DailyMail 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, MailOnline 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.
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.
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.
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.
His declared aim of the commune was the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property, free love, and collective education of the children.
