Exhausted Germans

Exhaustion has become a popular topic in Germany, many complaining “We are the most exhausted age.”

Wolfgang Martynkewicz provides some contrary evidence, though he doesn’t appear to know it. In Das Zeitalter der Erschopfung, he examines German bourgeois and bohemians of the early twentieth century and finds that they were already “drained by the demands of what they perceived as ever more complex modernity.” 

Anna Katharina Schaffner sums up the evidence in her TLS review: “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.

Not that they took it lying down. Exhausted, they threw themselves into various therapies to counter their exhaustion: “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.”

Martynkewicz describes the strategies as soteriologies: “‘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.”

It all sounds very familiar, as does the apocalyptic tone that this exhaustion lent to German thought: “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.”

Schaffner suggests that the evidence might be taken to indicate that everyone is always exhausted. But she wonders why the topic is so prominent among Germans today, and suggests an old-fashioned explanation: “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?”

 And she concludes that burnout actually carries an aura of achievement: “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.”