There seems to be a great need for particularly heinous crimes to be invested with some meaning - a displacement, I think of “how could this happen?” into “what is it about this society that enables this to happen”? This is very much at issue with the horrible crimes committed by Josef Fritzl, who confined his daughter to a cellar for 24 years, and incestuously sexually abused her, leading to the birth of seven children. Much of the commentary appears to refer back to some sort of essential Austrian pathology, no doubt stimulated by the fact that this isn’t the first recent case of an abduction and forced deprivation of liberty in a cellar - the case of Natascha Kampusch was brought to the forefront of people’s minds by the revelations of Fritzl’s horrendous crimes.
The tenor of this insta-sociology is clear from the (rather asinine, imho) questions Leigh Sales put to Times Berlin bureau chief Roger Boyes on Lateline last week.
LEIGH SALES: This is not the first case of its type in Austria and you mention the issue of Austria being a “look away society”. We also had the case recently there of Natascha Kampusch, the woman, the girl who was kidnapped and kept in captivity for eight years. Every society, of course, has its inexplicable cruelties, but you’ve written that Austria in particular is a society that nurtures its secrets, that suppresses its history, that blocks out uncomfortable biographies. What do you mean by that?
There seems to be an assertion around that the Austrian failure to do de-Nazification properly (which raises the question of whether Germany did either - which is a big one) and its consensual system of politics created this “look away society”. It was to Boyes’ credit that he pinged the responsibility at a much less metaphysical or world-historical level - the uselessness of the Austrian police and bureaucracy (which of course, for readers of Robert Musil’s novels and/or students of Habsburg history, is a much older story than the Nazi one). It’s interesting to ponder why there’s an almost instant reflex to blame political culture - is that another displacement of responsibility from the pathological individual onto the responsibility of the state to protect citizens? But I’m also interested to see another sort of hidden evil which creates a similar sense of social angst ignored here - the death alone of elderly or isolated individuals in houses and apartment blocks in the modern anonymity of the city - you can no doubt all think of several recent Australian examples. These are followed by agonising over the loss of social capital and the fraying of community, just as the citizens of Amstetten are appalled that these events occurred undetected in their midst. But the occurrence of such deaths across the Western urban world suggests a deeper level of causation, if I’m right in drawing the analogy, than anything particularly Austrian. It also suggests a deeper level of anomie which is not all that amenable either to projects of national recollection or to policing.
It’s also interesting to see that the gender dimension of Fritzl’s behaviour has escaped comment entirely as far as I can tell. Perhaps that can’t be seen when the frame is in terms of family and incest.
Elsewhere: More from Gary Sauer-Thompson.
One needs to make a distinction between the crime itself and detection of the crime, although these two phenomena may be connected in some way.
it’s interesting to note that Fritzl’s brutalised daughter herself blamed her brutalisation at the hands of her father and an as-yet unknown number of others on Austria’s Nazi past.
This form of intimate analysis does deserve some thought before being chucked into the “knee-jerk basket”.
The “look-away” syndrome may be a socialised response against looking too hard for bad news in a socio-cultural context wherein bad news is all-too easy to find.
Austrian Kurt Waldheim (UN Secy Gen) had been a Nazi for God’s sake, and no one in Austria thought it noteworthy enough to mention in any publication.
That’s some “look away”!
What do you have in mind when you say ‘the gender dimension’?
I sort of agree with what you’re proposing here Kim because I did think the same sort of thoughts while reading some of the press about the Fritzls: the coverage very quickly turned into reflex, uninformed analysis & opinion sort of stuff, no doubt purely because it’s a huge story and the flow of new information dried up long before we got sick of hearing about it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no substance at all to some of the inferences journalists have begun to draw.
When I heard this was an Austrian case the first thing I thought was that Michael Haneke is from Austria - Haneke is one of the only artists I know of who cares to unsqueamishly look at and think about the sort of profoundly alienated gothic horror we’re seeing here, and at the same time to question what it is the rest of us ‘mere spectators’ get out of looking on with such fascination.
Well, if we’re making all sorts of conclusions about Austria based on this incident, I’d be interested to know more about the incidence of sexual assault and the position of women in Austria.
There’s also the fact that Fritzl arguably took the patriarchal role to the extreme - totally instrumentalising as well as abusing his daughter and their children.
The “look-away” syndrome may be a socialised response against looking too hard for bad news in a socio-cultural context wherein bad news is all-too easy to find.
Austria’s most recent Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek, has explored many of these themes in novel form, and is particularly scathing with respect to a perceived culture of misogyny, bigotry and sadism within Austria, as well as little attempt to come to grips with a Nazi past.
Most European countries had had their fill of far-rightism following WWII. Austria was the first to welcome them back, albeit in electoral form.
Crossed, laura.
As to the inferences, I think it’s a very big causal leap between a failed process of de-Nazification and a political system which tries to compose rather than argue out differences, and either Fritzl doing what he did, or no one finding out he was doing it.
