About Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a British-German-French 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, 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". It was only at the age of twenty three in November 1878, when he first heard the music of Richard Wagner, that Chamberlain became not only a Wagnerite, but an ardent Germanophile and Francophobe. More happily for him, Chamberlain founded the first Wagner society in Paris and often contributed articles to the Revue wagnérienne, the first journal in France devoted to Wagner studies. During his youth, Chamberlain – while not entirely rejecting at this point his liberalism – became influenced by the romantic conservative critique of the Industrial Revolution. Due in part to Chamberlain's advocacy, this became official dogma during the Third Reich.
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