Chamberlain, Houston Stewart

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart

(born Sept. 9, 1855, Southsea, Hampshire, Eng.—died Jan. 9, 1927, Bayreuth, Ger.) British-born Germanophile writer. An admirer of Richard Wagner, he wrote a biography of the composer and several books on his works (1892–95) and later married Wagner's daughter. In his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (2 vol., 1899), he presented a broad but biased analysis of European culture and proclaimed the racial and cultural superiority of the so-called Aryan element in European culture. His theories, which owed much to the writings of Joseph Arthur, count de Gobineau, influenced German nationalist thought, particularly Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement.