Founded by a sick paedophile artist in Vienna in the 1970s, the Friedrichshof Commune was a radical experiment in communal living that saw its leader encourage polygamous sex between the cult’s 600-strong membership before he was thrown behind bars for raping underage girls.
Otto Muehl was the co-creator of the Viennese Actionist movement – a group that was known for its bloody and scatalogical sexual performances – including 1968’s Kunst und Revolution where Muehl and his friends stripped naked, defecated on the floor before smearing it on themselves while masturbating and singing the Austrian national anthem in a classroom at Vienna University.
Muehl, who was called Papa by his followers, built his disturbing world with the belief that humanity’s future lay in a life of ‘free love’ while dictating that all his followers must have sex at least four times a day, but strictly with different partners as couple relationships were forbidden.
As his twisted fantasies grew even more perverse, and the women within the commune began falling pregnant with many not knowing who the father was, the children grew up to worship the cult leader like a God, with Muehl once chillingly recalling in a film that they would even queue up to wipe his bottom after he had been to the toilet and swarm around him while he showered.
Now, almost 35 years after the far-left Friedrichshof Commune was dissolved following Muehl’s conviction of widespread sexual abuse of minors who grew up with him, has taken a look inside the extreme ‘sex cult’ that found brainwashed women and girls pining for a touch, a kiss or an invitation to ‘Papa’s’ bed.
Otto Muehl, an artist from the 60s, founded the Friedrichshof Commune which had over 600 members (pictured centre)
The Founder
Otto Muehl, was an Austrian artist and convicted sex criminal best known for his role in co-founding Viennese Actionism and for founding the notorious Friedrichshof Commune.
Before Muehl became the authoritarian sect he is widely recognised as today, he served in the Wehrmacht – the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany.
He was then promoted to a lieutenant position, and in 1944, he was involved in infantry battles during the course of the last major German offensive campaign – the Battle of the Bulge.
After the war had ended, Muehl retired from the battlefield and studied teaching German and history, and Pedagogy of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
He would go on to display his work at the Louvre and the Leopold Museum in Vienna; and in the United States it was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Maccarone gallery in New York.
He began experimenting with action art – artistic live performances that would sometimes run on for days, but each one would become more depraved as Muehl let his imagination run free.
He had swapped the canvas for the human body, and created disturbing pieces that would use limbs and body fluids in place of paper and paints.
Muehl gained a reputation as a sex communist in the early 70s before starting his ‘sex cult’
The artist experimented with Action Art – which saw performances with men and women, often in the nude, which would sometimes be days-long
He had sought to create a community that would tear down traditional bourgeois values, in favor of communal living and uninhibited sexual expression
Pictured: A live action art performance by Otto Muehl and Guenter Brus, in Porrhaus, Vienna, 1967
Muehl went on to gain notoriety for his scoptophilic ‘performances’ that involved naked people rolling around in paint, mud, and feces groping each other, and often ended with the artist either defecating on someone or urinating in a performer’s mouth.
In 1962, when he was 37, his first ‘Aktion’ Die Blutorgel – The Blood Organ – saw three artists performing a crucifixion and the disemboweling and tearing apart of a dead lamb.
The slaughtered and skinned lamb was crucified with its head down and nailed into a vaulted arch, and the innards were placed on a table and covered with blood and hot water.
Actions such as these by the Viennese Actionists, who were operating covertly at the time, were summarised under the term ‘orgy-mystery theater’.
After several more displays, the most famous would take place just six years later.
In June 1968, in front of around 300 spectators in Lecture Hall 1 of the New Institute Building of the University of Viennan Muehl, along with his actionist friends Gunter Brus, Peter Weibel, Oswald Wiener, and Malte Olschewski, carried out a disturbing act that went down in Austrian art history as one of the most famous performances of the post-war period.
The Kunst und Revolution – Art and Revolution – saw the group of five breaking several taboos: nudity, relieving oneself, masturbation, whipping, self-mutilation, smearing one’s own excrement on one’s naked body and vomiting by irritating the esophagus – and all while singing the Austrian national anthem while lying on an unfurled Austrian national flag.
While Brus mutilated himself, Muehl simulated a masturbation scene and gave a lecture with a burning glove, a tirade against Austria’s government.
Muehl gained a reputation as a sex communist and just two years later, he took his obsession to new heights, and formed Friedrichshof, as a sort of anti-society, in the outskirts of Vienna.
Actions performed by the Viennese Actionists, who were operating covertly at the time, were summarised under the term ‘orgy-mystery theater’
Pictured: Otto Muehl, Austrian actionist with a member of his commune, Photograph, 1975
His declared aim of the commune was the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property, free love, and collective education of the children.
