Max Nordau was a famous writer, a practicing physician, a bourgeois
examplar of enterprise and energy when his Degeneration appeared in
Germany in 1892. He argued that the spirit of the times was
characterized by enervation, exhaustion, hysteria, egotism, and
inability to adjust or to act. Culture had degenerated, he said,
and if criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics were
degenerates, so were the authors and artists of the era.
Degeneration, and the controversy it aroused, served to define the
fine de siecle. Its targets included Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen,
Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Zola, and Walt Whitman. The book was
enormously influential. Nordau anticipated Freud in describing art
as a product of neurosis, and he set a precedent for psychological
and sociological critiques of literature. You may wish to talk back
to "Degeneration," as George Bernard Shaw did, but you will be
entertained by its vitality. Holbrook Jackson, in "The Eighteen
Nineties," called the book "an example of the very liveliness of a
period which was equally lively in making or marring itself."
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