Will-o'-the-wisp – on the map because of their influence as an ideologue of racism, as an object of critique.
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
A sweeping account of European history as a struggle between “Germanic” peoples and Jews; a bestseller among the educated public and a source of National Socialist ideology.
Introduction
Chamberlain’s two-volume work appeared in Munich in 1899 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the following decades. It surveys European history from antiquity to 1800 as a struggle between “Germanic” peoples, presented as creators of culture, and Jews, presented as a racially foreign force; it reinterprets Christianity and claims that Jesus was not a Jew. The book combines borrowings from Gobineau, Darwinian vocabulary and a cultural idealism and found admirers among the educated public, including Emperor Wilhelm II. Alfred Rosenberg’s “Myth of the Twentieth Century” (1930) presented itself as its continuation. Historians such as Geoffrey G. Field (1981) study it as a key text in the transmission of racial antisemitism to National Socialism.
Connections
Builds on
- Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races1853 · Arthur de Gobineau
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