DAS ZEITALTER DER ERSCHÖPFUNG
Die Überforderung des Menschen durch die Moderne
427pp. Berlin: Aufbau. €26.99.
978 3 351 03547 1
Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner, editors
LEISTUNG UND ERSCHÖPFUNG
Burnout in der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft
220pp. Berlin: Suhrkamp. €16.
978 3 518 12666 0
C ertain illnesses seem to offer themselves as fertile ground for reflection on the state of society as a whole. Tuberculosis and syphilis, and later cancer and AIDS, have all been used as barometers for measuring changing cultural assumptions that reach far beyond medical debates. The symbolic stakes appear even higher in the field of mental health – hysteria, for example, has long fascinated commentators, owing mainly to the rapid rise and fall, and the highly gendered nature, of the diagnosis. Yet no condition has attracted as much critical attention as exhaustion, especially at the present moment, and no nation is as preoccupied with the topic as the Germans.
If exhaustion manifests itself physically as weakness or fatigue, on a psychological level it can be described as weariness, disillusionment, apathy and hopelessness. Medically speaking, exhaustion is related to various diagnostic categories, including melancholia, nervous weakness, neurasthenia, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS or ME) and burnout. Yet these diagnoses are not simply synonymous with exhaustion: most of them combine exhaustion with a range of other symptoms. Exhaustion may be the consequence of these other symptoms, or else their cause.
With most of these conditions, the precise organic origins are unclear. They have therefore invited speculation on the role that social and environmental factors play. Ostensibly scientific accounts of exhaustion are often clothed within a sociocultural interpretative framework, especially when the aetiologies of these conditions are thought to be triggered by external causes. Many theorists of exhaustion assume that, just as viruses can penetrate the body and wreak havoc with its functions, various cultural developments can do the same.
One of the abiding refrains in exhaustion theories, both past and present, is the idea that modernity as such drains the individual’s energy. The aspects of modernity that are repeatedly identified as responsible include technological inventions that have dramatically increased the pace of life, as well as wider cultural developments such as the spread of capitalism, secularization, urbanization, industrialization, and, more recently, the imperative to be a constantly self-fashioning, entrepreneurial subject in a highly competitive environment. Symptoms are related to specific external developments, which are thus not just construed as drivers of pathology, but also pathologized in their own right. Even Freud, who generally aimed to establish transhistorical truths about the human psyche, assumed that modernity and exhaustion went hand in hand, as the demand to repress one’s desires became ever more complex.
Articles on burnout in the German supplements in recent years have been legion – in fact, so many have appeared that some observers are already complaining about “burnout burnout”. Academic publications, too, have mushroomed: in addition to the two books reviewed here, there is Stephan Grünewald’s Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft (2013), Patrick Kury’s Der überforderte Mensch (2012) and Byung-Chul Han’s Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (2010; and already in its eighth printing). All this clearly attests to a wider preoccupation with the relationship between individual energy levels and the organization of work in the age of techno-capitalism. Yet many of the strategies used to explain what is represented as an unprecedented epidemic of burnout are in fact very similar to those that were used in pre- and early modern accounts of melancholia and acedia, as well as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of nervous weakness and neurasthenia.
One of the abiding refrains in exhaustion theories is the idea that modernity as such drains the individual’s energy
Wolfgang Martynkewicz’s erudite and highly enjoyable study Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung announces its thesis in its title. Martynkewicz marshals an impressive range of evidence to establish that numerous German bourgeois and bohemians living around the turn of the twentieth century felt physically and emotionally drained by the demands of what they perceived as an ever more complex modernity. Perceptive case studies include the “tired colossus” Otto von Bismarck, the diet-obsessed Friedrich Nietzsche, the sharp and ascetic Cosima Wagner, the depressed Protestant Max Weber, and the fitness fanatic Franz Kafka, as well as Gustav Meyrink, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and many other key figures of German modernism.
