Volume 47, Number 14 · September 21, 2000
Lord Trouble
By Christopher Hitchens
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas
by Douglas Murray
Talk Miramax/Hyperion, 374 pp., $27.50
In Berlin in 1892, Max Nordau published his extraordinary book Entartung, or 'Degeneration.' Dedicated to the pseudoscientist and (let me risk a tautology) phrenologist Cesare Lombroso, this dense and lengthy diatribe sought to lay bare the origins and effects of national and individual self-hatred and self-destructiveness. Directed at the languor and amorality of what Nordau was already terming the 'fin de siècle,' it exalted the 'normal,' the 'manly,' and the utilitarian over the neurotic and the aesthete. Herr Nordau had some unresolved difficulties of his own—he had changed his name from Südfeld or 'Southern Field' to the more bracing and valiant-sounding 'Northern Meadow'—and he was the most militant deputy of Theodor Herzl in proposing a Zionist solution to the Luftmensch question; the nagging problem of the enfeebled and deracinated and feminized Jew. (The fact that the National Socialists later borrowed his book and his concept, and staged taunting exhibitions of Entartete Kunst and Entartete Musik, is not to be charged to Nordau's account, though it would make a fascinating appendix to any study of the relationship between self-loathing and ultranationalism.)
Review, 3605 words
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