Nordau

[nawr-dou]

noun

1. Max Simon 1849–1923, Hungarian author, physician, and leader in the Zionist movement.

Nordau

/ ˈnɔrdau /

noun

1. Max Simon (maks ˈziːmɔn), original name Max Simon Südfeld. 1849–1923, German author, born in Hungary; a leader of the Zionist movement

Example Sentences

The sources of modern art, according to social critic Max Nordau, were decadent, corrupted societies whose artists, afflicted with “degeneration” as a form of mental illness, could only produce work reflecting their degenerate selves.

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Nordau, who had declared that composer Richard Wagner — perhaps the Nazis’ most venerated cultural icon — possessed a “greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted,” would no doubt have disagreed.

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Nazi architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg later pushed Nordau’s theory of degeneration further down the slippery slope, arguing that it was not social conditioning that produced such despicable degenerates, but race, and in particular race-mixing.

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While Nordau’s distaste for Wagner – whose operas were embraced by Hitler with quasi-religious fervor – was not “racial” in nature and may have been inflated by the composer’s notorious antisemitism, questions over what qualified as degenerate art illustrated how nebulous the concept was.

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One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris.

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