A few years ago I saw an advert on British television: A German is on the stage of a variety show telling jokes. He tries really hard, but nobody laughs. Finally the curtain falls and the sentence appears: “Germans are not famous for their humour – but for their cars.” The Germans are not famous for their humour, but for their cars. As with any good joke, irony here exposes reality with a wink. We Germans are just as famous – or rather notorious – for our thoroughness. The German language thus gives rise to the wonderful term “basic cleaning”.
Perhaps it is due to this mixture of thoroughness and lack of humour, coupled with a special work mentality, that a phenomenon is being examined, tested and discussed particularly intensively in Germany: New Work. Other nations are said to work in order to live. In Germany, one sometimes gets the impression that we live in order to work. That is why we Germans devote ourselves with devotion to everything that has to do with work. In Germany, industrial capitalism was the first to merge with the Protestant work ethic, and it was here that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the first to measure the depths and limits of capitalism.
The founder of New Work was also a native German – although he moved to Austria as a child. Frithjof Bergmann, a social philosopher, grew up in Hallstatt, Austria, before migrating to the USA in 1949. There he kept himself afloat with various jobs before studying philosophy and finally teaching as a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan from 1958. He retired in 1999, but remained active in the New Work movement until his death in 2021: He traveled a lot, founded New Work centers around the world and spoke out on labor policy and philosophical issues until the end.
A social utopian idea
New Work is, if you will, a child of European philosophy. It was not created by a manager, a psychologist or a management consultant. Rather, it was created by a social philosopher who wanted to create a utopia: a better working society in which people are not there for work, but work for people. In which people look for and find a job that they “really, really want”. This claim, this revolution in the philosophy of work, is, by the way, the reason for numerous misunderstandings that are associated with the term New Work today.
The concept of New Work can only be understood if one looks at Bergmann as a person. His family was persecuted by the National Socialists; his mother even faked her suicide before managing to escape from Austria. All of this gave young Bergmann a desire to make the world a better place, to fight against foreign control and fascism.
He studied Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of freedom, on which he also wrote his doctorate, and transferred the human pursuit of freedom to the world of work. In an ideal world, people should be able to work independently and meaningfully and follow their calling.
Participation in the community and ecological sustainability were also extremely important to Bergmann. In this respect, he was a real visionary and viewed the modern working society as a mild illness that “comes on Mondays and goes on Fridays”. In this sense, he was also very skeptical about attempts to adapt New Work to today's working system.
Bergmann was a radical, yet loving thinker. A philanthropist and discoverer of circumstances who was drawn out into the world. As with many great thinkers, his life and work were intertwined. For some followers, New Work is still Bergmann; to this day, the scene is divided into social utopians, realists and pure organizational developers who fill New Work with rather arbitrary concepts and sell them now that New Work has arrived in the mainstream.
And Germany? How does the country of poets and thinkers, of thorough analysis and the Protestant work ethic view New Work today? The prophecy was grim: just a few years ago, Frithjof Bergmann stated that he did not know of any company in Germany that was implementing New Work in the way he intended. At the same time, he is of course pleased with the late acceptance of his idea.
The practitioner's verdict is more lenient: There are now many serious attempts to implement New Work, from small craft businesses to medium-sized companies and some corporations. However, for these first steps to succeed, companies, institutions and New Workers must answer the question: What is New Work anyway, especially today? And what can it contribute to a debate about a modern working world?
Hopeful visions for the future
Frithjof Bergmann's original social utopian idea has given way to a hodgepodge of approaches and the elaboration of partial aspects. There is simply no such thing as “New Work”; rather, currents and beliefs are now separating. We know this from philosophy or psychology, which have also produced very different schools of thought in the history of ideas. On the one hand, this diversity of concepts is an enrichment for intellectual debate, but on the other hand it makes it difficult for interested practitioners to approach the topic of New Work in a structured way. In 2019, the New Work Charter was therefore launched as a thought-provoking tool for theorists and practitioners alike. The charter was intended to combine the social utopian with the economy, the basic idea of work that people really, really want with the needs of a company organization. A gain, say some. A betrayal of the basic idea, say others.