Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Degeneration

Abstract

Max Nordau (1849-1923) was a household name to educated late nineteenth-century Europeans. It is a telling fact that most late twentieth-century readers will have little or no idea who he was or what he represented. A famous journalist, physician, dramatist, novelist, polemicist and, later, Zionist activist, his thought and work, so it appears today, achieved widespread popularity amongst the middle classes precisely because it was so time-bound, tied to the conventions and postures of a positivist outlook that ceased to be relevant after the first world war. The hundredth anniversary of the publication of his famous, indeed infamous, work Degeneration (1892) a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-siecle current as a symptom of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern industrial age provides an opportunity for reassessment.' This can perhaps be most effectively done through a comparison of Nordau with a thinker whom he despised and whose relevance to, and imprint upon, twentieth-century intellectual sensibility could not have been greater Friedrich Nietzsche. Judging by contemporary intellectual fashions and the highly antipositivist cultural tenor of the times, it appears, of course, that Nietzsche has defeated, indeed routed, Nordau. His later Zionist career perhaps excepted, Nordau has been accorded a fate worse than neglect: he is typically treated as little more than a 'symptom', a textbook example of hopelessly outmoded and misguided cultural and intellectual postures built upon thoroughly discredited psychophysiological premises.2 A recent historian of degeneration, for instance, has summarily dismissed Nordau's work as 'the best-known instance of bizarre social diagnosis '. The story seems to be dotted

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