In the introduction to his notorious 1892 book Degeneration, the Jewish journalist and physician Max Nordau declares: ‘Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.’ With these fateful words, he launches his vituperative critique of the most celebrated representatives of the cultural avant-garde, including Wagner, Zola, Wilde, Ibsen, Verlaine and Nietzsche, branding their art atavistic and regressive, a symptom of the epidemic of degeneracy and hysteria he saw plaguing fin-de siècle society. His lurid revelations of the illnesses, sexual deviancy and moral insanity supposedly afflicting the leading figures of modernism ensured that Degeneration was a spectacular international success, and made it one of Europe's ten best-selling books in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Although Nordau's name soon sank into the oblivion from which it has only recently been rescued, the shockwaves unleashed by his work could still be felt decades later. It is a singular irony of history that it was an Ostjude and future Zionist who, by popularising an anti-modernist rhetoric of degeneration, unwittingly anticipated the slogans of Nazi cultural policy, which culminated in the infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ (Entartete Kunst) exhibition of Expressionist and Modernist paintings in 1937.

Nordau has been credited with being the first to transfer the concept of degeneration from its place in nineteenth-century medical and sociological discourse to a quasi-scientific discussion of literary modernism.