Work can kill you, and work is what gives life.
In this video podcast, Christoph Magnussen and Michael Trautmann speak with Frithjof Bergmann about work in general and about why wage labor is not the solution.
„We talk about the poverty of desire, about an assembly-line worker who opened a yoga studio, and again and again about the big question of what we actually really, really want. Slightly affected by illness, the Godfather of New Work welcomes us with a firm handshake and an irrepressible will to keep advancing his life’s work. With the words ‚Then let us do it!‘ and not without a promise of a continuation, almost three hours of podcast come to an end.“
Frithjof Bergmann. A Life
Evil Is Not Just a Dream
Frithjof is born on December 24, 1930 in Weickelsdorf, Saxony. The family soon feels the rise of fascism and moves to Hallstatt in Austria. His childhood during the war is marked by separation, danger, and the long belief that his Jewish mother had taken her own life. Only after the war does he see her again.
The Influence of the Church
Frithjof’s father is a pastor. Even as a child, Frithjof senses that the church is not the right instrument for improving the world. The contradiction between everyday life and public ritual sharpens his lifelong search for a more real form of freedom.
The Narrowness of Austria
After the war, Frithjof works mostly as a farmhand and is early thrown back on himself. The experience of fascism and war awakens his fighting spirit. Shortly before finishing school, he wins a writing contest with an essay about the world we want to live in and receives a year of study in the United States.
Storytelling and Finding Himself
Frithjof does not return to Europe. His first years in the United States are years of storytelling and identity formation. Again and again he is asked what Germany and Austria were really like under National Socialism. The question becomes personal: what does he want to do with his life in America?
Experimenting
Frithjof tries many things. After a year at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, he works as a dishwasher and dock worker, becomes known as a prizefighter, and works on an assembly line. He turns these experiences into plays portraying American society in the 1950s, then receives a scholarship to study writing at the University of Iowa.
Resistance to the Vietnam War
During the student protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Frithjof gains intellectual influence at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Together with a small group of professors he organizes teach-ins and takes part in protests and a hunger strike against secret research projects at the university.
What Is Freedom?
Fellow students in Iowa predict that his gift for storytelling will lead him into philosophy. After initial resistance, curiosity and the hunger for knowledge win. At Princeton, the German-American philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann becomes his mentor and friend. Frithjof completes his doctorate on Hegel.
The Philosophy Professor
At first Frithjof resists the idea of becoming a professor. The path seems too easy, and he tries rural self-sufficiency instead. With the help of friends he returns to what he really, really wants: philosophy. He teaches at Stanford, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and receives a chair in philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1958.
The Path to New Work
Frithjof’s early work develops a new definition of freedom. He sees freedom not as an abstract choice, but as the ability to act. In On Being Free, he describes the free human being as someone who can do what they really, really want. This becomes the foundation for his theory of New Work.
Doing What You Really, Really Want
As a professor at the University of Michigan and after travels in countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Frithjof sees the deep problems of capitalism in the Western world of work, but also the dead end of communism. He begins to develop a counter-model: New Work, a cultural shift away from dependence on wage labor and toward independence, self-determination, and shared participation.
Falling in Love with Life
In Flint, the first Centers for New Work are founded. With the help of mentors, people are meant to overcome their „self-ignorance“ and search for work aligned with their wishes, hopes, dreams, and abilities. The goal is to change one’s life in a way that makes it more alive and energetic. Over the years, Centers for New Work emerge around the world.
Frithjof Bergmann. Freedom
Calling
Contrary to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his famous sentence in The Social Contract, we human beings are not „born free“. Nothing is as wrong as the statement: „Man is born free.“ The opposite is the case. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s image of the human being assumes that freedom is something we can experience only under very fortunate circumstances, sometimes and only partially, and hardly for any longer moment. The path to freedom in life is difficult. Life is an attempt to arrive at freedom, the very opposite of something we already received in the cradle. Where are we going? How do we want to live? In the part-time revue we call life, we slowly begin to understand that, as a society intoxicated by nightmarish increases in speed, we are nevertheless somehow stuck. As Frithjof Bergmann says: „We are burning the violins.“
Do what you really, really want
A culture in which everything strengthens everyone – from kindergarten to accompanied dying.
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