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:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/05/01/europe/EU-GEN-Britain-Kampusch.php
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:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=563399&in_page_id=1770
All sorts of parallels with concentration camp guards in this piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/04/austria.internationalcrime
A more intelligent take on the debate from John Wray:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/opinion/02wray.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
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: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/austria
Telegraph commentary here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1924847/Wall-of-silence-hid-Josef-Fritzl%27s-crimes.html
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 http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/people-knew-about-fritzls-crimes-but-still-kept-silent/2008/05/04/1209839454659.html
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. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article3834569.ece
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:
It may just be that I’ve been reading his work for a long time and have a fair idea what he thinks about things and how he uses irony, but it seems obvious to me that this is a critical comment on the values of a patriarchal society, and that the line about the princess is ironic. And he makes it very clear in the rest of the piece that he finds the Fritzl affair at least as repugnant as the rest of us do.
Just chiming in –
I don’t think there is a direct causal link between Austrian culture and Fritzl’s actions Ambigulous. I *do * think that the overt misogyny of Austrian culture and it’s long-standing historical and contemporary support of fascism, with it’s well known support of extreme misogynistic paradigms and practices means that his actions received indirect support from the authorities. This included the incredibly weak sentencing and benign labelling of his actions as “expanded sexual capacity” as opposed to “highly dangerous sexual predator” for his several previous sex crimes, the expunging of his criminal record, and the casual public acceptance of his violence against his family.
I think in sum the search for causation/correlation is misplaced. What we’re looking at is a repugnant series of crimes over time that were at the very least supported by the society they occurred in – but the society didn’t originate the crimes. So looking for causation/correlation to me is bass ackwards.
Laura, apologies if I didn’t pick up on the same sense from your posts as my original one (if that makes any sense) – didn’t mean to steal your thunder.
This implies that only cellar-building is valid manifestation of patriarchically motivated behaviour.
Are you arguing that any differences between national profiles of criminal behaviour are not relevant to an understanding of differences in cultural dynamics between societies? We know that these differences are quite marked.
For the record, I know that you are not arguing that.
However, note that I have used the same rhetorical device as you did from the opposite direction.
Even in the world of the www, it is difficult to get the raw data that answering your question would require. So please forgive me for not being able to extend my n to >2.
In the absense of this evidence I’m taking my clues from Austrians like Ralph Aichinger @ 52 who testifies to a startling moment of self-recognition in the events surrounding the Fritzls.
No apology necessary myriad.
Ambigulous I can only echo Pavlov’s comment about your dismissal of strands of this discussion as ‘piffle’.
Katz, I’m just saying that some examination of Austrian crime statistics could be useful! I had a look around last night and couldn’t find much useful.
cross-posted pavlov’s cat.
I’m happy to accept your reading of Guy Rundle as critiquing patriarchy, but can’t pretend I got that at all on first reading. I read it and got a sense of implied acceptance that just about made me lose my breakfast. In particular I think I missed his irony around ‘princesses’ given how his sentence before talked of needless to say how abhorrent mother-son incest is – he switched from using the horror of the Oedipal parable in terms of mother-son to talking of ‘comic figures’ vis father-daughter. I found it entirely too superficial and inappropriate to convey such a serious issue, particularly as the vast cases of father-daughter incest are most correctly labelled r+pe. If he was out to critique the patriarchy I think he made it a bit easy to miss.
I also found his whole article and his yes, clearly stated horror at the Fritzl case rather undermined given that he focussed on the ‘ickyness’ of incest without once mentioning that actually what’s most abhorrent about the Fritzl case is the imprisonment, torture and repeated rape and dehumanisation of Fritzl’s daughter – he makes the assumption that “we” (society) is most freaked out about the kids being the product of incest. I don’t think that’s accurate, I think it’s a very big assumption.
The whole thing freaks me out.
Rundle may have been given a specific angle to take by his editor though, myriad.
