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.
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.’
It wasn’t the only meaningful relationship Inka lost. When she was deemed as getting too close to one of her substitute mothers, Kate, she was taken away from her and placed with another group.
During her eight years in the commune, Inka had at least five substitute mothers and fathers.
Anyone who disagreed with the commune’s rules was punished, ridiculed or degraded by Otto and the collective, she explains. He was an authoritarian figure who was at best dismissive and condescending, at worst cruel and abusive.
It operated behind the facade of being a ‘free love’ commune. Muehl believed that society’s problems were caused by suppressed sexuality and that women should orgasm only from penetration. Sex was discussed openly at all times and in shared forums, occupants would critique each other’s sexuality. Muehl banned foreplay, homosexuality and emotional or loving relationships.
Teenage girls were forced to have sex with Muehl – a fate Inka managed to escape as she left the cult when she was 12. When she thinks about him now, she wrinkles her face in disgust. ‘He was just gross’, she remembers.
More disturbingly, Otto expected his disciples to have sex multiple times a day, with people who worked out of the commune coming home at lunch for sex with different partners. It meant that Inka, who slept in rooms with her substitute mothers, was exposed to constant sexual activity from the day she arrived.
‘Every night, some new guy would come and have sex with her, and I was there. So it’s kind of like being around a prostitute. I don’t remember if I was frightened, but I spoke to Kate [her favourite substitute mother who she is still in touch with] recently about it. And she told me that one time, this larger guy came in and I was crying. So I guess I was frightened.
Nudity was also common and Inka remembers being asked to touch naked adults. ‘The atmosphere of sex was there, always,’ she recalls. In the evenings members would be expected to take part in an activity known as ‘selbstdarstellung’ which means self-representation but was actually the opposite, Inka explains.
‘The whole group would get together, and people would sing and dance and Otto would tell people what to do, and there would be nude drawing. Or we would go for hikes or swimming in the lake. So from the outside, it looked idyllic. People would think: “Oh the kids have this great life.” But that didn’t show the emotional weight of what was happening.
‘Yes we were clothed and fed, but after school there would be a “palaver”.’
This was a daily ritual where the youngsters’ behaviours were held to account by Otto and those higher up the hierarchy. Their place was denoted with a number; Otto was number one and his wife was two.
‘The grown ups were in a circle with the children in the middle, and the bad things we did were discussed. It could have been anything that wasn’t considered good for the bigger whole. If what you did was considered bad, you would be moved lower down the hierarchy. So there was this idea that the play would feel very free, but then there was this other aspect of highly regulated, controlled, authoritarian living where you could be punished for anything you did.
‘My coping mechanism was to try and do everything correctly. And I was always high in the hierarchy, because I did what I was told. Although I do remember one time when I was five or six, and I was supposed to get a broom, but didn’t, so I was lowered in hierarchy. Shame was used to control us.
Like all members of a cult, Inka didn’t realise how wrong these methods were. ‘I was brainwashed. It just felt like this is how it is. And obviously, like any other child who accepts the outside reality as fact you then blame yourself’, she explains.
What began as a radical experiment, soon descended into depravity and Muehl became more and more greedy for younger victims. Then, in 1991, he was convicted of sexual abuse of minors, sentenced to seven years in prison and the commune fell apart.
Inka’s mother came and picked her up and took her to a boarding school in Berlin.
Although she reconnected with her dad, the pair never formed a meaningful relationship and Inka moved to the US in 2006 and has been living in LA ever since.
Her father passed away in 2008 and Muehl died five years later.
‘When Otto died, it was such a relief. I didn’t expect to have that reaction to his death’, admits Inka. ‘Because I was so well-adapted, I didn’t realise how much anger I had until my mid 20s.’
It took Inka years to understand how wrong and unnatural the rules that governed her formative experiences had been. She was left with attachment issues and in need of therapy. Many of the children she grew up with – some who needed paternity tests because no one kept track of fatherhood in the cult – ended up very scarred, struggling with anxiety, depression, addiction and other issues.
‘As an adult, if I heard sex around me, I would get this feeling in my body, like being scared, when I hear people having sex. It would make me freeze,’ she explains. The way she connected in sexual relationships was also affected. ‘There were definitely some things that I felt like I couldn’t give to a partner, because it would felt like giving up too much of myself.’
But a career pivot helped Inka heal when she was in her thirties and working in costume design.
She’d had an abortion and lost her sex drive, when, she explains, ‘I was wondering what I could do to help the situation. And so I thought, well, people watch porn for this sort of thing.
‘Me and my partner started looking around, but I found I couldn’t watch any of it – it was disgusting. It was all from the male point of view and lacked visual appeal.’
Wondering why no-one was making porn for women, Inka decided to make some herself.
‘I realised that behind the camera, I am in full control. It is so different from my childhood experience that it doesn’t elicit the same trauma response. It is empowering because I, and everyone else on the set, have consented to and chosen what is happening’, she explains.
Inka now directs what she describes as ‘ethical, feminist’ porn with a wholesome feel.
One of her films features a man whose foreplay with a bartender involves him helping her clear up at the end of her shift. Another features two actors, who were in a relationship, beginning their lovemaking with a real-life proposal. And she creates masturbation sessions led by mindfulness. She wants her work to act as an antidote to the culture of toxic films that promote misogyny.
‘It is wholesome because it is comforting and makes you feel good. I am making the female experience front and centre,’ Inka says. ‘I think that what people see in popular media affects their behaviour, and so I feel like if I show something that is how I want men to behave, I’m hoping that it will make an impact.
‘To me it’s educating men and mirroring women is so that they can feel empowered in their own sexuality because they feel represented authentically.’
Inka makes these films both in spite of and because of her childhood in the cult. She has seen what it is like when boundaries are crossed and her ethical, feminist approach aims to correct this wrong, for herself, the actors and the viewer.
Meanwhile, Inka is unable to leave her experience of the cult behind. She and other members are claiming reparations.
Muehl’s artworks have recently been sold for millions, with proceeds due to go to the legal entity comprised of former Friedrichshof Commune members with the older members claiming a share.
For Inka and the child members, this is unfair. ‘They chose to be there. We were there against our will. We have to work with the former grown ups to claim this money. And half of them are telling us – yes – you deserve this. Whatever happened was horrible. And then there is not a small amount of people who are saying: “Was it really that bad?” Or that they deserve the money.
‘I can’t tell that story until we get the reparations, if we ever do. But there are people who, 30 years later, haven’t realised that what they did really affected us, traumatically.
I’ve been in therapy since I was 16, and that’s really helped me. I am learning, is that in a way, I don’t think that society now is very different from the cult,’ adds Inka.
‘The cult was like an extreme version of society, #MeToo has shown us that. It’s only the tip of the iceberg.’
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