Pan-Germanism
A. L. Rowse
Evangelist of Race: The Germanic vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain G. G. Field (Columbia University Press £14.50)
Ihave always wanted to know about Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the renegade Englishman who became a Ger- man and a leading propagandist of Pan- Germanism — hatred of England and all she stood for, representative government and Parliamentary institutions; the superiority of German Kultur as a prelude to dominance in the world; anti-semitism (that goes with it); Teutonic purity going back to an original Ur-Aryan Volk — and all the rest of it.
It would be easy to make an anthology of asinine statements from this man's prolific writings, but all the same they had catastrophic consequences in corroborating and inculcating the nonsense Germans believed on these themes. The most distinguished German historian today, Fritz Fischer tells us: 'Houston Stewart Chamberlain had the greatest influence upon the spiritual life of Wilhelrnian Ger- many'. Perhaps 'spiritual' is not the word for it, and 'intellectual' is too good for anything so half-baked — Mr Field's word for it. It was not the less effective for that: Chamberlain's nonsense confirmed the nonsense they wanted to think. His Foun- dations of the Nineteenth Century favourite reading of another half-baked type, the Kaiser — was a key book in William II's Germany.
Now at last, thanks to Professor Field, we know about the author. He was not a relative of Neville Chamberlain, though there was another Neville in the family. They were descended from an illegitimate son of the Earl of Westmorland, a family of soldiers and sailors — this particular fellow, an odd man out, brought up abroad with very little knowledge of England. He failed to become a botanist or to take his doc- torate after years; he twice failed in business and went on to expound his hostility to England, from Bayreuth and Vienna, while living on unearned increment from the despised mother country. He was not at all a bad man, was in fact a gentleman; the only thing — not the ghost of a smile or anY sense of humour throughout this book.
He made his name as the leading pro- pagandist of the Wagner Cult at Bayreuth. He thought Wagner the greatest man who ever walked the earth. Well, we do not have to deny Wagner's genius, but he was a nasty man, a liar and a deceiver, also an anti- Semite. This is one source of Chamberlain's anti-Semitism, though he had been lri' troduced to Wagner's work by two Jews.
After prolonged failure Chamberlain made a huge success with his Foundations. It would be too tedious a business to itemise the loose stones — the racial nonsense upon which it rests. We can all see that there are differences between Whites and Blacks, Yellows and Reds, but it is difficult to reduce these matters to scientific precision- Chamberlainnaturally revelled in the vague and imprecise, the portentous, for he was not properly educated, an autodidact; and the trouble with autodidacts is that they are uncritical. The more one goes into it, the more one sees the parallel with Hitler, who was present at Chamberlain's graveside along with a Hohenzollern prince to repre- sent the exiled Kaiser. Defeat and exile taught the Kaiser — and Chamberlain — nothing: for them Ger- many's defeat was not her own fault but that of the Jews. But from this book we learn something very important: there had long been a bad tradition of anti-Semitisnl in Germany, but it reached maniac propor- tions after the defeat of 1918, for the Jews were made a scapegoat for her failure, her, defects, her unrecognised sense of guilt and refusal to face the truth, or even the facts. The crash was all the more psychotic after the megalomaniac hopes encouraged before. Chamberlain urged on the Kaiser, in their mutually flattering correspondence, with the myth of German 'inner superiority as a prelude to global dominance'. As for his mother country 'Germany's victory is the only hope for England's rescue from the total ruin in which she now stands; while England's victory would be terrible for the whole world, a catastrophe'. Even the, language was debased — Chamberlain 01 course wrote in German — and was no longer a proper medium for the advancement meat of knowledge. This was what we used to be told by Goebbels all through the war, for Chamberlain's portentous rubbish became part of Nazi 'thinking' if that was the word for it.
In Germany Chamberlain's book had a
roaring success, subsidised in schools and Public libraries, for it fitted in with their in- fantile delusions. But not only in Germany: it Was translated all over Europe wherever the Teutonic myth was nursed. In England Lord Redesdale, who was a friend and helped over the translation, wrote: `To me the book has been a simple delight — the companion of months — fulfilling the highest function of which a teacher is capable, that of awakening thought and driving it into new channels. The charm of the man is his obviously transparent truthfulness ... in one passage he himself says the enviable gift of lying has been denied him'.
Lord Redesdale was the grandfather of the Mitfords — of Unity Valkyrie, for one — and this is where they got their nonsense front.
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