Getting back to correlation/causation, there’s a macro/micro problem here from a social scientific point of view. Causation only makes sense when you’re talking about aggregates of human behaviour. It’s very difficult to talk in terms of causation when you’re talking individual choices, because:
(a) there may be a large number of arrogant abusive elderly engineers (or whatever) who don’t commit crimes, and the fact that one does and the rest don’t needs explaining at the level of individual psychology rather than social patterns – though the way those crimes are committed will generally conform to social and cultural patterns;
(b) concomitantly, predictors for why one individual will act in this fashion compared to others with apparently similar attitudes, dispositions, etc, are lacking.
he may well have been given an angle Kim – was just re-reading the article, and accept Pavlov’s interpretation as more accurate than my own. However if we assume that he as asked to write about the taboo of incest and the problems of confronting it in modern society – which seems to the main thrust – I’m still left questioning why he doesn’t directly address the fact that Fritzl and the Texan mormon case he also mentions point directly to the ineherent violence in a lot of incest, particularly father-daughter. I feel he rather inadvertently conflates the consensual father-daughter incest example with the violent sexual abuse of children – that incest is common to both is actually the least important factor in a lot of ways.
And before you think I’m causing thread drift, I think this refusal to confront the sexual abuse of children and a damaging level of general acceptance of domestic violence is partially what leads to extraneous analysis like “it must be Austrians” (in simplistic jargon).
Myriad,
You are correct to point out the consequences to Fritzl of his previous offending, though I’d call it “leniency” or “amazing leniency” rather than “support”. But perhaps that’s just pedantic, is it?
I actually agree with Katz, when he wrote: “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.”
Yes, PROBABILITIES, links, likelihoods…. but not yet “cause and effect”. I may have misread earlier posts and hence misunderstood their intentions, but I formed the impression many here were claiming causal links. To which I would repeat, “Piffle!”
Pavlov’s, it’s not that I’m uninterested. Really and truly, I’m interested-but-sceptical. I think large claims have been made on this thread, supported only by the merest guesswork. Sorry to say it, but that feels like mumbo-jumbo to me.
I can see that to others, it feels like cutting-edge inquiry and fascinating insights. Chacun a son gout.
I don’t expect you to go through the posts above and nominate which ones are excellent and uncontestable, like a tutor, BTW. Life’s too short.
cheers
myriad, I don’t think you’re causing thread drift and agree these issues should be discussed and on this thread. Haven’t read Rundle’s article myself yet, should say.
And what you’re saying in your last para is basically what I’ve been saying.
Americans tend to adopt criminal behaviour that expresses hatred and despair in a self-immolatory orgy of impersonal violence.
I happened to watch the beginning of ‘Unaccompanied Minors’ last night, a recent American film for ‘minors’ (ie under 16s). It’s supposed to be a comedy. It’s about a large bunch of under-16s who are travelling ‘unaccompanied’ getting stuck in an airport and causing havoc. The causing of havoc is intended to be funny, as in a scene where about 50 children run riot in a room, throwing things at each other, shedding rubbish all over the floor, shouting and creating slapstick violence. The idea that, left to their own unsupervised devices, this is what children/people ‘naturally’ do I found disturbing and very expressive of contemporary American mores. It might be a big leap, but recent mass campus shootings didn’t seem all that far from this scene, to me, like two sides to the same cultural coin.
myriad wrote: “a damaging level of general acceptance of domestic violence is partially what leads to extraneous analysis like “it must be Austrians” (in simplistic jargon).”
Now there’s something practical we can work on: reduce the general acceptance of family violence, here in Australia. Let the cellar-builders and shopping-mall-slaughterers be dealt with in Austria & USA.
In countries where there is too much family violence: address that. It’s a difficult but urgent task. It occurs in familes of every social class, every religious or non-religious adherence, every ethnic group. Mostly male violence (but in rare cases, female).
cheerio
I think it is the case that there really is an aspect of American culture that sees people as unrestrained if not civilised, and puts the onus for the work of civilising on the self rather than on an intrusive state. But I’m again going to proffer scepticism about the form of generalisations such as “Americans tend to adopt…” – a lot of crime in America is the exact same sort of crime that you’d get anywhere else.
Agree with Laura upthread – the fact that Haneke is easily the most articulate purveyor of cinematic violence in a calm, unassuming environment – over, and over again – is a worthwhile point in the context of recent occurences.
Although after screening his remake of “Funny Games”, I may have watched my last Haneke film, I’m always curious to know what’s driving him. And a pretty fine analysis takes place here . And paraphrasing from an interview contained within, a key quote is this:
“The society we live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen because I am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should reflect on it… My films are also a protest against the mainstream cinema, a response to the films screened in theaters today. If mainstream films were different, my films would be different as well.”