The point raised in some of the reports about his wife turning a blind eye (common in child abuse cases) and repressing suspicions was more to the point, I reckon. And no doubt the lodgers thought he was a grizzly old bugger. I can’t see how anyone else could reasonably have been able to sniff anything out, and the only point at which that sniffing could have gone on was when he adopted 3 of the kids without his past offences being considered. But - in the absence of a more persuasive argument - I think DOCS in NSW shows fuck ups by child welfare authorities aren’t necessarily caused by a Nazi past.
It seems to me that what’s at issue isn’t a “look away” society peculiar to Austria but a general mode of living in the modern urban West where we are socialised into taking very little interest in what neighbours and fellow citizens are doing. That’s why I’m using the parallel of deaths not discovered in apartment buildings, etc. But I could also point to the usual refrain in crime stories when neighbours are interviewed - “I had no idea that nice Mr X was a creepy psycho-killer”, etc. Or “he/she always kept to themselves” - but most of us do keep to ourselves under almost all normal circumstances. A lot of domestic violence that people are aware of goes on all over this country - and people who can hear it happening on the whole don’t report it to police. Not many people intervene when they see or hear others arguing in public, or even fighting.
In Fritzl’s case, the set up with the cellar meant that there wasn’t anything to see if anyone apart from the others who lived in the house had been looking.
But what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me that most urban societies in the West are “look away societies” and mostly we haven’t had Kurt Waldheim as President.
Sure.
But where’s the link? That’s the point I’m trying to argue in comment 6 as well as the post.
How would people explain this if it had occurred in Australia? I don’t see any reason why it might not have.
Haneke adapted Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher.
Germans, yes, but Bernard Schlink’d last couple of novels and some of Sebald’s de-abstract what it means to say a whole nation or culture hasn’t come to grips with its Nazi past. (Which, actually, I haven’t seen too many reporters specifically claiming is the problem with the Fritzls. Mostly aren’t they just saying it’s a symptom of something rotten without going into specifics? I didn’t see the remark Katz says Elisabeth has made.)
And well, Freud was Viennese, I don’t think we need to go over the arguments about how the particular features of the bourgeois culture he worked in influenced what he thought about the ways human beings bury and disavow traumatic material.
But where’s the link? That’s the point I’m trying to argue in comment 6 as well as the post.
Well, I don’t have the link to hand, but I believe there is some evidence correlating far-rightism with not-so-positive attitudes to women. I think the alienation of the ‘urban West’ that you describe is a factor, but I think quite a few people actually do take an interest in what their neighbours are doing.
and
I think it’s very important to clarify, which few reports have done, that it was not a house with lodgers, Fritzl owned an apartment building in which he lived in one apartment while his tenants lived in the other apartments. That’s how he got a government grant to have the renovations in his basement in the first place - it was a Cold War thing and was meant to be a nuclear fallout shelter adequate for all the inhabitants of the apartment building.
In this situation, where people weren’t actually living cheek by jowl and the basement would have been well separated from the apartments by the building’s lobby etc, it’s easier to see how Fritzl could keep his daughter’s imprisonment a secret from the other inhabitants of the building, especially as the fallout shelter structure was built to be airtight and thus inherently soundproof.
I’m a bit pissed off with how few reports of this imprisonment and repeated impregnation of his daughter actually call it what it is - rape. Why is the media disappearing the word? Not even you used the word, Kim.
See the line of questioning from Leigh Sales which I excerpted, laura.
If you do a google news search for “fritzl nazi past” you get over 2000 articles.
Natascha Kambusch herself has made the link:
[link]
Although her comment that “the suppression of women was propagated”, as I’m saying, doesn’t seem to have stimulated much of a debate.
This is the sort of thing that’s resulted:
[link]
All sorts of parallels with concentration camp guards in this piece:
[link]
A more intelligent take on the debate from John Wray:
[link]
Ps - I think Katz is confusing Elisabeth with Natascha Karmbusch.
tigtog, thanks for the clarification regarding the set up in the building - I agree that’s important.
As to my choice of terms, I didn’t use the word rape because I try to avoid using terms which set off sysadmin alarms for posts that appear on the front page of LP. So it’s a SFW thing not a euphemism. Fritzl was guilty of rape.
“I’m a bit pissed off with how few reports of this imprisonment and repeated impregnation of his daughter actually call it what it is - rape. Why is the media disappearing the word?”
They always do. Child rape is always reported generically as ‘abuse’. I’ve no idea why except as some angle on the refusal to recognise there is any sexual aspect to children.
d
It could be, Darryl. It might also be part of the whole framing of this as patriarch gone mad rather than man abusing woman. Of course it’s both.
Everyone;
Overanalysis, perhaps?
From the little I have seen of Austria, it seemed a normal country with as normal a people as you’ll find anywhere - any political expression I heard seemed to cover as wide a range as anywhere else. What did I miss?
This is hilarious.
Having seen a little of both in action - in 3-dimensional, full-colour, wide wide angle vision and with better-than-Dolby stereophonic sound - I was very impressed by their skill, flexibility and efficiency. There is more to Austria than just “Kommissar Rex”.
