LEFTIST CULTURAL CRITIC Jeffrey Nealon argues that “we’ve experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life.” The new global economy elevates competitiveness to its guiding principle, mandating a national quest to maintain “Konkurrenzfähigkeit des Standorts Deutschland” (competitiveness of Germany as a business hub). At the same time, since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, intensified technologies of the self, widely promoted by popular culture and the advertising industry, insinuate that individuals should take a functionalist approach toward themselves as sites of experience, or conceive of themselves and their physical bodies as reified projects for self-marketing and improvement in a normative marketplace. This imprinting is so pervasive that it is difficult to resist; it presents itself in the guise of self-actualization, or even as entertainment.

The writers under consideration in this chapter present a strong critique of neoliberalism by addressing these pervasive effects. Katharina Hacker, Nikola Richter, Julia Schoch, and Judith Schalansky want readers to question which common goods are foundational for a liveable society, what the proper ratio of work versus leisure is, and how to recover or attain for the first time a sense of shared intimacy. Moreover, their works critique the evacuation of the public good as a shared civic responsibility from the public sphere, chronicling the neoliberal shift onto individuals as entrepreneurs, “equipped,” in economist Mirowski's judgment, “with promiscuous notions of identity and selfhood, surrounded by simulacra of other such selves … a world where competition is the primary virtue, and solidarity is a sign of weakness.”

While women's bodies were already commodified and relegated to the status of consumers in the Western capitalist marketplace, women in the neoliberal era are disproportionately affected by this renewed punitive intrusion into their psyches, urging them to submit to the dictates of perpetual self-interventions in the guise of a new freedom to realize the self. Moreover, as Hester Baer has pointed out, compared to women in other EU countries, German women are underrepresented in leadership positions in the workplace, and those who work are more likely to do so parttime.