Do what you will with that.
As a counterpoint, the most successful Austrian export on ’stralian screens has been Inspector Rex!
When i first heard about the Fritzl case, my first thought, after “Oh Sh+t” was not the Nazi past of Austria, but the Hapsburg past. The Nazi’s are the obvious refferance point for most of us, they are reletively recent, everpresent in the msm (SBS anyone?) and an aknowledged yardstick of evil.
My point about the Hapsburgs et al is the brutality of empire, they, empires, exist on the backs of “imprisonment, torture and repeated rape and dehumanisation” (thanks mriad) of subject peoples. The Austrians were good at it too.
The con on offer when we all pick on the Nazi’s is the drawing of a veil across anything that preceeds them. So we can all exclaim “thank the Flying Spaggeti Monster, we don’t have those influences” at the same time as getting that warm inner glow that comes with remembering how “our boys and girls sent Jerry packing” as well as turning our own blind eye to the “imprisonment, torture and repeated rape and dehumanisation” that does and has happened in Australia.
yep, and that’s what I’m getting at when I say that the ascription of blame to a Nazi past is in many ways a convenient displacement. It’s actually a move that “looks away” from real issues regarding power, gender and crime and shifts responsibility to a metaphysical level where probably a debate on the influence of Nazism will do precisely nothing to make things any better for victims of violence and rape, or prevent or mitigate violence and rape.
Guy Rundle here.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/05/03/1209235222713.html
Apology if someone else has linked. Not enought time yet to read all this most interesting blog and thread.
Thanks, joe2.
It does read as if he’s using Fritzl as just a hook to explore issues about incest. I think the key bit is his discussion of individual choice and the social bond working against each other, which I think Dr Cat would agree is one of the characteristic themes of his writing.
There I agree with you absolutely.
Kim’s point about editorial direction is a good one; in fact, I’d go further and suggest that the piece may have been actually commissioned. Also, nobody who writes for newspapers expects their work to appear in print unravaged by sub-editors and house styles and space issues and blahdiblah: don’t ever assume that what you read in the paper is necessarily what the person wrote. But even given those things, I think there’s something rather odd about a piece like this appearing in a newspaper at all. The psychological and anthropological issues, which is where the focus was in the piece, are far too complex to render readable in the Sunday papers, which Rundle obviously knows, and I’m a bit surprised that he took on this task at all.
I’d agree with that, and I think the piece as published is capable of all sorts of misreadings, and lacks the length and depth to argue the point. I think the point’s a bit overdrawn anyway, mind.
Kim opined: ““Americans tend to adopt…” – a lot of crime in America is the exact same sort of crime that you’d get anywhere else.”
That’s partly what I’ve been trying to say. There are typical human crimes, typical human angers, violences, emotions. Crimes such as rape, murder, theft, assault, incest occur the world over. It’s sad and tragic. Austria is not such a special country really. Its society has many features in common with other European societies. It even has some historical events, and religious traditions, in common with other nations.
Men can be brutes. It’s time to protect the women and children. Women and children can be brutes. Sad, but that’s why we invented civilisation, my fellow apes. We’re trying to control the brutish impulses.
***************
Oh my, at 10.15am, purely in jest, I suggested that if some bizarre episode were to arise in 2009 involving detestable behaviour by an Hungarian, there would probably be a LP post blaming it on the Austro-Hungarian empire….
And now dylwah has obliged by citing the “Hapsburg past” re Fritzl.
(sigh) life imitates art so well at times, nicht wahr?
Again, Ambigulous, I think it’s more nuanced than that. While I agree (and have argued) that ascribing the Frizl crimes to historical factors is probably an avoidance of actual analysis that might be helpful, that doesn’t mean that crimes aren’t inflenced by culture. But here a conservative and authoritarian form of family and gender relations – which is common to a number of countries – is likely to be a more powerful explanatory factor than the politics of memory. It is the fact, for instance, that family forms and the understanding of familial relations differs in cultures – but the level at which it differs is more likely to be supranational rather than national – for instance, the nuclear family form is characteristic of Northern Europe while extended families are more characteristic of Mediterranean Europe. There are also variations to do with individualism and collectivism within those broad groupings. There’s actually a lot of historical and sociological research on all this.