Now, let’s take a look at Australia …. full of raving gun-nuts, mass-murderers, car-hoons, ignorant drunks, forest flatteners, crooked businessmen, crazy politicians, peculiar artists, etc., etc. Don’t you feel scared living in Australia? :-O
I agree with you, there are equally extreme examples from outside of the former Nazi states- the Wests in England spring to mind. But I don’t believe it is all that modern a problem or one confined to urban areas. I think that the excessive respect for private realms and the unwillingness to ask questions about what goes on there, or to report concerns is a really fundamental feature of all Western societies, one that crosses all classes and I think it has been around for a very long time.
There is still something powerful, almost superstitious, about the boundary between the the outside world and one’s own house and I think that that deters a lot of people from crossing over, even in their thoughts. Acts of this nature are also ‘unthinkable’ and I believe that people will go to extraordinary lengths to Not Think about suspicions that lead them into unthinkable places.
su, I don’t think it’s just urban areas but more prevalent in urban areas. You’re right though that the home/outside border probably has power in smaller communities too. I’ve never lived outside the city so I’m not really able to say first hand.
This home/outside dichotomy also accounts, as I’m suggesting, for the difficulties that the state has in intervening in domestic violence, rape and sexual assault within the home/family/intimate relationships, and also I think reluctance of others to report/intervene.
Graham Bell
Agreed, it’s hilarious; and sad.
I think it was once called “psychobabble”; one may babble on endlessly about national “characteristics”, dark stains from the past, etc. This is the kind of silliness that holds the chattering classes up to justified ridicule.
BTW, what terrible legacy can “explain” the brutality of Pol Pot? American bombing? Sihanouk’s foolishness? Vietnamese acquiescence? Chinese influence via Red Guards period? French colonialism? Poor diet in the jungles as Khmer Rouge insurgents? Crazy ideas imbibed in Paris in the 1950s? Beaten as a kiddie? A cruel teacher at school? Dad was a bit nasty? The Palace concubines a bit tasty?
I mean, really and truly!! Sheer speculation and arrant nonsense as the hypotheses are mostly baseless. You’d be better off wondering why “Big Brother” is so popular in some countries….. at least there’s some data to work with.
I dunno Kim: I reckon your use of the word “analysing” is drawing a very long bow….
There’s a mixture of material, some good, some bad in the British press. The West analogy has already been drawn. There have interviews with former tenants (and one lodger whose dog repeatedly attempted to enter the underground cellar). Fritzl and his wife went on separate holidays, so there was always someone around to feed the prisoners. Her ignorance should not be taken as a given, I don’t think.
Guardian commentary here: [link]
Telegraph commentary here: [link]
I think that assumes that Fritzl’s actions themselves were uniquely aberrant and discontiguous with with the toleration of the full range of his behaviour in the “normal” social world. Clearly he is a man who pursued the domination of all those around him, and his treatment of his daughter was only the most extreme and monstrous possible expression of his general disposition. So someone with totally destructive behaviour was tolerated and accommodated by the society around him.
The links with Nazism are perhaps to specific, but I think there is something about deeply conservative societies like Austria’s (Russia, Switzerland, Japan, might be similar) in which the importance of social hierarchy is the prime concern. The point of social action is to know and reproduce those power structures. I always say that in organizational terms the difference between Europeans and Australians is that Euros are fixated on process - the purpose of which is to know your place, while Australians are more interested in outcomes - and hierarchies are less important as long as the result is achieved. Living in the UK (which is not so bad compared to the rest of Europe) I have never understood why things never seem to get done. It took me a long time to realize that getting things done is never the point - knowing your place is the point.
In that sense, the atomization of capitalism might not be the major factor here, and in some ways the radicalism of capitalism, so celebrated by Marx, might be something which actually undermines the rigid social stratification that allowed Fritzl to flourish in his society.
There seems to be a great need for particularly heinous crimes to be invested with some meaning
I don’t see anything peculiar about that - maybe it would be more peculiar if there wasn’t an attempt to analyse such crimes and ask about their possible ‘meanings’ or implications.
And not to search for social meanings is to fall back on either ‘universal evil’ or ‘universal misogyny’ or something else as a cause.
Of course Austria isn’t the only country in the world where men/fathers rape and abuse women/their daughters. Nor is there any country which seems to escape mass murders and terrible cruelties. But the particular form that any crime takes or the particular ways in which, for example, men are cruel and violent towards women have specific social roots (as well as the more shared characteristics which Freud’s work was about). I’ve never been to Austria and know little about it but perhaps there are Austrian peculiarities (or specificities) in the life and era of Fritzl which have shaped the way he carried out this crime.
It was a partial pun on psycho-analysing, Ambigulous. The Vienna-Freud connection!
Well, suz, yes, I agree, but I’m suggesting that’s far more likely to be something discernible in the micro-politics of gender and familial relations in Austria than in the macro-politics of the broad sweep of history etc.
MH’s insight is an important one.
Fritzl behaved as he did because he felt that the world that he wanted was not acceptable in the public world.
