When does the modern age begin according to Egon Friedell?

For Friedell the modern age does not begin with its visible arrival around 1500 but with its conception. He dates an era the way one dates a human life, from conception, and calls 1348, the year of the Black Death, the year in which modern man was conceived.

What does Egon Friedell have to do with antifragility?

Gwendolin Kirchhoff places Friedell beside Nassim Taleb in her symposium lecture; Taleb later called a property of nature antifragile. She points out that Friedell, with the hydra that grows two new heads when one is cut off, anticipates the image Taleb uses for regeneration through trauma.

Egon Friedell: Cultural Historian of the Value of Illness

Q: Did Friedell think the plague caused the modern age?

No. Friedell writes explicitly that the plague was not the cause of the modern age. He compares it to a pregnancy, which is not the cause of a new organism either: a new spirit produced a kind of developmental illness in European humanity, and the plague was its most conspicuous form.

Q: What does "every heel has its Achilles" mean?

With this phrase Friedell considers reading the Achilles myth the other way round: not that every hero has a vulnerable spot, but that the hero is born from the vulnerable spot, from the awareness of vulnerability and the stubborn struggle against it. He calls this less logically thought, but perhaps truer for that very reason.

Q: What did Friedell mean by the survival of the unfittest?

Friedell sets an inversion against Darwinian selection: in the struggle for life the victor is not the fittest but the most endangered, most unstable, most spiritual organism. He adds the qualification that not every inferior organism is a higher form of life, but every higher form of life is inferior.

Egon Friedell (1878–1938) was a Viennese writer, cabaret performer, actor and cultural historian whose Cultural History of the Modern Age (Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit) dates the modern age to the Black Death of 1348 and reads illness as a productive force in history. Gwendolin Kirchhoff places him beside Nassim Taleb in her symposium lecture “Antifragility – On the Value of Illness” and speaks there of “the wonderful Egon Friedell” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 01:18). She reads several passages from the Cultural History aloud word for word, because to paraphrase him would, she says, be a pity (cf. ibid., 02:35).

#Who was Egon Friedell?

Egon Friedell was a Viennese writer, cultural historian and actor who shaped the literary and cultural life of Vienna (Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Egon Friedell”). Cultural history stood at the centre of his life’s work (ibid.). He was born Egon Friedmann in Vienna on 21 January 1878 and had his surname officially changed to Friedell in 1916 (Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Egon Friedell”). In 1904 he took his doctorate with a thesis on Novalis als Philosoph (Novalis as a Philosopher) (Wikipedia, “Egon Friedell”). After that he was many things: artistic director of the Cabaret Fledermaus from 1908 to 1910, theatre critic, translator from French and English, and an actor on Max Reinhardt’s stages in Vienna and Berlin (Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Egon Friedell”). With Alfred Polgar he wrote the school satire Goethe im Examen (Goethe Sits His Exam), in which he played Goethe himself (Wikipedia, “Egon Friedell”).

His major work is the three-volume Cultural History of the Modern Age, whose first volume C. H. Beck published in Munich in 1927 (Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, imprint). A Cultural History of Antiquity remained unfinished; its first part, on Egypt and the ancient Near East, appeared in 1936 (Wikipedia, “Egon Friedell”). At the end of 1937 the Nazi regime confiscated Friedell’s works, and in February 1938 the Cultural History was banned in Germany (Wikipedia, “Egon Friedell”). On the evening of 16 March 1938, a few days after Austria’s annexation by Germany, two SA men came to his Vienna flat asking for him; Friedell took his own life by jumping from the window (Wikipedia, “Egon Friedell”).

#Why does Friedell’s modern age begin with the Black Death?

For Friedell the modern age begins with the Black Death because he dates an era the way one dates a human life: not from birth, but from conception (cf. Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, p. 62). In his scheme the beginning is usually a great external trauma, such as an epidemic; it is followed by a traumatic neurosis that throws everything into an unstable, chaotic state, and only later does a new psychic order form, of the kind the classicisms carry (cf. ibid., p. 63). This yields his dating: “the year in which modern man was conceived was the year 1348” (ibid., p. 63). The new age only becomes visible later: “with the dawning sixteenth century the modern age stepped into the world; but it came into being in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it did so through illness” (ibid., p. 64).

Even so, the plague is not the cause of the modern age for Friedell. He compares it to a pregnancy, which is not the cause of a new organism either: a new spirit produced a kind of developmental illness in European humanity, and the plague was its most conspicuous form. His principle here reads: “It is the spirit that builds itself the body” (ibid., p. 96).

Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads Friedell’s sentence on the modern age coming into being through illness aloud in her lecture (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 05:05) and stresses what Friedell starts from in his dating: “he starts entirely from subjective evidence” (ibid., 03:26). With him she names the three phases as the trauma proper, for which the plague stands, the traumatic neurosis, and classicism (cf. ibid., 06:33).

#What did Friedell mean by the value of illness?

