Welcome to Vienna’s anti-fascist duelling scene

Student duelling fraternities such as this were once widespread in Germany and Austria, but today only around two percent of students belong to one. Many of the clubs have a justified reputation for Nazi sympathies and antisemitism. One fraternity, the Albia, stipulates that it will only accept members who belong to the German Volksgemeinschaft — a Nazi-era term synonymous with ethnic Germans. “It is incorrect to infer xenophobia or racism from the non-acceptance of foreigners,” says the Gothia, another Viennese fraternity, without a trace of irony. 

In contrast to the Albia and the Gothia, however, the Corps Ottonen has Jewish members and explicitly rejects the antisemitism of its far-right rivals. This stance is borne out in their history. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, many fraternities welcomed the occupation, but members of the Corps Ottonen joined the underground anti-Nazi Resistance – some gave their lives for the cause. (In 2008, Austria’s national fund for victims of Nazism funded a book on the Corps Ottonen’s anti-Nazi history.) Today, Ottonen members of all faiths annually celebrate Hanukkah to honour their Jewish members killed fighting the Nazis.

I’d found the club after going down a German-language Wikipedia rabbit hole into student duelling. It turned out that the club had been dissolved after the Second World War, and only re-founded in 1992. And so here it was, an embodiment of 19th-century values that had somehow smuggled its way into the 21st century. 

It felt very dashing, and not very real. Now I was here, at a postwar tenement after sundown, in a smoke-filled basement with alarmingly large sabres lying on tables and burly men nursing pitchers of beer, and I felt quite glad I’d sent my location to my flatmate. 

After introductions, I asked the members to clarify the politics of their club. It’s “anti-fascist but centre-right,” Shogun said. “If you are proud to be an Austrian, if you’re patriotic, but not so pig-headed as to say you’re nationalist, then you’re right here.”

David, a 37-year-old manager at Siemens codenamed Mephisto, agreed. (The codenames are a 19th-century tradition in Austrian fraternities.) “What we try to show,” David said, “is that there’s a big difference between patriotism and nationalism, and we try to bring people to the ‘patriotism’ side.”

The club itself is more egalitarian than one might expect a group of monarchists to be. The members I met were project managers and programmers, not dukes. “It’s not about social status,” Shogun said. He did admit, though, there were some “influential” regular members outside the Habsburgs. One person’s great-grandfather was Archduke Franz Ferdinand – every May, the descendant invites the whole fraternity to his castle in southern Austria. “But still, I can talk to him just like a normal person,” Shogun added.

Everyone underlined the diversity of the club, even if it is all-male. “We have atheists, and we have homosexuals, we have hetrosexuals,” Mephisto told me. “It’s very non-homogenous.” Shogun is Buddhist; there are Jewish and Serbian Orthodox members.

The most evocative part of the Corps Ottonen is perhaps the sword-fighting. Prospective members (as well as sitting two history exams) must fight a Mensur — a kind of duel. They don a chainmail shirt and steampunk-style metal goggles, and cross blades for a set amount of bouts. Most Mensur are friendlies, but some are hostile: they aim to settle feuds. 

On one occasion, a member of a rival far-right fraternity patronised a young Corps Ottonen member, so Anubis challenged him to a duel. (Normally, challengers hand over a ripped calling card. Anubis’ challenger didn’t have a card, so he wrote his phone number on a piece of paper. “It was worse than cringe,” Anubis remembered.)

There are never winners or losers in any of the duels; unlike fencing matches, they are not competitive. It’s about conflict resolution, Shogun explained. The idea is, after the duel both duellers should make up their differences and head to the pub. Shogun – who is 39 – valued the mutual respect it brought. “That’s one thing I miss in the current generation.” 

For Mephisto, a selling point of both the Mensur and the Corps Ottonen more broadly is the menswear. “In modern times, you hardly have any occasions to dress up,” he said. “I can’t even wear a full suit to work, because then my colleagues might think I’m strange.”