He got away with it so long and the Austrians are so keen to close the books on this case because Austrian authorities, reflecting Austrian conservative, patriarchal culture, did not want to acknowledge that there may be many Fritzls in Austria, or at least Fritzl wanna-bes or people who shared Fritzl’s rage at the erosion of patriarchal culture.
Thus, Fritzl is a transitional figure. The problem with Austria is that this transition is taking a god-awful time.
Well, I’m much more open to the sort of analysis MH is gesturing to regarding conservative and hierarchical cultures rather than some sort of metaphysical mumbo jumbo about Nazism and history. I think it has a lot more explanatory validity.
I was also alluding to atomisation in modernity (I’m not sure it’s particular to capitalism as such) in the post.
It’s not metaphysical mumbo jumbo necessarily. the man is 73 so he was 11 in 1945.
Yes, but again so what, Laura? He himself may have been influenced by the Nazis or prevailing mores. But then there are a lot of elderly Germans and Austrians about - Pope Benedict for instance who don’t lock their daughter up in a cellar, etc.
Secondly, even if it could be established that there’s a link between his growing up under a Nazi regime and his subsequent behaviour, it doesn’t demonstrate anything about Austrian culture more broadly or about the behaviour of others wrt this crime.
danke schoen Kim, but I don’t sink ve ken blame zis ‘orrible mess on Sigmund, nor on his followers, nor on Nazism.
This is a worry though:
“the particular ways in which, for example, men are cruel and violent towards women have specific social roots”
like to give some examples?….. or is it a complex-sounding but laking-in-content generality…..
Specific Social Roots
vodka swilling in Russia?
beer swilling in Australia?
gun-toting in USA?
sheep envy in NZ?
In Austria, could it be the mountains? I mean some guys IN EVERY COUNTRY behave in a very controlling and hierarchical manner…. and many of those men are NOT rapists, …. so what in the name of sweet reason can we actually say with any certainty, or that has any practical effect?
“Hitherto social commentators have described the world; the point, howeever, is to CHANGE it!” [apologies to old Karl Marx]
I’d be more interested to see practical measures undertaken to reduce family violence and rape in Australia, and to assist victims, than to waffle on about the detestable Fritzl. No, not because I want to “look away”, rather because I want to LOOK MORE CLOSELY at nearby streets and homes. Where I can make a positive difference.
Go to a women’s shelter; listen: there are near-Fritzls amongst us Aussies.
auf wiedersehen, Freundinen
Growing up under a Nazi culture doesn’t have some broader relevance to Austrian society? Whatever, Kim.
Laura, it doesn’t have immediate relevance to the majority of the population that didn’t. Of course the Nazi past does have relevance to Austrian society. What I’m trying to argue is that it’s a very big leap to go from macro-political factors to the explanation of individual pathology.
If we started explaining domestic violence, rape and incest in Britain according to political culture, say according to the pre-second World War repression of dissent under the guise of a “national government” (a political formation somewhat similar to Austria’s now), we’d be barking up the wrong tree entirely, I’d suggest. The push-button word “Nazi” doesn’t make the causal weakness of the argument any stronger.
The only other cellar/abduction/rape incident, that of Natascha Kampusch, was perpetrated by someone born in 1962.
I’m not aware of any statistics on sexual abuse, etc, in Austria, but you’d expect to see variation if there was a causal effect of the Nazi era. Ie - more afterwards, or declining with time as the Nazi-era generation ages. I’d wager there’s no such effect.
Kim inter alia wrote: “analysis MH is gesturing to regarding conservative and hierarchical cultures rather than some sort of metaphysical mumbo jumbo about Nazism and history.”
so are you saying Nazism wasn’t “conservative”? I suppose in many ways it was a radical break with Catholic/conservative society….. but…..
or are you saying Nazism wasn’t “hierarchical”? I think Adolf conceived his movement and its role in government as exceedingly hierarchical.
The Scribe of Babylon
Adolf was Austrian, ja? Und a bit kinky I think…….
Ambigulous @29, you asked for a specific example of cruelty havign specific social roots, well how about the link between the culture of violence and dehumanisation South African apartheid generated and its current appallingly high incidence of child (indeed infant) rape.
I’m uncomfortable with the racial essentialisation of what is, to me, a case of sociopathy and paedophilia - psychopathologies which manifest themselves universally. Countries which concentrate on outcome rather than process have just as many problems with paedophilia, incest and child rape. Does Austria then produce these psychopathologies out of its history, its national character?
People who work in this field will tell you that the great bulk of child sexual abuse occurs within families and goes unreported. Given this, its always interesting to watch the fevered witch hunts when a known pedophile gets released into the community. I always think its a projection of familial and societal denial placed onto the visible monster we must obliterate. I wonder if the same thing is occurring on a national level here. Blame it on nazism. Forget that it happens in families every country, nazi history or not, conservative or not, process oriented or not.
Ambigulous, you need to differentiate between culture and political regime.
Can I just reiterate that I’m not denying a link between society/culture and individual pathology? I’m just saying that it’s not very likely to be mediated by immediate political events. In Austria, you had a conservative and patriarchal society before during and after the Nazi era. Similarly, if we wanted to talk about South Africa, apartheid socially (as well as but also apart from legally and politically) is something of very long duration structuring patterns of interpersonal relations and crime.