But under this pretense of freedom, Muehl would eventually steer his community down a dark and sinister path of perverse sexual destruction.
Inside Friedrichshof
Muehl ruled over his members with an iron fist, creating a series of rules and demands that controlled the sex lives of each of his followers.
An enormous complex was built just outside of Vienna that housed dozens of children, who slept communally in one area, and dozens of adults, who slept communally in another.
He had sought to create a community that would tear down traditional bourgeois values, in favor of communal living and uninhibited sexual expression.
The commune’s ideology was centered around the practice of ‘Action Analysis’ – a form of group-therapy inspired by Muehl’s creative, yet disturbing, performances during the sixties.
The practice involved public confessions, role-playing, and often sexually explicit performances that intended to break down social barriers and individual inhibitions.
These sessions were frequently recorded on video, with the resulting footage becoming part of the commune’s artistic output.
At its peak, the commune was home to some 600 members who participated in a lifestyle marked by extreme social experiments, including partner swapping and communal child-rearing.
Muehl’s practices also involved separating children from their biological parents to break traditional familial bonds and banning monogamous relationships.
Foreplay and affection during sex was not permitted under the artist’s strict rules and regulations, and if a man failed to find a woman to sleep with on a particular night, he wouldn’t have a bed.
Predictably, perhaps, the commune soon became riddled with gonorrhoea, lice, cystitis and diarrhoea, through mass sharing of bodily fluids from countless different commune members.
Many children were born having no idea who their father was.
Muehl could rarely walk through the commune grounds with fewer than 30 women swarming around him
He started telling women aged 35 and above that they were too old for him to want to have sex with, and that he preferred ‘younger flesh’
But soon, what was set out to be a free-love community of artistic existence and self expression degenerated into what has often been described as a ‘cult’ – with Muehl’s hunger for power and dominance causing the commune to come crashing down.
Women began viewing Muehl as an esteemed sexual figure who they would begin fighting each other over for just a second of his attention.
Star-struck women queued to sleep with the leader and the pressure that was placed on the other men within the commune to try and emulate his immense sexual output sparked the power hungry dictator to set up an official sexual hierarchy.
This began with a First Lady, who was Otto’s favourite of the moment, all the way down to the most shy and unattractive female members of the commune who would only get to sleep with the most timid and undesirable males.
Women who had joined from across the globe – but mostly northern Europe – as academics, artists, and socialists found themselves in competition with others for sexual favours of a man three decades their senior.
Muehl could rarely walk through the commune grounds with fewer than 30 women swarming around him while they shoved each other out of the way in a bid to steal a kiss, a touch, or better yet – an invitation to his bed.
But as the commune’s babies began to grow into puberty, ‘Papa’ Otto found he preferred to sleep with the younger girls to their mothers.
He started telling women aged 35 and above that they were too old for him to want to have sex with, and that he preferred ‘younger flesh’.
Brought up my their mothers to regard sex with Muehl as a privilege, girls – sometimes as young as 14 – would line up to wipe his bottom after he had been to the toilet and flocked around him while he bathed.
Muehl’s practices also involved separating children from their biological parents to break traditional familial bonds and banning monogamous relationships
Pictured: An action art performance by Otto Muehl and Guenter Brus, in Porrhaus, Vienna, 1967
According to reports from former communards, personal sexual initiation for girls within the community began at age 14, and 14-year-old boys would be initiated with Claudia – his wife or ‘First Woman’.
As the commune steered further away from a place of ‘free love’ and artistic freedom, the sexual requirements became further instilled into the backbone of the community until Muehl began raping young girls under the pretense of it being ‘sexual and political liberation’.
The End of Friedrichshof
In 1991, the Friedrichshof Commune dissolved after Muehl was arrested and jailed for seven years for the sexual abuse of teenage girls and drug-law violations.
He served six-and-a-half years behind bars before his release in 1997, aged 73, where he spent his time in Portugal at a different commune he founded, suffering from Parkinson’s.
Similarly to the original Friedrichshof members, they were all commanded to sleep with a different partner every night – apart, that is, from Muehl, who could sleep with whomever he wanted whenever he wanted.
Following his release from prison, Muehl had several interactions with press and media, while he expressed deep regrets for his actions, he claimed his involvement with the young women at the commune was inseparable from his political mission.
‘Why should the government dictate when you should have sex?’ he asked a Frankfurt newspaper in 2004.
‘I’m not a child molester,’ he told Die Zeit. ‘This is nonsense. The girls were all developed.’
Muehl produced no more public actions and became a painter in the expressionist style, painting around 300 pictures and writing about art theory while he was in prison.
Over two decades after he was arrested, in 2010, Muehl made a public apology regarding the role he played in the Friedrichshof Commune.