Shogun emphasises the safety of the Mensur: Swords are disinfected between bouts; doctors are always present. “Boxing could be more dangerous,” he said. Still, especially with the hostile type of Mensur, there are injuries. The swords are sharp and the duellers wear nothing on their heads but the goggles. Anubis showed me a post-duel picture of him and his challenger: the latter had blood streaming down his face. “Is Mensur legal?” “It’s legal,” Anubis told me. 

Things like the Mensur, he explained, seem bizarre, but they have a rationale. It means that testosterone-fueled young men who might otherwise join a far-right fraternity come to the Corps Ottonen. Deradicalising young men is crucial to reversing the electoral success of far-right parties like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which as of September is now the biggest party in Austria. The hard-right German AfD has almost doubled its support among young people in the last year — especially with young men. 

Perhaps the biggest thing the Ottonen offers is the sense of community. Membership is lifelong; the atmosphere is like a “family,” Shogun told me. Anubis agreed. “If you scream and you need help, there’s a brother here that helps you,” he told me. That kind of community explicitly aimed at men is rare today, which worsens the male loneliness epidemic and helps the far right.

In the Ottonen, men get community, and friendly dissuasion from radicalism. For instance, to win over members who are sceptical of immigration, Shogun points to Austrian history: “Austria was always a multi-people state,” he says. “Within the whole Austrian Empire, more than half were non-German speakers.” He points to the glories of Viennese art and architecture, made by people from “all over Europe”. “We can’t be purely German. It’s not our identity.”

It helps that the Corps Ottonen’s patrons are strident pan-Europeans: its previous patron, Otto von Habsburg, directed retired Corps Ottonen members to help organise the Pan-European Picnic in 1989, creating the largest exodus of East German citizens since the erection of the Berlin Wall and hastening the fall of the Soviet Bloc. 

Today, the fraternity is more ambivalent about its Habsburg links. On the “values” section of the Ottonen website, along with stressing tolerance and brotherhood, the fraternity declares its “loyalty to the Austrian Empire.” That doesn’t mean, it hastens to declare, that it wants an “unconditional” return; the Habsburg Empire is more a model for modern EU-style European integration. 

Still, many members are fans of royalty. Shogun prefers a British-style constitutional monarch (“King Charles is very vocal about ecological things,” he tells me) ; Anubis liked the idea of a monarch with the powers of the current Austrian president. 

Many members of the Corps Ottonen don’t have strong opinions about monarchy at all. “Even if some of our members are republicans, we will stay true to the House of Habsburg,” Shogun said. But the monarchy isn’t always too bothered about the members. The House of Habsburg people (Karl and his brothers, the “direct line”) only show up for special events, Shogun said. 

Everyone I talked to seemed deadly serious about the swords, and the chainmail, and the nostalgia for long-gone empires. But I sometimes struggled to reconcile their lifestyle with reality. Mephisto, for instance, was part of a historical re-enactment group before “upgrading” to the Corps Ottonen. Unlike the re-enactment group, he denied the fraternity had any element of cosplay. In the Corps Ottonen, he said, you couldn’t just act out the rituals: you had to seriously imbibe the values that went along with them. “It’s something that you have to feel… some common sense of honour, and maybe even chivalry” 

For Anubis, the royal connection, however symbolic, is what makes the fraternity more than a re-enactment society. “We don’t think it’s a fantasy — there’s something real behind it.”

Shogun also explained that the fraternity’s promise of brotherhood had deep personal significance. “I haven’t got very many people I can speak with openly,” he told me. He’s often struggled with his mental health; the fraternity has been there for him. He has mobility issues that stop him from fighting the Mensur, but that isn’t a problem. “They were okay with the limitations I’ve got, with my quirks, my personality, and I felt accepted.” For decades, he struggled to find anywhere he properly fit in. “I never really found my home. And then I came here, I found a family, I found friends, and I found a sense of belonging.”

I asked Mephisto if he’d call the Corps Ottonen a kind of mental health support group. He said he would, at least partly. “Sometimes,” he said, “we just need to help each other when the job sucks.”