In other words, Nazism would have been accepted by many Austrians because it went with the social groove and thus it wasn’t some imposition that fundamentally reshaped or created hierarchical and patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving.
So am I, casey, and that’s why I’m sceptical about these “explanations”. I blame the patriarchy. Seriously.
Meee too.
I’m not one who’s particularly taken with the psychologising of national character to explain such things, but if we are looking for novelists dealing with Austrian conservatism and the Nazi past, there isn’t a much better place to start than Thomas Bernhard - a friend and mentor, btw, of Sebald.
MH [21]:
Without getting into debate about national stereotypes, I can understand why you have this viewpoint …. but i have to disagree. What about all the institutionalized injustice that is so prevalent in Australia?
Almost all of that arises out of people perceived as not knowing their place [a tragic case of this is unfolding right now not far from here; justice was on their side - but they committed the terrible offence of rocking the boat when they were not entitled to do so - now they are being punished].
OK Kim. I am very sceptical that this Fritzl business is all and ultimately about an individual pathology. It’s an individual pathology born of god-knows-what, like any other common or garden scumbag, but positively flourishing and thriving in an environment which can only be said to have smoothed the way for him to go on with his monstrosities. This is the part that gets me and that I am willing to tentatively consider might have particular social causes that are peculiar to Austria. Details emerging about what people who knew the family, friends, and tenants observed [link]
suggest a network of people of this age cohort mainly who just don’t ask questions, don’t report child abuse etc. Not to mention the fact that as a convicted rapist Fritzl was legally allowed to become the guardian of three children who jsut ‘turned up’ on the doorstep.
Laura, I’d agree “individual pathology” is a misleading concept, and I shouldn’t have used it - maybe I was trying too hard to understand the way the media report these things and ended up mirroring it. Thanks for the link, but as I’ve said at 6, I don’t necessarily think this scenario would have played out any differently in Australia as opposed to Austria. How many times are people who have suspicions ignored? How often do people who have suspicions repress them? A lot of the reported dynamics of this case seem to me all too familiar.
It may well be that there’s something about gender and interpersonal relations in Austria which explains some of this. But there are tons of countries where people know dodgy stuff is going on within a family, or suspect it, and do nothing. Including this one.
As I read the article you’ve linked to, the two people cited are a school friend of Elisabeth’s and a friend of a schoolfriend of Elisabeth’s suggesting they’re from her age cohort not her father’s.
Yes, that’s true, but in Austria if what we’re told is correct then you can report quite serious and telling observations and nothing at all is done, and their privacy / data protection laws make it impossible for the necessary connections to be made. [link]
Casey mentioned the ‘witchhunt’ that ensues when a paedophile is known to be living in the neighbourhood here - she’s right, it’s not pretty, but I don’t accept that it’s purely hysteria, displacement or hypocritical nimbyism. Having had my own run-in with a notorious rapist who is due for release in a few weeks I am pretty keen t have him strictly supervised and bugger his liberties.
Comment 44 Kim, yes, I was thinking of Fritzl’s 69 year old pal who tells the press he often saw Fritzl hitting Elisabeth before she was imprisoned.
I’m having a lot of trouble leaving comments tonight. It keeps telling me the post doesn;t exist.
Lots of police forces and child protection agencies the world over are useless and/or corrupt, Laura. And wrt the points in your link lots (if not all) treat “respectable” middle class citizens very differently from recent immigrants. Austria may well have a serious problem. But it’s not alone, and hence I’m sceptical of all the interpretations which refer to the level of support Haider’s party had, etc. Pauline Hanson’s mob got over 20% of the vote in Qld in 98. But the fact that our child protection system is awful isn’t directly related to that.
That’s weird. Does it do that every time? I haven’t had it. If you could be more specific about whether it happens on other threads, etc, that would be really helpful in trying to fix it, and we’d be grateful!
I can think of one example. British sculptor Rachel Whiteread was commissioned to make a memorial to the Austrian victims of the Holocaust and the site was the Judenplatz (Jewish Place), a very pretty square near the centre of Vienna. When they were digging the foundations for it, they uncovered the remains of a medieval synagogue burnt out in the pogrom of 1421. (There’s a plaque on the wall of an ancient house in the square, describing how the fires purged ‘the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs’.) The memorial got held up for several years while they decided how to proceed. Eventually it was built over the preserved synagogue site. On the occasion of its official public unveiling, almost all of the people present were journalists. The Viennese public stayed at home in droves.
I wrote an essay about Vienna and Whiteread’s sculpture a few years ago that included a few thoughts on masculinity: ‘It certainly enhances my understanding of Vienna to meditate on the fact that two of its main tourist attractions, the Lipizzaner Stallions and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, have the same basic criterion for becoming a performer: testosterone levels. Hitler’s sometime home is a city where masculinity matters. The little person on Vienna’s pedestrian-crossing lights is not the usual androgynous stick figure: he’s wearing the sort of snappy hat one associates with pictures of the young Frank Sinatra. Women, one assumes, are not expected to cross the road.’