Rilke’s famous dictum “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” neatly sums up the resolute attempts of these characters to counter their exhaustion-related disease by subscribing to various tenets of Lebensreform (lifestyle reform). It is one of the many strengths of this fine study that the intricate connection between these salvation-promising reform movements and exhaustion is so cogently demonstrated: Martynkewicz shows that the fin de siècle did not just produce exhaustion, but also saw the advent of numerous strategies to counter and even to prevent its effects. “In times of weakness and illness”, he writes, “the longing for salvation and redemption, as well as for saviours, spiritual guides, prophets, trainers and dieticians, multiplies.” Among the prophets we encounter are the naturopath Ernst Schweninger, whose allegedly miraculous regime was said to have transformed the “obese and miserable dotard” Bismarck into a strong and “elastic” young man; the raw food advocate and deviser of Bircher muesli, Max Bircher-Benner; his colleague Heinrich Lahmann; and the endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who performed and popularized dubious and later discredited rejuvenation operations.
Other practices that were frequently mobilized to counter exhaustion include nudism, vegetarianism, macrobiotics, gymnastics, yoga, gardening and expressive dancing. Martynkewicz discusses the thriving sanatorium culture (famously satirized in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), as well as a phenomenon called “Europe-fatigue”, manifest in an escapist idealization of the Orient’s exotic otherness, as seen, for example, in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung goes on to engage with a range of famous declinist thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and, above all, Nietzsche, who articulated a sense of “belatedness” and bitterly complained about the decadence, degeneracy and weakness of their contemporaries.
Martynkewicz establishes some intriguing parallels between the present German preoccupation with burnout and the turn-of-the-century exhaustion he analyses. It is a shame that he does not develop them further, and that he never questions the main claim of the figures he discusses: “We are the most exhausted age!” is their weary cry. Yet many other people have presented their own ages, whether before or after the fin de siècle, as the most stressful of all, and a wider historical perspective on exhaustion as well as a reflection on why so many other periods embrace very similar rhetoric are curiously absent in this otherwise admirable study.
Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner’s essay collection Leistung und Erschöpfung provides an excellent overview of the current debate about burnout in Germany. First diagnosed in the 1970s in American social workers, burnout entails a lack of energy and motivation, cynicism about the meaning of one’s work, and a general sense of disengagement. Generally understood as a social rather than an individual pathology, it is viewed as being bound up with the transformation from an industrial to a service industry, and with the changes affecting the modern worker brought on by globalization.
Like Martynkewicz, many of the contributors to Leistung und Erschöpfung accept uncritically the notion that ours really is the most exhausted age, and they cite numerous worrying statistics and predominantly sociological observations to support this claim. Most also embrace the theories of the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, that the pressures of our “post-disciplinary” society, with the waning influence of traditional authority figures and institutions such as the State, the Church and the patriarchal family, have ushered in a new set of anxieties. Burnout is also frequently linked to the proliferation of new media in the digital age, which no longer allows us to relax properly. These technologies, it is assumed, further blur the boundaries between work and private life.
In their cogent, co-written introduction and chapter, Neckel and Wagner discuss burnout as a predominantly social phenomenon. One of the key concepts that they and their fellow symposiasts address is the idea of the “subjectivization” of work, which brings with it a novel set of pressures: workers are now expected to be creative, authentic, empathetic, selfmotivated and responsible at work, meaning that their subjectivity, too, is being commodified and exploited. Ultimately, Neckel and Wagner conclude, it is the neoliberal competitive society as such, and, in particular, the principle of the “winner takes all market”, that are pathological, as the energies of the far more numerous non-winners in these markets are effectively wasted. Such markets, then, are not as energy-efficient as they might seem, and exhaust not only individual, but also social, resources.
Of interest also is Patrick Kury’s historical perspective on burnout, in which he compares the phenomenon to nineteenth-century neurasthenia and the “manager illness” that haunted Germans during the Wirtschaftswunder period in the 1950s. He rightly observes that exhaustion appears to be closely associated with social transformations. Yet Kury, too, does not venture beyond the nineteenth-century threshold in his analysis – social change surely took place in other periods as well.
