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WORKSHOP:
Views, Ways of Thinking, Cultural Transmission and Cultural Processes
European Metropolises versus "Provincial City" Pest in Max Nordau's Feuilletons
Hedvig Ujvári (Budapest)
Max Nordau (1849-1923), physician, journalist and cultural critic, the second most important Zionist after Theodor Herzl, famous overnight at 34 through his "The Conventional Lies of the Cultured," definitively shaped a decade later with "Degeneration" the intellectual and conceptual history of the fin de siècle. Up to the First World War he furnished numerous European and North American newspapers with feuilletons; he worked for the Vossische Zeitung among others for 35 years. His works are available in 17 languages, his Best Seller went through seven printings in four months in England and elsewhere.
Nordau, born in Pest in an orthodox Jewish family, achieved his literary successes after he settled definitively in Paris. Although it would be exaggerated to speak of Nordau research, the productive years after 1880 are the ones that are treated in relevant studies. His first thirty years are dismissed in all lexicons with his place and date of birth, his study of medicine as well as his work for Pester Lloyd, if this is mentioned at all. Along with the Pester Lloyd numerous contributions of Nordau could be seen in a second publication, the New Pester Journal. All together Nordau wrote a total of approximately 330 feuilletons between his 18th and 29th birthday.
The feuilletons trace the stations of Nordau's development: they can be divided into four larger units - beginnings, Vienna, trip through Europe, Paris. Comparison of the newspaper and book versions reflect Nordau's various intentions, for as a writer of feuilletons his aim was to capture what he saw, whereby as a writer of feuilletons for a government publication he also had to include other matters for better or worse. He always tried to hide his Janus face, for he let Pester Llloyd pay him well for his journalistic services, while at the same time his thoughts were permanently focused on getting away from the despised "provincial city" and from the "provincial newspaper."
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