By the value of illness Friedell means that a disturbance of equilibrium is the path by which something new comes into being. His excursus opens with the sentence: “That illness is something productive, this seemingly paradoxical claim we must place at the head of our inquiry” (Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, p. 64). Every illness, he argues, is a malfunction in the organism, but only a very superficial view equates malfunction with damage; every fruitful innovation can only come about by way of an upheaval (cf. ibid., pp. 64 f.). The sick organism is, for him, more restless and therefore more eager to learn, more sensitive and therefore more able to learn (cf. ibid., p. 66). Friedell puts it pointedly: “Everything higher is by its nature always the sicker” (ibid., p. 66). Wherever something new forms, he writes, there is weakness, illness, decadence: “Everything that develops new seeds is in an apparent state of reduced life” (ibid., p. 66), such as the pregnant woman, the teething child, the moulting canary.

Friedell draws here on Novalis and on Nietzsche, who asks in the preface to The Gay Science whether illness is in fact dispensable to us (cf. ibid., p. 67), and on Alfred Adler’s Study of Organ Inferiority of 1907 (cf. ibid., p. 68). In the process he arrives at a sentence he himself calls paradoxical: “Health is a metabolic disease” (ibid., p. 69). He means the average person who lives more rationally and more solidly but lacks fruitful friction, resistance and polarity (cf. ibid., p. 69). Gwendolin Kirchhoff sums the thought up in her lecture this way: in the individual too, illness appears as a misunderstood sign of a higher opening (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 11:08).

Nietzsche’s concept of the great health is presented in the entry Great Health.

#What does “every heel has its Achilles” mean?

With his phrase about the heel and Achilles, Friedell considers reversing the myth of the vulnerable hero. Achilles, the invincible, has his heel waiting for the fatal arrow, and one could see in it the secret drop of poison mixed into every good fortune. Friedell asks whether it might in the end be meant the other way round: “not that every Achilles has a heel, but that every heel has its Achilles”. From the vulnerable spot, from the awareness of vulnerability and the stubborn, heroic struggle against it, the hero would be born. “That would be less logically thought, but perhaps truer for that very reason” (Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, p. 74).

From this Friedell gains a new position on Darwinism. In the struggle for life, he argues, the victor is not the fittest but the most endangered, most unstable, most spiritual organism; the selecting principle of development is not the survival of the fittest “but the survival of the unfittest” (ibid., p. 75). He qualifies this at once: not every inferior organism is a higher form of life, but every higher form of life is inferior (cf. ibid., p. 76).

Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls the Achilles thought a very beautiful one that inspired her while preparing the lecture (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 15:19), and turns it into a question to herself: “Where do I actually stand on the question of vulnerability?” (ibid., 15:28). Around health, she says, she could only dig in “like a fortress, further and further” (ibid., 15:35). But perhaps, she goes on, a certain greatness and “a certain development” come into “my life only through the wound” (ibid., 15:43). That would mean that one “can also affirm” suffering, mere undergoing, and “can open oneself to it” (ibid., 15:54).

#What links Friedell to Taleb’s antifragility?

According to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, what links Friedell to Taleb’s antifragility is the image of the hydra, which Friedell anticipates (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 16:04). About a century after Friedell, Nassim Taleb called a property of nature antifragile: the capacity not to buckle under a shock or a trauma but to grow beyond oneself, as Kirchhoff presents it in the lecture (cf. ibid., 01:48). Friedell reports a species of freshwater polyp that grows two new heads when its head is cut off, and concludes that the story of the Lernaean Hydra has a deep scientific meaning; in such cases the wound leads to the emergence of new individuals (cf. Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, p. 70). Of this passage Kirchhoff says: “here he actually anticipates the image” that Taleb would later use as an example of regeneration through trauma (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 16:06). Taleb himself, as she presents it, chooses the image of the Lernaean Hydra for the antifragile (cf. ibid., 22:36). The term itself and the spectrum of fragile, robust and antifragile are the subject of the entry Antifragility.

#Friedell’s language and crisis as birth

Besides Friedell’s ideas, Gwendolin Kirchhoff singles out his language: she calls it “the language that is so dear to my heart” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Antifragilität”, 19:24), a language of the kind still spoken at the end of the nineteenth century (cf. ibid., 19:27). Friedell’s idea that an era is conceived and born like a person touches the birth process, in which a crisis is understood as a birth, and the essay Crisis as Birth. That every age makes its own illnesses is Friedell’s claim (cf. Friedell, 1927, vol. 1, p. 96); whether an epoch recognises its illnesses is the question the entry Pathogenesis, Not Progress asks. The Nietzsche on whom Friedell draws appears as a diagnostician of decline in the entry on Nietzsche. Whether your own heel is a flaw or the place where something begins is the question Friedell’s sentence leaves you with.

#Sources

Friedell, E. (1927). Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit. Die Krisis der europäischen Seele von der Schwarzen Pest bis zum ersten Weltkrieg [A Cultural History of the Modern Age]. Vol. 1: Einleitung, Renaissance und Reformation. Munich: C. H. Beck. Cited from the 28th–32nd printing, Munich: C. H. Beck 1954; page numbers refer to this edition (pp. 62–76, 96). English renderings of the quotations are our own.
Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Antifragilität – Über den Wert der Krankheit – Egon Friedell & Nassim Taleb – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, in German]. YouTube, 12 October 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeXzRj9KVXE (quotes 01:18, 03:26, 15:28, 15:35, 15:43, 15:54, 16:06, 19:24).
Wien Geschichte Wiki. “Egon Friedell”. https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Egon_Friedell (accessed 4 October 2026).
Wikipedia (German). “Egon Friedell”. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Friedell (accessed 4 October 2026).

Egon Friedell