When housing managers react with aggression to simple inquiries from citizens, they are defending power dynamics rather than fairness. Those shaped by historical experiences with arbitrary bureaucracy recognize the pattern: anyone confident in the justice of their decision has no reason to fear public scrutiny.
For quite a long time I toyed with the idea of founding a cooperative. It all began in 2018, when I was still mostly moving in English-speaking circles and came across the Zebras Unite movement – and then, through Zebras Unite, dug deeper into co-ops. Among other things, I found out that in the US co-ops aren’t unpopular at all, that co-ops are fairly widespread in all kinds of areas – in food, for example, or agriculture. And in Europe, above all in Spain, and especially in the Barcelona region, there are a whole lot of interesting set-ups when it comes to co-ops.
In Germany the landscape is a bit more difficult. With Delitzsch, we are the cradle of the cooperative idea – cooperatives as such came into being in Germany, in Saxony among other places. Out of economic hardship, people organised themselves and founded businesses together whose shares they divided among themselves – whose profits, in other words, they shared among themselves.
And then, in September 2025, I met a representative of Gen Z and realised that we share a great many values, and when I mentioned that I wanted to found a cooperative, she reacted very positively and said she’d been carrying the same idea around for a long time. So the two of us set out to find people who wanted to found a cooperative with us. On 31 January we invited a gathering of about 20 people to the lobby of Capri by Fraser for exactly that.
Unfortunately, though, I had to realise that the bureaucratic hurdles are still set very high, despite the GenoDigital movement, that the whole process is very opaque – and that the power still lies with the so-called auditing associations (Prüfverbände). And that these auditing associations, the cooperative auditing associations – there are about a dozen of them in Germany – make their own rules and, above all, set their own prices. Among others, I contacted one association – I can’t remember its name right now; it was the association that SleepDrift eG from Leipzig also used, that was their recommendation. And I called this person – it was someone from Leipzig – and within about a minute he got straight to the point and said the audit would cost around 10,000 euros.
And for me that was a no-go, because in this day and age, with AI, you can’t charge 10,000 euros for an audit that AI does practically for free. What is there to audit, anyway? AI can query the parameters far better and then make a decision – because of course this auditing association can’t guarantee either that the cooperative’s business model works and is viable, especially nowadays, when nothing at all is predictable or foreseeable anymore. And this person I spoke to on the phone wouldn’t negotiate either; he just said: “Yeah, it costs 10,000 euros, ciao Kakao.” So – first I’d have to come up with 10,000 euros, and I can invest them better, more profitably, more meaningfully and more valuably than by throwing them down the throat of a cooperative association.
It was a similar story with opening a business account: that’s still very bureaucratic and very difficult too, with lots of hurdles. And my experience, my contact with Ostwerk GmbH, which supposedly supports cooperatives in the East, was very negative too, because they basically rejected our concept straight away and gave us to understand that they only support cooperatives in the traditional sense – agricultural cooperatives or building cooperatives or big businesses where there’s a lot of dosh at stake. But not what UNO.TEAM has written on its banner, Humanity at HER Best – Ostwerk couldn’t do anything with that, and still can’t. And that’s why I still see this power imbalance in the cooperatives, too. So, for now, I’m cured.
In the end the term itself is a bit outdated, too: “Genossen” – comrades. Who are the comrades? Why not Genoss:innen? And “-schaft” sounds a bit like “Mannschaft”, somehow dusty – co-op sounds much better, of course! And these hurdles also explain, I think, why the number of newly founded cooperatives is sadly still falling. I see cooperatives being founded in energy, maybe in agriculture too – there are SoLaWis, after all, community-supported farms. In our conversation with Sarah from the pastry cooperative we learned that Leipzig really is a hotspot for SoLaWis, that there are several of them. I know KoLa (Kollektive Landwirtschaft), and Sarah said no, there’s a whole bunch of other SoLaWis, and many of them then register as cooperatives – and I wish them every success with that.
For me it’s no longer a primary, immediate goal. I’ve put it on the back burner, put it on ice for now, and I want to wait and see how things develop. Sadly, I just had to realise that in this field, too, there’s a power imbalance and that patriarchal structures still come through – that with cooperatives we’re still a long way from the point where we can say: these are principles oriented towards the common good.
That’s why, for the moment, I’m stepping back from it and concentrating – I mean we, there are two of us, and maybe soon three or four, that’s really important –: we’re concentrating above all on developing our website in combination with the events we now offer on the ground, support on the ground, and for that we don’t need any bureaucratic structure or huge effort for now. Because the bureaucracy involved in founding a cooperative is of course enormous: starting with the bookkeeping – it has to be a particular software, I think it absolutely has to be DATEV, because DATEV is a cooperative too, they have the monopoly there, they prescribe it. Then there has to be an annual audit, which of course won’t be done digitally and which costs a lot of money, then we’d need office space and much more – things we might not even be thinking about right now.
I remember what it was like back when I founded my GmbH, Autotransfer.jetzt GmbH: it was a bureaucratic monster, and I’m glad I’m rid of it – because I didn’t run the GmbH, the GmbH ran me. And I think it would be similar with a cooperative now. I don’t need that, I don’t want that. By the way, I heard something very similar from Diana Osterhage, who had also first toyed with the idea of founding a UG and getting it start-up funding through Startnext. And Diana then told me that for her, too, the whole thing is far too bureaucratic and rigid, and that she’s stepping back from founding a legal entity as well – and that for now it’s about people first, and about values, about trust, about human relationships, and less about bureaucracy.
What do you take away from this thought?
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