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.
Max Nordau was a famous writer, a practicing physician, a bourgeois exemplar 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 to act. Culture had degenerated, he said, and if criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics, were degenerations, so were the authors and artists of the era.
