Degeneration (Nordau)

Degeneration (Entartung, 1892), is a book by Max Nordau in which he attacks what he believed to be degenerate art and comments on the effects of a range of social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and its perceived effects on the human body.

Nordau begins his work with a "medical" and social interpretation of what has created this Degeneration in society. Nordau divides his study into five books. In the first book, Nordau identifies the phenomenon of fin de siècle in Europe. He sees this as first being recognised, though not originating, in France, describing this phenomenon as "a contempt for the traditional views of custom and morality". He sees it as a sort of decadence, a world-weariness, and the wilful rejection of the moral boundaries governing the world. He uses examples from French periodicals and books in French to show how it has affected all elements of society. Nordau accuses also society of becoming more and more inclined to imitate what they see in art. He sees in the fashionable society of Paris and London that "[e]very single figure strives visibly by some singularity in outline, set, cut or colour, to startle attention violently, and imperiously to detain it. Each one wishes to create a strong nervous excitement, no matter whether agreeably or disagreeably".

Nordau establishes the cultural phenomenon of fin de siècle in the opening pages, but he quickly moves to the viewpoint of a physician and identifies what he sees as an illness:

In the fin-de-siècle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of men who write mystic, symbolic and 'decadent' works and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he [the physician] is quite familiar, viz. degeneration and hysteria, of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia.

The book deals with numerous case studies of various artists, writers and thinkers (Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche to name a few), but its basic premise remains that society and human beings themselves are degenerating, and this degeneration is both reflected in and influenced by art. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, refers to late 19th Century French society as embracing unusual or exotic types or individuals, such as criminals, Gypsies and Turks, and certain others formerly not seen as socially acceptable, so Nordau's position is not novel or isolated as social criticism.