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3 One Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration Max Nordau (1849–1923) was a household name to educated latenineteenth -century Europeans. It is a telling fact that most late-twentiethcentury 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 appears today to have achieved widespread popularity among the middle classes precisely because it was so time-bound and tied to the conventions and postures of a positivist outlook that ceased to be relevant after World War I. The hundredth anniversary of the publication of his famous, or rather infamous, work Degeneration (1892)—a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-siècle trend as a symptom of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern industrial age—provides an opportunity for reassessment.1 This can perhaps be most helpfully done through a comparison of Nordau to a thinker whom he despised, yet one whose relevance to and imprint upon twentiethcentury 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. With the possible exception of his later Zionist career, Nordau’s work 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 psycho-physiological premises .2 A recent historian of degeneration, for instance, has summarily dismissed Nordau’s work as “the best-known instance of bizarre ‘social diagnosis .’”3 The story appears dotted with ironies and tables turned: as, for example, when Nordau predicted that his fin-de-siècle degenerates would “rave for a season, and then perish,”4 a prediction that apparently 4 The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now applied more to himself than it did, for instance, to the objects of his scorn—Ibsen, Wilde, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and so on. These perceptions notwithstanding, this essay will seek to analyze and reassess the Nietzsche–Nordau relationship in terms of a contemporary perspective. On one level, clearly, it is tempting to regard both thinkers as almost archetypal figures, extreme personifications of an epochal parting of the ways, the point at which an indignant, rather bewildered and uncomprehending , yet aggressively self-assertive European positivism confronted the incipient modernist revolution intent on radically questioning, indeed destroying, all its revered postulates. The clash of the Nordauian and Nietzschean sensibilities can then be taken as historical evidence of a particular cultural turning point. Nevertheless, appearances apart, there were not only differences: there were also certain interesting, if limited, affinities that need to be identified and analyzed. I shall document both the clash and the commonalities and then attempt to evaluate the competing legacies of these two thinkers from our own present historical perspective . We may yet uncover some unsuspected relevancies contained in Nordau’s heritage. At the very center of what Max Nordau described as a “severe mental epidemic . . . a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria,”5 stands the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Degeneration it is Nietzsche who, more than anyone else, provided the philosophy behind what Nordau described as the prevalent “ego-mania” and who furnished the grounds for an ongoing “deification of filth, . . . licentiousness, disease and corruption .”6 Nietzsche represented nothing less than the quintessence of intellectual and moral degeneration. Indeed, Nordau’s definition of the ethical climate of the fin-de-siècle is marked by what appears to be its essentially Nietzschean characteristics: a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality . . . a practical emancipation from traditional discipline. . . . unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man . . . disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure . . . to all, it means the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity , and in every art matured something of beauty.7 Nordau’s cultural analysis explicitly extended the Morelian and Lombrosian analyses of psycho-physiological degeneration to an area where, as he stated, it had not yet been applied, “the domain of art and literature .”8 “It is not necessary,” he wrote, “to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the...

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