Houston Stewart Chamberlain - Later Years

Later Years

In 1889 he moved to Austria. During this time it is said his ideas on race began taking shape, influenced by the concept of Teutonic supremacy he alleged was embodied in the works of Wagner and Arthur de Gobineau. This was in spite of Wagner having dismissed Gobineau's racist ideology in his late years as "eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung" (completely immoral world-order).

Chamberlain had attended Wagner's Bayreuth Festival in 1882 and struck up a close correspondence with his widow Cosima. In 1908, twenty-five years after Wagner's death, he married Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Franz Liszt's granddaughter and Richard Wagner's step-daughter. The next year he moved to Germany and became an important member of the "Bayreuth Circle" of German nationalist intellectuals.

By the time World War I broke out in 1914, Chamberlain remained British only by virtue of his name and nationality. In 1916 he also acquired German citizenship. He had already begun propagandising on behalf of the German government and continued to do so throughout the war. His vociferous denunciations of his land of birth, it has been posited, were the culmination of his rejection of his native England's capitalism, in favour of a form of German Romanticism akin to that which he had cultivated in himself during his years at Cheltenham. Chamberlain received the Iron Cross from the Kaiser, with whom he was in regular correspondence, in 1916.