For a little girl with no parents around, life in the commune was frightening (Picture: Thao Kieu/Supplied)
Inka Winter has no memories of the day she arrived at the commune as a tiny child.
After her father abandoned the family, her mother had to seek work in Berlin, so four-year-old Inka was left at the headquarters of a ‘socialist living experiment’ just outside Vienna.
The commune looked like the perfect place to leave the little girl in others’ care while she earned enough money to support them both, her mother thought, and she made sure she visited regularly.
For Inka, who now has a good relationship with her mother, it is difficult to talk about their past. She doesn’t know if she was too young to remember the separation or if she has blocked it out to protect herself from the trauma.
Inka didn’t realise it at the time, but the utopian community which she was expected to make her home was soon to descend into a sex cult where women were expected to have sex with multiple men under the controlling eye of Otto Muehl, a former soldier who had fought for the Wehrmacht – the armed forces of Nazi Germany.
‘Free love’ was the lynchpin of Muehl’s Friedrichshof Commune, and members were expected to sleep with everyone, possessions and childcare were communal, nudity was commonplace and family relationships were forbidden.
The Friedrichshof Commune was dissolved in 1990 (Picture: Supplied)
For a little girl with no parents around, life in the commune – which German-born Inka describes as similar to a farm or country estate – was confusing and frightening, and she was introduced to sex too early.
‘We were put in these family units, with an amount of children with a handful of grown ups that would be their caretakers,’ she tells Metro over Zoom from her home in LA. ‘Emotionally, I was lonely. Because while there were a lot of people, there was never one person that you could go to with anything. If you hurt yourself. Who do you go to? Who do you tell?’
Muehl believed that things like monogamy and nuclear family units stifled human development, and blaming parents for many of society’s problems, he separated kids from their mums and dads.
It meant that the children at the 600-strong commune would sleep in a room with a substitute parent who would change periodically so connections couldn’t form.
When five-year-old Inka and another little boy formed a close friendship amongst the chaos, the pair were quickly punished.
‘We were accused of having a relationship, even though we were just five,’ she remembers. ‘Otto held this court, with me on one side of the room and him on the other. It was discussed with everyone, how what we were doing was bad, and then I was suddenly kicked out of the ‘family’. I was devastated.’
Life in the commune was confusing and frightening for Inka (Picture: Supplied)
It wasn’t the only meaningful relationship Inka lost. When she was deemed as getting too close to one of …read more
Source:: Metro
