Dieter Duhm - Practical Application

Practical Application

In 1978 Duhm began to put this theory into practise. First he created an interdisciplinary research center with a dozen experts from various fields, called the “Bauhuette,” located in southern Germany. Their goal was to find workable answers to the ecological and technological problems facing the human species at that time. However, within a few years they discovered that if their project had any chance of surviving, they first had to research more deeply into the core human relationship questions that lay hidden under all issues – such as competition, greed, and jealousy. So Duhm traveled around Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for a year, finding fifty willing participants who began a social community experiment in 1983 to research the possibilities of dissolving internal group conflicts concerning power, money, sexuality and love; and they spent three years in a remote area of the Black Forest under Duhm’s guidance.

But in 1984 a slanderous campaign in the media began against Duhm and his projects, both in Germany and Switzerland. This increasingly impeded the research work in the Black Forest, and finally disrupted it totally. The group’s attempt to have the information about them corrected remained unsuccessful, and the community finally had to disband.