In 1970, Otto Muehl founded a commune in his Vienna apartment that became famous for its radicalness. In 1972, the communards acquired the last habitable building on an abandoned farm on the Parndorfer Heide: Friedrichshof.
It became the center of an international network of over 20 groups across half of Europe within just two decades, in which over 600 people practiced a radical-utopian life according to the principles “self-representation, collective property, free love without fixed couples, shared work and production, collective childrearing and direct democracy.”
When criminal charges were brought against Muehl and dissatisfaction among commune members increased, the entire collection was brought into a cooperative in the late 1980s. The experiment of communal living was abandoned in 1990. In the fall of 1991, Otto Muehl was convicted for the sexual abuse of children.
An important goal of SAMMLUNG FRIEDRICHSHOF is to explore the history within the commune in a differentiated fashion and to investigate how an anarchist-libertarian group could turn into a hierarchical system over the course of twenty years. An interdisciplinary academic research project using the means of “oral history” and the examination of the extant archival materials is in the process of preparing a detailed history of the Friedrichshof commune and its failure.
The archival materials can be studied for academic purposes in a room especially designed for this purpose.