Balancing between different careers - The starting career of Max Nordau as physician and journalist in Budapest
Authors: Ujvári Hedvig 
Published: July 2021

The doctor, journalist, Zionist, and essayist of cultural criticism Max Nordau (born as Simon Maximilian Südfeld 1849 Pest – died in Paris 1923), after high school graduation 1867 enrolled in Medical School at the University of Pest. Aged 37, he became famous at once for his book of cultural criticism titled Conventional Lies of Human Culture (Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit) and later he ruled the narrative and the set of definitions of Fin de Siècle by his main work Degeneration (Entartung). The year 1867 was also an important year in Nordau’s career as a journalist when he was hired to write for Pester Lloyd, a prestigious German-language journal. Prior to World War 1, he submitted Feuilletons to numerous newspapers of Europe and Northern America and was engaged among others for 35 years by the Vossische Zeitung. His works are in 17 languages available and his bestseller Degeneration had e.g. in England seven editions within four months. Between 1873 and 1876 Nordau travelled across Germany and parts of Northern Europe and in 1874, he finally began his long-awaited European tour he earned financially himself. He returned to Budapest only in Dezember 1875 and completed his medical exams. However, he did not stay in Budapest for long. He moved to Paris with his younger sister and mother, where he worked as a doctor and the correspondent of several European journals and in 1880 settled there permanently. When Nordau arrived in Paris, the opportunities he was presented with as a freelance journalist and the international fame of the Parisian medical circles were definitely a positive experiences to him. Nordau’s main achievement was complying with his two professional activities. As a physician, he endeavoured to analyse the contemporary culture by available means of psychopathology. Nevertheless, his diagnosis turned out as a total failure. He denied the creational capabilities of mainstream artists like novelists (Baudelaire, Zola, Verlaine, Tolstoi etc.), componists (e.g. Richard Wagner) and Philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche) and stigmatized them simply as insane and degenerated. However, his significant merits survived in the history of literature since he was a pioneer of modern cultural criticism thus his later impact e.g. on Georg Lukacs was obvious. Concerning Nordau’s works beyond novels, dramas and letters, medical and Zionistic documents, there are prevailing works of cultural criticism. They testify clearly that he was an icon of cultural criticism of Friedrich Nietsche’s significance and one of the leading intellectuals of Europe at the time of the Fin de Siècle. The aim of this paper is to show the years Nordau spent in Pest/ Budapest in terms of polyglottism and national identity. We discuss his linguistic and cultural paradigm shift since 1861 which forced Nordau first into defence and then into isolation both socio-culturally and professionally. He planned to write a dissertation about medical anthropology, a field for which there were no Hungarian specialists at that time.