in the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain . Section 4.
  6. ↑ Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Richard Wagner NZZ, January 23, 2015
  7. ↑ p. 413
  8. ↑ in the first version: "in the Jardin du Luxembourg " p. 521
  9. ↑ p. 370
  10. ↑ p. 362
  11. ↑ p. 219
  12. ↑ p. 275
  13. ↑ Interview with Udo Bermbach
  14. ↑ p. 503
  15. ↑ p. 839
  16. ↑ p. 132
  17. ↑ p. 716
  18. ↑ pp. 271-272
  19. ↑ Boasian Critiques of Race in "The Nation" . P. 30.
  20. ↑ It was an Englishman who shaped Hitler's hatred of Jews Die Welt, April 10, 2012
  21. ^ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Volume 7: Sixth Series. P. 86
  22. ^ Klaus-Peter Lehmann: Anti-Judaism in the 20th Century: Der Rasseantisemitismus. ImDialog: Evangelical Working Group for Christian-Jewish Discussions in Hesse and Nassau, December 2014.
  23. ↑ Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews . CH Beck, Munich 2007. ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 . P. 105.
  24. ^ Chamberlain in: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 5th edition 1905. P. 867-868 Zeno.org
  25. ^ Music lexicon by HJ Moser. Max Hesses Verlag, Berlin 1943. p. 138 archive.org. The last sentence is missing in the first edition from 1935.
  26. ^ Seducer of the Germans Die Zeit, September 17, 2015
  27. ^ U. Bermbach: Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Wagner's son-in-law - Hitler's thought leader . P. 172
  28. ↑ Juan Comas: Racial Myths p. 36.
  29. ^ Wanda Kampmann: Germans and Jews. Studies on the history of German Jewry. P. 317 f.
  30. ^ Udo Bermbach : Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Wagner's son-in-law - Hitler's thought leader . P. 115.
  31. ↑ p. 324
  32. ↑ Matthias Heine : Burned Words: Where we still talk like the Nazis - and where not. Bibliographisches Institut, 2019. Partial online view
  33. ↑ Simon Goldhill : Who Needs Greek? Contests in the cultural history of Hellenism . P. 95.
  34. ↑ Kindler's Literature Lexicon . dtv, Munich 1974. Volume 10, p. 4165.

literature

  • Udo Bermbach : Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Wagner's son-in-law - Hitler's pioneer . Springer-Verlag, 2015. ISBN 978-3-476-02565-4 .
  • Ruth Benedict : Race and Racism. Foreword by John Rex . Routledge & Kegan PLC, new edition 1983. ISBN 978-0-710-09970-9 .
  • Johann Chapoutot : From Humanism to Nazism: Antiquity in the Work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Miranda, November 2015. Partial online view
  • Albert Ehrhard : H. Stewart Chamberlain's "Foundations of the 19th Century". Lectures and papers of the Austrian Leo Society . Vienna 1901.
  • Geoffrey Field: Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Columbia University Press, 1981. ISBN 978-0-231-04860-6 .
  • Simon Goldhill : Who Needs Greek? Contests in the cultural history of Hellenism . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002. ISBN 0-521-01176-0 .
  • Wanda Kampmann: Germans and Jews. Studies on the history of German Jewry. Lambert Schneider Verlag, Heidelberg 1963, 450 pages. Gerd Fuchs: The failed emancipation . Review in: Die Zeit, April 24, 1964
  • Leopold von Schroeder : Houston Stewart Chamberlain. An outline of his life, based on his own reports. JF Lehmanns Verlag, Munich 1918.
  • Ernest Seillière: Houston-Stewart Chamberlain, le plus récent philosophe du pangermanisme mystique. La Renaissance du Livre, Paris 1917.
  • Ernst von Unruh: Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain and world history. CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1908.
  • Boasian Critiques of Race in The Nation. Edited by Alex Golub and Angela Chen, with an introduction by Richard Handler. Savage Minds Occasional Papers No. August 12, 2014. Online

Web links