Btw, certain words like Hitler trip the moderation filter so as to discourage ideological stoushes on threads where they’re not appropriate, so I apologise for the annoyance on this thread where they are.
Thanks, Dr Cat, that’s really interesting stuff, but I hate to be a party pooper by saying masculinity matters too in a lot of European cultures, as I’m sure you’re aware. And similar events to the one you describe have occurred in Poland and other central European countries.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff written on the legacies of anti-Semitism in Poland.
My point is to argue against the specificity and explanatory power of national level cultural explanations of this thing.
I’ve got no particular torch to carry for the Austrians. But I do think that the remembrance of the Holocaust and the resonances of Nazism are being conflated with something here that isn’t necessarily related at all. As I alluded to briefly, it’s highly questionable whether Germany has dealt at all well with the politics of memory, but the claim in so many of these articles appears to be that it did - contrasted with Austria.
I could also easily imagine this sort of thing happening in Switzerland. Where I was born incidentally. A very similar set of attitudes and practices to those prevailing in Austria - remember women didn’t get the vote there until 1971.
And I do think MH is on to something about process and status. Bureaucracies, authorities, police, of all sorts in a whole range of contintental EU countries are unresponsive, arrogant and generally useless.
Interesting analysis!
As someone who has been living in Austria all his life, I think your observations are spot-on. To give you an example: The school I attended had two historical figures amongst its former pupils: Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Last time I checked only one of them is remembered on a plaque next to the entrance. You may guess who. I can’t find anything about the other one on the school’s web page either.
Even during my school days in the 80ies there were some teachers who made no secret of their admiration for Nazi ideology. Not in public (where it was and is prohibited), but in the classroom where pupils would not dare to speak up. I did not, which I regret now. We Austrians do indeed like to look away (and I don’t exclude myself), it seems. And it seems we are noticing and remembering things in a very selective way.
Thanks, Ralph, but as I’m saying the issues of Fritzl’s actions and the politics of memory in Austria and Germany are separate. I don’t believe there’s a close causal link.
I raised Poland for a reason. The national mythos is of struggle against the Nazis - but there have been well known incidents where Jewish memory and suffering has been effaced by a Catholic cult. Yet this isn’t ascribed to WW2 events because Poland was occupied rather than incorporated into the Reich. Rather a soft anti-Semitism rewrites itself - even on the occasion of a Papal visit to a concentration camp site - floating free of any moorings in Nazism. Similarly, in Prague, much of the effacement of the memory of the city’s German past (long predating the Nazi era) similarly effaced its Jewish past.
Think about Franz Kafka from the Czech point of view. Written out of the national story because he was seen as being German post WW1, reinscribed after 1991 as a “Czech” writer. His memory oscillates between nationality and nationality, and his Jewishness (and Judaism) is ignored in the official story. And there are too many critics who’d dismiss it as a sort of epiphenomenon, or debate Brod’s “theological” reading rather than read Kafka’s whole oeuvre through the lens of the narrative forms of Yiddish folk tale and Midrash (not the only reading, mind, but an essential component of any adequate reading).
Every country and culture notices, remembers and forgets in a very distinctive way. It’s in the nature of these things.
So I see Austria as worrying over these issues in part because it’s an all too easy explanation. That may sound counter-intuitive but I think Fritzl’s crimes are easier for people to deal with if some sort of historical meaning is applied to them - it’s a displacement. It’s the fault of Nazism, or of incomplete deNazification. It’s harder to accept that such crimes could occur anywhere, and people would act much the same (not identically, but much the same).
I linked to Gary Sauer-Thompson’s post for a reason, but I haven’t seen it discussed in this thread, so I’ll do so again. I don’t wholly subscribe to it, but it’s interesting:
As I said I don’t wholly agree, because I see the invocation of the Nazi past as a form of displacement and as a defensive strategy.
Of course — I didn’t mean it was Austria-specific, only that such a culture would lend itself more readily to the systematic abuse of wives and daughters than we in enlightened, feminist Australia (*rolls eyes*) would be used to.
Then again, I come from South Australia, home of child murderers and other unspeakable ‘messy head’ murders serial and otherwise but sexually motivated more often than not. So maybe not.
Yeah, I’m not buying the cultural essentialist argument. BTW, it’s amazing that world news got through an entire breathless week of stories without once confusing Austria & Australia! (that we know of
But there probably is some substance in Kim’s original mention of the gender issue:
Our very own Ivan Milat probably would’ve been just as bad as Fritzl if he could build a dungeon. Instead he went orienteering in Belangalo.
And then there’s that monster in Canada who butchered prostitutes by the dozen.
And Russia’s ‘Chessboard killer’ who confessed to over 60 murders last year.
And on, and on…
Apart from being male, there’s nothing much else they have in common…
Austria, land of “look away” Nazi sympathisers?…unlike Australia (some dopes mix them up sometimes), land of “look away” White Australia Policy sympathisers…nah, doesn’t work for me. These correspondents can be so bi-polar in their BLAME GAME & VICTIM selection process.
