AAO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5nXuvyBvjI

The documentary „Meine keine Familie“ („My fathers, my mother and me,“ Austria 2012) tells the story of the Friedrichshof Commune in the Austrian Burgenland near Vienna from the perspective of one of the children born and raised there. The director, Paul-Julien Robert, lived in the commune for the first 12 years of his life as one of 80 children. Friedrichshof was founded and led by the Vienna actionist Otto Mühl, who died this May. He spent his last years in Portugal after serving an 8-year prison sentence for sexual abuse of minors.

The Aktionsanalytische Organisation (AAO), as the commune called itself, was meant to function as a kind of long-term psychotherapy, in which physical self-expression performed in front of and together with the whole group would replace the need for intellectual analysis. The communards rejected traditional marriage and private property, practiced free love, and collectively organised the upbringing of the children, dismissing the idea of a special bond of a child to its parents. In the course of the commune’s history, Mühl became more and more abusive, publicly shaming children and adults, ruling randomly, while apparently not prevented from doing so by the members themselves, who instead abided by the so-called “Struktur”, a strict hierarchical order of the communards implemented by Mühl. The film is shocking and moving because the director is in many ways motivated by his own traumatic biography and the question of how to deal with the abuse and neglect on the side of his mother and of his extended commune family.

In the course of their “treatment”, the communards were obligated to commit a symbolic and public patricide, Vatermord, directed against a generation of authoritative, bigoted father figures who had made themselves collectively guilty of a historical denial and emotional disengagement. In the documentary, the artist Theo Altenberg explains that during the sessions at Friedrichshof in reference to his mother he came up with the association of having grown up in chilly amniotic fluid (Fruchtwasser).

The film itself is also a Vatermord, a way of ridding oneself of the phantoms of one’s childhood. Robert introduces all three of his possible biological fathers while excavating the damming evidence, all recorded on film, of the acts of the symbolic father Otto Mühl. Mühl’s theory stated that every child is born socially and psychologically “healthy” and is made sick by the crime of parenting in the restrictive structures of the nuclear family. Of course he was a case in point himself for the destructive nature of education.

Today we live in a setting that has reverted so strongly to the bourgeois idea of the prodigal Bio-Laden-fed, gluten free 1,36 children per woman that the commune ideology seems especially scandalous. But the question remains and is raised by one of the former commune children in regard to his own son: how to bring up a child without transferring your own inherited damage to the next generation?

Theo Altenberg, Kommune Friedrichshof, 1976