Egon Friedell - The Actor As Historian

The Actor As Historian

Also during the early 1920s, Friedell wrote the three volumes of his Cultural History of the Modern Age, which describes events from the Renaissance to the age of imperialism in an anecdotal format. For instance, Friedell writes; "All the classifications man has ever devised are arbitrary, artificial, and false, but simple reflection also shows that such classifications are useful, indispensable, and above all unavoidable since they accord with an innate aspect of our thinking." In 1925, publisher Hermann Ullstein received the first volume, but was suspicious of the historiography of an actor. Five other publishers subsequently rejected the book. It was finally published by Heinrich Beck in Munich in 1927. The book proved very successful and allowed Friedell to continue his work as an author and has been translated into seven languages.

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Friedell described the regime as:

"(in) the realm of the Antichrist. Every trace of nobility, piety, education, reason is persecuted in the most hateful and base manner by a bunch of debased menials".