Hi Veritas - it is nice to see a fellow German fraternity member in this list...1.
Now to your questions Silver Turtle:
Do you most or all of the organizations have the sword-fighting?
There are about 1000 chapters of different fraternity organizations all over Germany and Austria. I would say most of them are fencing but as to membership the non-fencing ones are the biggest
2. Is there a name (like 'fraternity' or 'Greek letter organizations' in America) that describes all of the groups?
The German word is "Studentenverbindung" - that really covers them all
3. Why were fraternities there banned, and when did it become okay for them to exist?
The origin of the fraternities we have today dates back to the middle ages and the foundations of the first universities in Europe. At that time students from different nations gathered in national groups.In Germany fraternity life started mostly in and after the post-napoleonic liberation war in the early 19th century when students took part in the war and later demanded unification of the particularistic (that is devided in numerous little kingdoms and such)
Germany. That early time was pretty hard and all fraternities were prosecuted for revolutionary activities.... Still, fraternities were in a large way responsible for the German revolution of 1848 trying to establish the first democracy.
A second very hard time came in the thirties an fourties of this century when the Nazi's prohibited all fraternity organizantions. The reason was quite simple: they had democratic structures and very independent ways of thinking......
Nowadays we don't face legal opposition but we face the same predjudices as you do.
Best, matthewg
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