About me

I spent my childhood as Joana v. Rechenberg in Hamburg. My family loved traveling and art, yet in other ways my upbringing was characteristic of the “war grandchildren”. Thus when I started boarding school in the UK, Kelly College in beautiful Devon, British youth culture and its obsession with (in my case, Punk) music and style, seemed like a fresh dose of oxygen; it showed me how wild and different life could be. 

But before I was able to craft my own way, I spent another year in Geneva and started studying art history, anthropology and Eastern European history at Munich University (LMU). Fascinated by the lectures of Laszlo Vajda about European witch hunts or the spirit journey of Siberian shamans, I followed his advice to write my master thesis on a very, very dusty collection of East African jewelry and amulets in the Anthropology Museum of Budapest. In retrospect the only positive aspect about this thesis was that it allowed me to spend a summer in Budapest, just before the fall of the iron curtain. 

1989

In the summer of 1989 my partner and now husband, Stephan Breidenbach and I moved to the People's Republic of Berkeley. Here, my thinking received a major boost. I was especially influenced by Laura Nader, who applied the anthropological lens to very contemporary socio-economic topics such as the struggle of the Zapatistas in Mexico or the dynamics behind plastic surgery in the US. At my next academic stop-over, University College London, I found Daniel Miller's work on mass consumption so exciting, that I decided to write my Phd thesis on German material culture: Deutsche und Dingwelt (Lit Verlag 1994). 

In 1992 my daughter Lilian was born, followed by Vico in 1995. Having moved to Berlin and with Lilian and Vico on the lap, I started to write my first “proper” book: Tanz der Kulturen (with Ina Zukrigl, Verlag Antje Kunstmann 1998). My friend Ina and I had been studying together in London and were highly influenced by a new generation of anthropologists who came up with exciting and often counterintuitive research about cultural globalisation. Instead of leading to a world wide homogenisation, they showed, how groups around the world appropriated global ideas and goods for their own specific goals, leading to new forms of cultural diversity. For the next years, Ina and I popularised this perspective in many articles, talks and a long-standing column in the German business monthly brand eins. 

Around 2000 I started to collaborate with the China scholar and anthropologist Pál Nyíri. The combination of our dual perspectives - my more journalistic, his academic - proved to be very productive. To research topics such as the life worlds of theoretical physicists during the Soviet era, Chinese migrants in the Italian textile industry or the newly evolving mass tourism in Russia and China, we travelled widely and wrote for a number of anthropological journals such as Current Anthropology and Development and Change. In Maxikulti (Campus, Frankfurt 2007) and Seeing Culture Everywhere (University of Washington Press, 2008) we explored how an outdated understanding of “culture” was mostly erroneously (and often dangerously) used to explain all sorts of current political, social and economic developments.

My work during these years wouldn’t have been possible without the wonderful Kinderladen Goethestraße in Berlin, as well as an amazing support network of girlfriends, foremost Isabel Kleihues and Nicola Bramigk.

2006

In 2006, we took time out as a family and went on a trip around the world. During this time, my children (aged 10 and 12) not only wrote the book In 136 Tagen um die Welt, but the idea for betterplace.org was born. Originally conceived by my husband Stephan as a kind of "eBay for help", we wanted grassroots projects from around the world to be able to present themselves and enlist donations online. A few months after the start of our project we met Till Behnke and friends, who were working on a very similar idea. We got together and in November 2007 betterplace.org went online. Since then, betterplace.org has become Germany’s largest online fundraising platform for social projects.

In 2010, supported by Dennis Buchmann, I founded the betterplace lab. This think-and-do tank explores the interface between digital technologies and the common good.

My years both at betterplace.org and the betterplace lab were the richest and most rewarding I can imagine. I especially loved the fact that I was able to reconnect to my anthropology research with fieldwork into digital-social innovations, which took me (once more) to China, Egypt, Greece and India. Check out one of our annual reviews here.  In 2019 we added bUm, a co-working hub for civil society organisations, to our operations. 

Since 2015, I have gradually withdrawn from the operative business and accompany betterplace as a member of the supervisory board of our non-profit joint stock corporation, gut.org gAG. In the betterplace lab, we have replaced me as boss with a radical form of self-organisation. Since 2016, the team has been working with a competence-based hierarchy without a fixed boss or manager. But as I can’t let go fully, I still provide some sparring four days a month. 

In 2014 my children's crime novel Edwina Ermittelt was published (Gestalten Verlag, Berlin). Like almost all my projects, I realized it with a friend, Judith Homoki. 

Together with my husband Stephan and two other friends, I co-founded Das Dach Berlin in 2018. Intended as a space for meaningful innovations, we are working on various projects involving systems change and write together under the pseudonym Keks Ackerman.  

I also support a number of for-profit and not-for-profit digital-global organisations, and invest in some meaningful startups. Check out this website to see who they are.

2019 - today

In the last decade my life has been greatly enriched by a new focus on inner work, meditation and other contemplative approaches. Largely inspired by the spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl, I am exploring how outer and inner dimensions of life influence each other and how we can both “grow up” psychologically and “wake up” spiritually. How can we navigate the increasingly complex and fluid digital-global world and innovate in such a way that we realize our individual and collective potential? Together with friends I organize a series of meditation retreats, among others in our hamlet La Haute Carpeneé in the South of France.

Most recently I have turned to an exploration of the Future of Work. 2019 saw the publication of New Work needs Inner Work (German version), followed by the English version The Future of Work needs Inner Work (both with Bettina Rollow, Vahlen Verlag 2019, 2020) as well as the Online Course of the same name. Since 2022 the book is also available as an audiobook, read by myself. My podcast Being Underwater deals with inner work in the digital age. 

In my book Innenansicht. Eine Dekade Inner Work und New Work (2021) I dive into my own developmental and spiritual journey to convey a sense of the inner work path. The book is both for people who are curious about the subject without any personal experience so far, as well as for those on the path, who are interested in a wider map and differentiated vocabulary to describe inner states and experiences. 2022 Bettina Rollow and I published Die Entfaltete Organisation. Mit Inner Work die Zukunft gestalten, in which we provide an in-depth account of organisation change which fully includes the inner dimension of life.

And now there is also brafe.space in my life - a community of entrepreneurs who want to engage with new perspectives and form deeper relationships with themselves, one another, and the world around them.

The common thread running through all my activities is that I have a strong base in my family and at the same time like to live at the edge of the present. My inner magnet is attracted by what is "edgy" and I love to bring meaningful new things into the world. I am curious what the next step will be.