Bring me the head of the GATEKEEPER!…:)
Is that the sound of KERCHING!!! I hear?…or just ideas rattling around in the Political Tin kept in the draw of INCONSISTENCY…?
As Mars says on RTS, OPPORTUNISTS everywhere.
News Corp 1, Austria 0. The crowd left MORAL PANIC stadium thru the RIGHT EXIT, ever confused, w/ the hairs on their back standing to attention, holding voting ballots instead of the newspaper they arrived with.
It seems to me that the essentialist culture argument is a (perhaps deliberate) red herring from what the Fritzl case really highlights - which is that a tolerance of domestic violence is not only heinous in itself, it allows for other more appalling crimes to be covered up - like child r+pe, and from there this extreme example (I too am utterly like of the use of the sop “abuse” - it’s like how when the Japanese or some other person of colour does it, it’s called torture, but when the USA tortures, it’s called ‘abuse’).
The nexus I see between Fritzl’s public actions and Austrian society, is how clearly the laws and accepted behavioural norms reflect an overt misogyny.
I read with interest not only how Fritzl’s peers were aware of his proclivity for hitting his wife and children, but also the Austrian police describing his predatory sexual behaviour as ‘an enlarged sexual capacity’ - poor man! That’s no doubt part of why he got the mere 18 months for breaking into a woman’s room and r+ping her at knife point.
Also, and dammit I can’t find where I read it - did someone else see this? - an article talking about how in Austria after a certain amount of time if you’ve been sentenced and served less than a certain number of years for crimes your record is cleared - which is how Fritzl was not investigated when his daughter disappeared, and was allowed to adopt the children that ‘turned up’ - despite several convictions and time served as a sexual predator, his record was expunged and the authorities therefore didn’t know to investigate him.
And then there’s our press, spending more time contemplating the influence of right wing fascism and ignoring the bleeding obvious. Take for example Guy Rundle’s musing on incest in the Age on Saturday I think - where he tosses in the throw-away line about how incest between a mother and son is absolutely taboo, whereas incest between a father and daughter is more ‘acceptable’, ending with a truly nauseating comment about fathers having to let their ‘little princesses’ go.
Let’s translate that - mother-son incest is absolutely taboo because in it the son usurps the place of the patriarch, therefore even though it’s far less likely to be violent or non-consensual, mother-son incest is the most heinous of all.
Whereas father-daughter incest is much more ‘tolerated’ because what man doesn’t sexualise his daughter via the ‘princess’ line of thinking (following Rundle’s argument), and of course it’s more ‘acceptable’ because the rights of the patriarch to take sex and dominate wherever he wishes is one of the foundation stones of patriarchy - what a surprise that the sexual expression of the power of the patriarch is acceptable to patriarchs!
that should be ’sick’ not ‘like’ in the first set of brackets.
“The nexus I see between Fritzl’s public actions and Austrian society, is how clearly the laws and accepted behavioural norms reflect an overt misogyny.”
Myriad, that’s EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to suggest (not insist, which would be dumb so early in this story), not that the Austrian psyche needs analysing or something.
Yes, I have read with astonishment many references to Fritzl’s record being cleared, which is clearly one tangible, governmental gesture towards wiping out the past that allows criminals to operate unobserved.
Guy Rundle’s piece was disappointing.
The link did not work last night, Kim. It brought me to an archive page but I couldn’t click through to the article.
I agree that the focus on Nazism may be a kind of displacement. How convenient to locate the causes in events that are wholly in the past, and in a failure to thoroughly expunge those events from the national consciousness, rather than face up to the toxic nature of their patriarchal culture as it exists right now? The link Laura provided mentioned the bizarre police handling of the Kampusch case and that reminds me of the Marc Dutroux case in Belgium in which there was also police mishandling and alleged corruption of the investigation process. The trial judge in that case claimed that he was being obstructed.
I think that the cultural characteristics that incline toward silence and the enabling of such men predate Nazism and are more widespread in Northern Europe than just Austria and Germany. My father would have been a decade older than Fritzl and grew up in Holland. His solidly middle class upbringing was oppressively patriarchal in some very bizarre ways, but it was not at all unusual for the 20’s and 30’s as I understand it, and the behaviours that strike me as bizarre apparently passed unremarked back then.
I have to admit that I’ve only spent a week in Austria, but the whole time I kept thinking it was bleeding obvious that this was the place where H**tler came from. It seemed so grim and brutal to me.
When I first read about this, I simply didn’t beleive that no-one else knew. Now, it seems many people knew at least something.
But as to the “look away” society, what about the so called Snowtown Murders. These were people who just ‘disappeared’ and no-one seemed to notice or care, for ages, presumably because thay came from the bottom of society’s heap.
Su, I don’t really agree that Nazism is wholly in the past. World war II is easily within living memory of many and everyone would have relatives who had personal experience. This is leaving neonazism out of the equation. Laws that prevent various kinds of information about people’s backgrounds from being available to authorities are the type of thing done by a culture which can’t or won’t deal with its failures and finds it expedient not to ask who once did what to whom. Katz already pointed this out in the first comment. And look, Fritzl is reported to have told his children he would gas them if they fought him, by his admission he did burn the body of one child, these are not things that one just thinks up out of thin air
Laura, I also thought Of Michael Haneke. I’d love to know his thoughts about this.
