Interpreted as a political and administrative perception, particular notions of austerity are strongly influenced by their respective historical contexts. Thus austerity can lead to historically contingent imperatives. Bavarian university hospitals in the 1970s and 1980s represent a case where this contingency can be demonstrated. The paper shows how the sharp rise of
health care expenditures, the expansion of the welfare state and the recession in the second half of this timeframe led to increasing demands that encountered shrinking resources, making austerity measures appear inevitable. Since university hospitals represent a horizontal issue concerning science-, education- and health-care policies, they are affected by a web of interweaving, multi-scalar shortages and political countermeasures. The paper will discuss how austerity has dynamized discourses of health care and higher education towards marketization and the economization of their semantic framings, ultimately criticizing the mono-causal narrative of a neoliberal agenda.
