“burnout burnout”
ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER
Wolfgang Martynkewicz
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
"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."
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