A young man of the 1880s, exhausted by his own century, drifts between Berlin, Paris and a woman who is worse for him than the age is. Nordau was a physician who co-founded the World Zionist Organization with Herzl — and who wrote Degeneration, the book that told Europe its artists were sick. The plates in this edition are by the very painters he diagnosed: Munch, Klimt, Böcklin, Redon. The argument and the pictures are left to fight it out.