Since the signs that Max Nordau took as proof of degeneration are not our own, we are likely to dismiss the “stigmata” he identifies as proof more of his lunacy than the degeneracy of the artists, writers, performers, composers and playrights at whom he aims his diatribe. Nordau’s, however, is a prototypical illustration of social psychological displacement. He points to urbanization, transportation, drug and alcohol abuse, to the expansion of print and audio communication and, overall, to the increasing pace and speed of life, which induce in those subjected to it a variety of nervous disorders that cannot help but find expression in the cultural artefacts the degenerate produce and consume. But, rather than level his criticism at the social and economic order that is responsible for this quickening pace and heightened speed, Nordau instead levels his criticism at the producers and consumers of its cultural effects, the degenerate individuals and artefacts whose lives illustrate the degeneracy of fin de siecle Europe. Nordau’s approach raises several questions: (1) although we know how, technically, to fashion economic and social policy that might have some hope to dampen the blows of industrial capitalism; how might we fashion a social or political solution to the problem of degeneracy? (2) why might Nordau believe that a set of aesthetic preferences would eventually make its way into and stamp itself upon the genetic material itself, so that habituation to degeneracy in the first generation will be genetically transferred to the next generation, leaving traces on the cleft palate or chin, the elongated or foreshortened earlobe, a sensitivity to bright colors, or a predisposition to melancholia? What is the relationship between spirit and body that Nordau invites us to entertain? (3) how does a society eradicate a spiritual disorder that now reproduces itself genetically?
To this original set of questions and problems, we need to add a set of second-level questions, recalling that we are getting prepared, on both sides of the Rhine and both sides of the Channel, to so characterize those on the other side as to fashion the conflict between them as a life-and-death “clash of cultures.” So that we may have to rethink our belief that our own “clash of cultures,” made famous by Samuel P. Huntington, was in some way original, which it appears it was not. According to this line of reasoning, conflict is not grounded in social, economic, political or technical problems, but is fundamentally “cultural,” and therefore cannot be resolved through the peaceful tools of conversation, dialogue, debate, policy formation or implementation. Rather, it can only be resolved either by isolating the competing cultures or through open conflict between them. Similarly for Nordau (as for today’s cultural warriors), we need to isolate the degenerate. (Nordau would have had them castrated if it were not for the fact that their degeneracy, he believed, left them impotent and baren, making castration unnecessary.)
Nordau’s Degeneration was the number one bestseller in Europe and in the US at the turn of the 20th century. During the 1900s and 1910s its popularity waned, a victim of progress in the social, historical and psychological sciences. But, then, in the 1920s its popularity began once again to take off, a beneficiary of the growth of right wing, nationalist political organizations, many of them explicitly anti-Semitic.
This is surely one of modern history’s greatest tragedies, since Nordau was a secular Jew who became a powerful and vocal advocate for Zionism and the creation of a Jewish homeland; a fact that perhaps might lead us to a third set of questions. How was the ideal of Zionism to which Nordau helped give rise similar to the racially and culturally defined ideal of Germanness that took hold of Germans during the 1920s and 1930s? How might cultural purity solve any of the problems that Nordau (or others) identifies? Why do we turn to reputedly fundamental identities–culture, race, gender, nationality, ethnicity–during times of political, social, or economic uncertainty? How does do such “turnings” prepare us to make the ultimate sacrifice?
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