And all of the hope inside you dies…
Humanity and not using a God, with out arbitrary sovereignty and with out egotism, might be incomparably extra ethical than the humanity of to-day which ‘places its belief in God and retains its powder dry.’ – Max Nordau, Typical Lies of Our Civilization, p. 342.
One other level on which Nordau and I agreed was that solely anti-Semitism had made Jews of us. – Theodor Herzl, The Full Diaries, p. 196.
In November 1895, Herzl got here to see Nordau, and skim his e-book to him. His first phrases had been: “Schiff says that I am insane.” For 3 successive days he got here again, studying, explaining, arguing. Max Nordau listened, answered, mentioned. The thought pierced him like a sword of sunshine. The air vibrated about these two. Herzl, the youthful of the 2, along with his good-looking Assyrian head, was anguished, fevered, up-lifted by his religion and his ardor. The older man watched him out of the gray eyes which burned in his white-bearded face. He curbed himself, however he was overcome and impressed. Eventually he rose and opened his arms to his trembling pal: “If you’re insane, we’re insane collectively. Rely on me!” – Max Nordau A Biography, by Maxa and Anna Nordau, p. 120.
Schiff was proper. Herzl was affected by a Messiah advanced.
On many different events, too, madmen come to see me. I’m haunted by Messiahs of each stripe. The newest factor is a “Jesus Christ’’ named Lichtneckert who writes me in an in any other case clever letter that I’m Elijah, his Elijah… – Herzl, p. 876.
At this time the thought arises in me that I could also be fixing rather more than the Jewish Query. Specifically, tout bonnement [very neatly], the social query! – Herzl, p. 96.
The Exodus underneath Moses bears the identical relation to this venture as a Shrovetide Play by Hans Sachs does to a Wagner opera. – Herzl, p. 38.
Nuttier than a fruitcake. Because the title and its following traces suggest, I see the Herzl/Nordau mind-meld via a Coen brothers film lens. Right here we’ve got two assimilated, secular Austro-Hungarian Jews who anti-semitism has made into Jews, which they perceive (just like the anti-semites) in a racial, nationalist sense, not a non secular one.The notion of the white-beard psychiatrist being swept away by his ostensible affected person’s mania is without delay each tragedy and farce.
The humorous bits are funnier as soon as one has been launched to Dr. Nordau’s peculiar pedantry. I first encountered it in an excerpt from Eli Valley’s Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque. Valley makes the widespread mistake of back-casting subsequent appropriations and excesses of “degeneration” and Zionism to Nordau and Herzl, which is unfair however comprehensible. A recent evaluation by George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Artwork, is devastating sufficient. “My expensive Tucker,” Shaw begins the primary part:
I’ve learn Max Nordau’s Degeneration at your request: 2 hundred and sixty thousand mortal phrases, saying the identical factor time and again. That’s the correct technique to drive a factor into the thoughts of the world, although Nordau considers it a symptom of insane “obsession’’ on the a part of writers who don’t share his personal opinions. – G. B. Shaw, The Sanity of Artwork, p. 17.
A type of insane obsessions Nordau recognized in Degeneration was megalomania. Curiously, the Nordau of 1895 seems to have forgotten the pronouncement of the Nordau of 1892-93:
It’s a phenomenon noticed in each form of mania, that it receives its particular colouring from the diploma of tradition of the invalid, and from the views prevailing on the occasions wherein he lived. The Catholic who’s a prey to megalomania fancies he’s the Pope; the Jew, that he’s the Messiah; the German, that he’s the Emperor or a field-marshal; the Frenchman, that he’s the President of the Republic. Within the persecution-mania, the invalid of former days complained of the wickedness and knavery of magicians and witches; to-day he grumbles as a result of his imaginary enemies ship electrical streams via his nerves, and torment him with magnetism. The degenerates of in the present day chatter of Socialism and Darwinism, as a result of these phrases, and, in one of the best case, the concepts related with these, are in present use. These so-called socialist and freethinking works of the degenerate as little advance the event of society in direction of extra equitable financial types, and extra rational views of the relations amongst phenomena, because the complaints and descriptions of a person affected by persecution mania, and who holds electrical energy liable for his unpleasant sensations, advance the data of this drive of nature. These obscure or superficially verbose works which faux to supply options for the intense questions of our occasions, or, not less than, to organize the way in which thereto, are even impediments and causes of delay, as a result of they bewilder weak or unschooled brains, counsel to them faulty views, and make them both extra inaccessible to rational data or altogether closed to it. – Max Nordau, Degeneration, p.44.
