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Degeneration 258 Book Reviews against this view, on the grounds that it leaves out of account the number of points at which Nietzsche strongly repudiates all metaphysics of the subject. Although these new readings have uncovered a whole strain in Nietzsche’s work which was overlooked from 1890- 1960, Aschheim discusses them all too briefly: the fact that the prevalent reading of Nietzsche throughout the period covered by his study was a partial one is of little concern to him. Instead, his (positivistic) approach is simply to reproduce the readings of Nietzsche current at particular times without attempting to evaluate them. This has the unfortunate Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/13/2/258/565007 by guest on 29 September 2021 effect of ensuring that we are simply inundated by lists of people influenced by Nietzsche without sufficient consideration of why we should be interested in their having read him at all. The work heads towards an all too predictable climax with the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche, which is simply not investigated sufficiently. Aschheim’s main target in most of the book is R. Hinton Thomas’s Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890-1918 (1983).Thomas’s book documented the extent of Nietzsche’s influence on German left- wing opinion in the Wilhelmine period. Aschheim aims to put back in the account the extent of Nietzsche’s impact on right-wing opinion. But in the process of doing so he understates the considerable degree of hostility to Nietzsche on the part of the Right (well documented by Thomas). He therefore moves back to the approach of presenting Nietzsche’s influence as ineluctably leading towards the Nazi axis. His attempted defence of this approach is that the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche could not have occurred without there being something to appropriate. But this could be said with as much justice with regard to many of the other intellectual currents touched by his work, and does not therefore justify the way in which this book is constructed. A balanced account of the influence of Nietzsche on twentieth-century Germany is still required. Manchester Metropolitan University GARY BANHAM Degeneration. By Max Nordau. Translation of the 2nd German edition of 1895. With an introduction by George L. Mosse. Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press. 1993. xxxvi + 566 pp. i15.95. Degeneration by Max Simon Nordau was originally published in Berlin in 1892 with the title Entartung. Its author was at this time a celebrated novelist, playwright, journalist, critic, and physician. It was in this last capacity that he presented Degeneration to the public, taking his readers on a ‘long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital’ of late nineteenth-century European culture (p. 536). The subjects of Nordau’s diagnoses are familiar to readers today: they include Baudelaire and the Symbolists, Zola, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and the Impressionists. For a late twentieth-century reader, what these artists have in common is their contribution to the definition and development of Modernism. For Nordau, however, this newness was paradoxically what marked them off as regressive, or, to use the medico-legal jargon of the day, as ‘atavistic’ and ‘degenerate’. They were, he argued, a diseased sub-species which had no legitimate share in the future, and no part to play in ‘healthy’, normal society. Nordau evaluated the productions of the avant-garde in the same way the criminal anthropologist measured the cranium of a degenerate. ‘Science’, Nordau asserts, has discovered signs of mental deformity which manifest themselves in artistic production, ‘so that it is not necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the lobe of a painter’s ear’ to class him as a Book Reviews 259 ‘degenerate’ (p. 17). Criminals were ugly and abnormal, therefore ugly or unconventional works of art were criminal. Degenerufion offered a combination of the scientific and the sensational to a public willing to have their prejudices confirmed by the latest scientific theories. It spoke to the ‘average man’, asserting that whilst the ordinary bourgeois merely laughed at the avant-garde and its productions, the physician had a stem duty to diagnose what was nothing short of an ‘epidemic’, a ‘black death of degeneration and hysteria’ (p. 537). In short, Degenerufion presents at once a definition and condemnation of early Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/13/2/258/565007 by guest on 29 September 2021 Modernism, a pantheon of the pathological, and the logical extension of positivistic practice. In the 1890s it was something of a sut~cPsde scundule. Nine editions of the English translation appeared within its first year, and provoked scathing responses from writers such as Bernard Shaw and William James. Deget~erutionhelped to define thefrn de siPcle, and is therefore an essential document for any cultural history of that period. As such its appearance in paperback format is extremely welcome. This testifies to the importance of Nordau in the recent literary and historical scholarship which explores literary and medico-legal constructions of deviancy and decadence, and the part played by medicine and criminology in shaping and mediating bourgeois experience. In the light of this recent scholarship (which must have contributed to the demand for a paperback edition of Nordau), it is puzzling why the publishers chose to preface the text with George L. Mosse’s introduction to a 1968 edition of Degenerufion.Whilst Mosse’s essay offers a concise and informed introduction to the text, his reference to ‘Pinter’s recent play Homecoming’ (p. xxx), or to ‘the new psychology’ (p. xxxii), or ‘our present cultural dilemmas’ (p. xxxiii) make it something of a period piece in itself, and draw attention to the situation of an edition coinciding with a text’s centenary presented without marking the event with any contemporary commemorative comment. Momti College. O.$or.d ROBERT MIGHALL Dus Vaterland der Feinde. Studien :urn nationalen Feindhegi-iff und Selhst~,cr-stiitidnisin Deutsc*hlatid und Frunkreich 1792-1918. By Michael Jeismann. ‘Sprache und Geschichte’, vol. 19. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 1992.414 pp. DM 98. How is the appearance of the French stereotype of the German as ‘barbarian’ at the very start of the First World War to be explained‘? The unanimous opinion of all French parties-from Catholics and integral nationalists to socialists-was that this was a ‘holy war of civilization against barbarism’ (Le Mafin. 4 August 1914). Jeismann shows in this book that stereotypical images of the enemy were still extant, despite almost a half-century of peace, on both sides. Although Jeismann demonstrates the continuity of stereotypes since the time of the Revolutionary War, and analyses their transformation, his most important contribution is his argument that the French and German nations were constituted interuliu by reference to the other, the enemy without and within. His findings thus parallel those of Linda Colley, whose book Britons appeared at the same time. He engages in a stimulating debate with Wehler, for example on early German nationalism, arguing that it was not a liberal opposition movement, but ‘integral’ from the .
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