The strongest essay in the collection is by Ulrich Bröckling, who wittily dissects the metaphors and imagery deployed to describe burnout and its suggested cures in self-help manuals and other literature. Bröckling analyses the underlying assumptions about the relationships between body, mind and environment that inform the metaphors used to describe states of burnout, such as the Hamsterrad image (the German equivalent of the rat race), the “black screen” or the “broken cybernetic system”. He also highlights the paradox that is inherent in the popular gesture of blaming modernity for the current burnout epidemic: while a highly pessimistic and often apocalyptic vision of the present is frequently conjured up in the literature on burnout, the register changes completely when authors move on to discuss strategies of prevention and cure. Often, they call for reduced workloads and enhanced resilience as the ways to restore social and personal harmony. Yet this tinkering with the symptoms does little to address the underlying problem. Bröckling concludes: “In the end, it is difficult to say what one ought to fear more – the Zeitkrankheit or the suggestions for its cure”.
Practices that were mobilized to counter exhaustion include nudism, vegetarianism, macrobiotics and expressive dancing
Many of the contributors to Leistung und Erschöpfung look back nostalgically to times imagined to be calmer and less strenuous. Some subscribe, without ever acknowledging or theorizing it, to an essentially Rousseauist vision of the corrupting nature of modern society and the nerve-shattering, attention-sapping impact of new technologies. Most exhaustion theorists, past and present, assume that pre-modern man must have been happier, more energetic and less existentially troubled, safely supported by a religious world view, strong communal patterns and a pre-industrial agrarian way of life in harmony with nature. This is, of course, a romanticization – those living in the pre-modern period were doubtless drained of their energies by physical labour, unless they were fortunate enough to belong to the aristocracy.
Given that most exhaustion theorists’ arguments ultimately rest on the claim that their own age is the most exhausted, is it not time to concede that exhaustion might indeed be universal? If we were to venture further back into the past, crossing the frequently evoked modern/pre-modern threshold, we would find that many medieval men and women suffered from a lack of energy and spiritual weariness too, which might simply have been articulated in religious language – the numerous works written on melancholia and acedia (diagnoses that are also essentially structured around mental and physical exhaustion) suggest as much. Werner Post, in his beautifully written treatise on acedia (Acedia: Das Laster der Trägheit, 2011) has recently presented this argument in the most persuasive of terms. But one could look back further still: the weariness of the melancholic was a condition already theorized by Hippocrates and Galen. Rather than lamenting the horrors of modernity, perhaps it is time to acknowledge that exhaustion is simply an essential part of the human experience. Indeed, the fact that our energies are limited, and that this worries us, is very much part of what makes us human. What changes through history is not the experience of exhaustion as such, but rather the labels we invent to describe it, the causes we mobilize to explain it, and, of course, the specific cultural discontents that we tend so readily to map onto it.
It is tempting to speculate on why exhaustion has become such a popular topic in Germany at present, and not, for instance, in the UK. Germany’s economy is currently the strongest in Europe, and the country’s income levels and general quality of life are also higher than those of most of its neighbours. According to the statistics, Germans do not work longer hours than the British, or indeed many other nations – a recent OECD survey showed that only the Dutch work fewer hours than the Germans. Why, then, do the Germans feel so exhausted? Might there be some truth to the old cliché of the specifically German Arbeitsethos (work ethic) after all? Do they perhaps invest more (emotionally, physically, existentially) in their work, and are they therefore more prone to burnout? Max Weber certainly thought so. In his theorization of the Protestant work ethic, he presented a range of theological and historical reasons to explain the Berufspflicht that led to the exhaustion of one’s energies in work. Yet Germany is, of course, not the only predominantly Protestant nation in Europe. Moreover, as Martynkewicz and others have shown, Weber’s theses were not only in tune with the exhausted zeitgeist of his age, but might also at least partly have been motivated by personal experience.
Being burned out is a socially “respectable” condition, implying, as it does, that one has simply worked too hard. It carries less stigma than depression. It is a disease of those who have overtaxed themselves in the name of work, and it might therefore be worn almost as a badge of honour. Wolfgang Martynkewicz convincingly demonstrates that a not inconsiderable degree of pride and self-moulding was often involved in the accounts of neurasthenics in the late nineteenth century: neurasthenia signified refinement, sensibility and an artistic streak. Burnout, in contrast, signifies a work ethic carried to the extreme. Seen from that perspective, one can begin to imagine how, paradoxically, it might serve as a means not only to deplore modernity but also to praise it.
Anna Katharina Schaffner is Head of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Her most recent book is Modernism and Perversion: Sexual deviance in sexology and literature, 1850–1930, which was published in 2011. She is working on a cultural history of exhaustion.
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