Houston Stewart Chamberlain is one of the well-known unknowns in German cultural history.
It is known - if one is interested in this period - that he was one of the most influential intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, had extraordinary success with his biographies, but above all with the "Foundations of the 19th Century", that he was one of the pioneers of the racial thinking and anti-Semitism and was therefore one of the pioneers of the Third Reich and, as an old man who was already very ill, wrote an enthusiastic letter to Hitler in which the NSDAP recommended itself to the bourgeoisie.
Only the specialists know more.
But if he was a pioneer of National Socialism, was he involuntary?
Did Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg make unjustified, unhistorical claims on it?
When the Hamburg political scientist Udo Bermbach presented a large Chamberlain book in 2015, he leaned towards this view.
The claims made by the Third Reich did not do justice to Chamberlain's "intellectual cut" and his differentiated thinking;
he was "too educated and well-read a man" to be "completely" absorbed by the "vulgar ideology of Hitlerism".
Bermbach protected himself with the adverb "completely", but the idea that education and erudition were a protection against the seductive power of National Socialism seemed strange when one thinks of the successes of the NSDAP at the universities.
The historian Sven Fritz has now published a new, very voluminous book on the subject: "Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Racial delusion and world salvation”, emerged from his dissertation.
He lays out his book more biographically than his predecessor and relies heavily on the unpublished letters.
This doesn't give a completely new picture, but a sharper one that doesn't fall in favor of the already dubious hero.
What previously seemed differentiated, moderate or just less bad often turns out to be reticent for tactical reasons.
And on this Chamberlain and Bayreuth agreed.
The Festival had always seen itself not only as a venue for exemplary performances of the founder's works, but as a place for the cultural and spiritual regeneration of the German nation.
Under Cosima Wagner, who had become the new mistress after her husband's death in 1883, this had intensified, and Chamberlain, who had been in closer contact with Cosima and the Festival since the late 1980s, made this claim his own .
However, this claim presupposed that the festival and its mouthpiece, the "Bayreuther Blatter", could only be heard in principle.
The “ideal” should be retained, its political form, whether in vegetarianism, anti-Semitism or other “specialties”, as Cosima wrote in her diary, left to others.
This corresponded to a contempt for politics that was not uncommon in Germany, but also had pragmatic reasons.
Outspoken politicizing would have meant scaring off potential sponsors and visitors.