Students who want to be accepted into Austria’s secretive student fraternities have to prove their bravery by facing down the razor-sharp blade of an opponent’s sabre in a fencing duel.

But in a week in which Austria’s burschenschaften have come under assault from newspaper exposés and feminist pranksters, some of the country’s steadfast frat boys have started to flinch.

Austria’s vice-chancellor and Freedom party (FPÖ) leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, is expected to don the pill-box cap of his Vandalia fraternity on Friday night for an annual ball at Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Palace that will gather members of rightwing student societies from across Austria.

Yet days earlier, Strache had to insist “fraternities have nothing to do with the FPÖ”, after prosecutors started to investigate the songbook of one of his party colleague’s fraternities for containing lyrics mocking the Holocaust.

Q&A What does Austria's Freedom party stand for? Show Hide In December, Austria became the only western European state with a far-right presence in government when the nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ) agreed to enter a coalition with the centre-right People's party. Founded in 1955, the FPÖ has maintained historical links with pan-German nationalists. Though it positions itself as a defender of tradition, it has been accused of anti-Semitism and airbrushing the country’s Nazi past.

Austria’s vice-chancellor and FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, has warned of Austria’s “Islamification” and the party's hardline stance against immigration was credited with influencing the centre-right People's party's 2017 campaign promise to halt illegal immigration. When the FPÖ last joined Austria's government in 2000, the move was met with international outrage and the EU briefly imposed sanctions. But inside Austria, it is thought that the stint in government has helped to normalise its presence in the political landscape.

The party aligns itself with France's Front National and the Alternative for Germany.

Organisers of the FPÖ-funded “Academics Ball” have also been unnerved, imposing heightened security such as facial recognition cameras after a satirical feminist fraternity announced plans to infiltrate and disrupt the event.

Vienna police said they were likely to employ as many 3,000 officers to protect the ball’s 2,500 visitors in anticipation of more vigorous protests than in recent years.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s vice-chancellor, is expected to attend the annual Academics Ball in Vienna. Photograph: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

The far-right FPÖ has struggled to divert the spotlight from its roots in nationalistic student networks since it formed a coalition government with the centre-right Austrian People’s party of the chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, in December.

When the FPÖ last formed a government at the start of the millennium, its former leader Jörg Haider kept party activists with fraternity backgrounds out of prominent positions. But the FPÖ’s current leadership has until now been more open about its past.

Out of the party’s 51 MPs, 18 are active members of rightwing fraternities, including five of its six chairmen. They include not just its leader, Strache, but also the FPÖ negotiator, Harald Stefan, whose Olympia fraternity has called for Poland and Austria to be included in German reunification. “I feel German,” he told Austrian television in 2008.

They also include the transport minister, Norbert Hofer, whose fraternity Marko-Germania’s founding document rejects the modern state of Austria as a “history-defying fiction”, and who in a speech at last year’s Academics Ball emphasised that he wore the colours of the German flag “with pride”.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the fraternities have taken control of the Freedom party,” said Hans-Henning Scharsach, the author of a prize-winning book on the subject, Silent Takeover.



While German fraternities can range from far-right national socialists to liberal societies, Scharsach explained, Austria’s fraternity movement has to be located on a more narrowly nationalistic spectrum. “Because they were based outside German borders, Austrian corporations have always had to be more vocal about their commitment to the idea of a ‘Greater Germany’ based on ethnicity,” he said.

One such vocal declaration of allegiance to the pan-German idea landed the FPÖ in hot water this week. On Tuesday, the weekly newspaper Falter published excerpts from a songbook used by the fraternity Germania zu Wiener Neustadt that celebrated atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht and mocked Holocaust victims.

“In their midst comes the Jew Ben-Gurion: ‘Step on the gas, you ancient Germanic peoples, we’ll manage the seventh million,’” ran one of the lyrics quoted, a reference to Israel’s first prime minister and the 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis during the second world war.

Germania’s deputy co-chairman, Udo Landbauer, is running as one of the FPÖ’s top candidates in Sunday’s state elections in Lower Austria. His spokesperson told Falter he had only seen a copy of the book with pages and passages torn or blackened out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Duelling at a German student fraternity depicted in a painting from about 1900. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

Friday’s Academics Ball in Vienna illustrates the FPÖ’s dilemma: political calculation may command the party’s politicians to distance themselves from a pan-German ideology that is unpopular with the overwhelming majority of Austrian voters, but their fraternities demand unflinching loyalty to their traditions.

The ball’s organiser, the FPÖ member Udo Guggenbichler, told the Kurier newspaper this week that Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, had also once been a member of an Austrian fraternity. He did not mention that Herzl had left the Albia fraternity two years later because of its antisemitic tendencies.

Last year’s Academics Ball was interrupted when a satirical feminist fraternity called Hysteria unfurled a banner featuring a picture of a laughing hyena, which the group described as its “heraldic animal” because “it lives in matriarchal structures dominated by females, in which only the most docile males can survive genetically”.

On its website, Hysteria announced it had “officially” taken over the Academics Ball this year and planned to provide “might-night entertainment” for the event, which it renamed the “ball for the protection of men”. In an email exchange with the Guardian, a Hysteria member said the fraternity believed in the urgent need to curb men’s right to vote.

“Men are very emotional and tend to ignore the consequences their decisions can have on society as a whole,” the spokeswoman said. “It is for this reason that they have for centuries ended up doing harm to their own cause. Their mode of thinking is very suitable for parental care, but not for important structural and political decision-making.”

Hysteria came to the Austrian public’s attention when its uniformed members acted as stewards at a reading by the feminist author Stefanie Sargnagel in February 2016. However, the fraternity’s spokeswoman claimed it had been founded in 1810 – 40 years earlier than the country’s first officially known male fraternity.