Can a woman miss someone she has never met?
Someone with whom she has only had a very personal conversation via video call?
Yes, she can.
David Helmboldt, Frithjof Bergmann's friend, informed me on 24 May that our next video meeting could not take place because Frithjof had just passed away.
After my Nazi shitstorm a week ago, I was gradually crawling out of my hole and out of my tension – now I'm back ‘in the thick of it’.
It's a bit surreal because I never shook his hand, but I felt – and this is important for me to say – a closeness to both Frithjof and David that rarely arises, but always does when we meet like-minded people on a mission that is perhaps the most difficult one: to change the world for the better for everyone.
Not just for those with power and money who are more interested in preserving the current system, but for those who are always used as an excuse by the elite to do nothing.
Those who knew Frithjof know how important the human factor was to him in his working life.
How angry it made him that his concept of New Work was turned into a hollow phrase by too many people.
This makes me feel all the more responsible for carrying on his legacy and asking people:
‘What do you really want to do?’
Frithjof was very aware of what was happening in Germany. He asked me whether we – as had been the case in the USA for some time – were afraid of poverty and job losses because we needed a change of system. We had not managed to bring about this change, but Frithjof thought it was still possible.
In the 1980s, he first established his idea of New Work in response to the emerging crisis among car manufacturers in the USA. In 1981, he founded the Center for New Work in Flint and developed a series of proposals on work as a vocation and a means of self-realisation, alternating with regular employment and incorporating self-sufficiency made possible by technology itself. He never stopped being a pioneer of a human-centred world – starting with ‘New Work’ as a genuine rethinking of the freedom of each and every one of us. By shifting the focus from the outside to the inside of human beings, Frithjof shows how freedom can become a reality in self-development, in parenthood, in education and in the creation of a society that stimulates the self rather than destroying it or rendering it silent and dead.
He reminds us that the ‘job system’ for organising work is only about 200 years old – since the Industrial Revolution. It has always been problematic and is now on the verge of collapse, and what comes next, for better or for worse, depends on the decisions that are made and implemented in the present. The current situation is very similar to the time when he first began to change the way he worked. Anticipating the looming catastrophe, Frithjof Bergmann began to devise alternatives to the work system – and he is still doing so today. He began by promoting dialogue about mitigating the effects of layoffs during times of recession among the workforce in the automotive industry and in the community, which makes him very familiar with what he is now seeing in Germany. New Work, New Culture recounts the development of his ideas and describes a path that humanity could follow so that everyone can live a better life.