Laura wrote: “Ambigulous @29, you asked for a specific example of cruelty havign specific social roots, well how about the link between the culture of violence and dehumanisation South African apartheid generated and its current appallingly high incidence of child (indeed infant) rape.”
Well, does child rape not occur in other African societies? Does child rape not occur in Australia? I’m not saying apartheid wasn’t violent, I’m querying a causal link. Even if the incidence is higher in South Africa, you’d be hard pressed to prove correlation, let alone causality, IMHO.
Then Pavlov’s Cat wrote: “Of course — I didn’t mean it was Austria-specific…” Well, that’s really the whole point, isn’t it PC’s? If influence X is not Austria-specific, then this whole search for ’causes’, ‘influences’, ’social roots’ etc of the FRITZL CASE disappears as the vapid babble of a thousand baseless guesses…..
I’m surprised one of our analysts hasn’t reported a very pertinent nightmare they had. It’s all piffle, isn’t it? Sadly hilarious as Graham Bell said at 7.58pm yesterday.
Look, yesterday’s news showed a volcanic eruption in Southern Chile: I grant that areas of volcanic activity are more likely than Oodnadatta to experience an eruption. But this one had been dormant for 1,000 years, they said. Now if vulcanology can only observe and make limited predictions, how in the name of ten Andean gods does anyone think they can “explain” Fritzl?
If a Hungarian guy gets convicted next year of grinding up daschhunds (after, let’s say, torturing them and videotaping their agony) and selling the meat to a local butcher, will the Press and LP say “there’s something strange about those Hungarians…. mmm why didn’t anyone notice the doggies were going missing? what terrible parents he must have had… oh the bastard couldn’t play out his patriarchal fantasies on girls so he transferred to dogs… I blame the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… I blame the Turks…I blame the Soviet occupation and the bloody uprising of 1956… I blame the Americans who refused to come to the aid of the Hungarian patriots in 1956… they say his neighbour hated squirrels…” ?? Really and truly.
Piffle!
This may be a question of nuance.
Of course it’s ridiculous to assert that Nazism results in Fritzl. But I haven’t read anyone on this thread who has argued this line.
Again, there are two necessary levels analysis.
The first level is the question of the relationship between culture and crime. No doubt, there are cellar-building whackos all over the world. As indeed there are gun-toting berserkers all over the world. Nevertheless, it isn’t incorrect to asssociate one set of cultural values with one manifestation of crime and another set of values with another. We’re talking about probabilities here. Many data points add up to characteristic patterns.
Austrians tend to adopt criminal behaviour that perpetuates dominance and hierarchy. Americans tend to adopt criminal behaviour that expresses hatred and despair in a self-immolatory orgy of impersonal violence.
The second level is how spokespersons try to make sense of this behaviour. Criminologists are the core professional group. They are in dialogue with psychologists, social workers, cultural historians, journalists and others.
No doubt, some in these coteries will argue that Nazism caused Fritzl. For some this might suffice as the literal truth, and they’d be incorrect. For Fritzl’s brutalised daughter this assertion is more likely to be a kind of cultural short-hand that is understood at a gestalt level only by Austrians thoroughly immersed in Austrian culture. Analogously, “mate” has a thick meaning in Australia which is more difficult for non-Australians to understand in Australian terms.
In the second sense, Nazism and cellar-constructing control-freakery are both faces of a pre-existing cultural coin. One isn’t seen to be causing the other, but rather they are both effects of prior cultural dynamics.
Coincidentally, I sat through “Arabella” by Richard Strauss recently. The story concerns a Viennese family with two daughters, one of whom passes herself off as a boy with the knowledge and encouragement of the rest of the family because the wastrel father could not afford to introduce two daughters to society.
In C19th Vienna this seemed to be a culturally decypherable strategy for a financially strapped family.
Go figure.
This is my problem with that argument, Katz:
n = 2.
Before you start generalising about “Austrians” and crime, you’d want a much bigger sample of Austrians!
And I still think you’re confusing the statements made by Natascha Kampusch with Elisabeth, who I don’t believe has said anything.
No. The ‘it’ I was referring to was specifically a particular European attitude to masculinity, part of a clarification of an exchange of comments with Kim, as you’d know if you’d read the thread properly.
No. If discussion of sociocultural and psychosocial analysis doesn’t interest you, Ambigulous, then don’t read it, but dismissing an approach you clearly don’t know anything about as ‘piffle’ isn’t a very strong or or a very interesting position.
Myriad at #57, I think you’re misrepresenting Guy Rundle in quite a damaging way. I agree that the Age piece isn’t his best work, but I disagree with your reading of it. He does not use the word ‘acceptable’ or the word ‘tolerated’, which you imply by your use of quotation marks that he does. This is what he actually says, after having briefly talked about the mother/son and brother/sister incest variants: