Max Simon Nordau

Max Simon Nordau (1849–1923) was a Hungarian-born physician, journalist and critic who wrote in German and lived most of his life in Paris. Born in Pest as Simon Maximilian Südfeld, he became a correspondent for Viennese and Berlin newspapers and made his name with The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (1883), an attack on religion, monarchy and marriage, and Degeneration (1892), which diagnosed the art of the fin de siècle as a hereditary sickness and was translated across Europe. From 1897 he was Theodor Herzl's closest ally in the Zionist movement, delivering the keynote addresses at the early congresses. He also wrote novels and plays.