Degeneration - Softcover

"Degeneration is one of the most important documents of the fin de siecle, the years between the 1880s and 1900 when the robust views of the nineteenth century clashed with the heightened sensibilities of a searching and disillusioned generation. . . . [It] is a mirror of conflicting attitudes which are, in fact, contemporary with our present cultural dilemmas. But culture itself always reflects the state of society. Max Nordau presents us with a searchlight whose beams reflect the kind of world [we] have made for [ourselves.]"-George L. Mosse in his introduction to the 1968 edition -- George L. Mosse

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.