Laura [your link to TimesOnLine on 45]:
You’ll find similar attitudes to foreigners of non-local appearance in much of Australia, China, Japan, United States, etc., etc.; that’s just human nature. It seems to be less blatant in really cosmopolitan cities like London, Vienna, Singapore and New York.
Fine [61]:
Exactly! And this happened in Australia, not Austria.
Of course that’s true.
It’s also true that virtually every human face has the requisite numbers of eyes, noses, mouths, eyebrows and chins in very predictable places.
Yet mysteriously we can pick out our dear old grandma in a crowd amongst thousands of these stock-standard faces.
There’s nothing reductionist in this everyday intellectual feat.
I read today that there was actually a concentration camp in Amstetten which is not a boast every town can make. I do wonder if specific inflections of Fritzl’s crimes are coloured by nazism even though ambigulous thinks this is obvious piffle. I WONDER, that is all.
What I don’t wonder about so much is whether there’s a clear correlation between the magnitude of what he’s done and the ‘hands off’ legal environment he did it in. Myriad’s already made the salient points so I won’t repeat them.
An analogy might be that any disgruntled loser can take a gun onto a university campus but when it happened here at La Trobe and over at Monash the casualties were kept down because the state had taken steps to make sure the killer did not have unfettered access to automatic weapons unlike in the USA.
I think that’s clear, and agreed. But I still think the whole Nazism thing is a huge stretch, for all the reasons I’ve given (and which I won’t repeat).
But on the other hand just about every Swiss male (and any female with access to s Swiss males wardrobe) has access to a state-issued sub-machine gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_army#Ongoing_service
Yet very few Swiss disgruntled losers, of whom there must be a few, have made use of this extraordinary firepower in characteristically American ways.
Culturally, it may be argued, Switzerland is more like Austria than many places on earth.
KIm, do you think that Austria probably has the data protection laws it does because they make it possible to detach individuals from their past conduct and actions?
I honestly don’t know, Laura, and I wouldn’t venture a guess. It might be taking a concern for privacy to an extreme, but I really wouldn’t like to say.
Katz, on Switzerland, I’ve already referred to the country of my birth (I get around!) at 51. It seems to me that this supports my argument that supranational differences at the level of broad cultural patterns are more valid than specific national histories. The USA is best thought of as a continental empire in this context rather than as akin to a small European nation state, I’d suggest.
Fritzl’s defense attorney: “My job is to show him as a human being.”
This is where I think the media needs to reevaluate their use of metaphorical language when discussing people like Fritzl. By bandying about terms like ‘monster’ and ‘dungeon’, or the inevitable ‘evil’, they misrepresent the nature of these crimes, which are more often than not committed by people who lead superficially unremarkable lives, not by ravening beasts who are clearly and distinctly different to the naked eye, and they play into this strategy whereby if you can show that someone was kind and gentle in some circumstances you mitigate the crime. Evidence that should be seen as planning and selecting of a victim, like the fact that he treated some of his children well, is transformed into evidence that he is not a monster.
This was what really bothered me about the media drawing causal links with Nazism- again it makes it a crime committed by a ‘monster’, someone who is ‘evil incarnate’, instead of the crime of a violent, tyrannical man with whom you could have a pleasant conversation without becoming suspicious because the violence and tyranny are reserved for his family and restricted to the home.
Agree, su, that’s what bothered me too.
“the crime of a violent, tyrannical man with whom you could have a pleasant conversation without becoming suspicious because the violence and tyranny are reserved for his family and restricted to the home.”
It’s precisely that careful sociopathic bifurcation which is characteristic of Nazism, only the other way around – the violence was reserved for the workplace and they went home to their families at the end of the day.
But again careful sociopathic bifurcations are not limited to Nazism or countries with a Nazi past.
No, but the nazis turned it into a modern nationalised Fordist operation rather than private sport
Sure.
But in less extreme manner, this sort of bifurcation is characteristic of modernity. Private cruelty, public affability or its reverse.
Anyway, I think I might bow out of this now. Laura and I obviously won’t get any closer to agreeing about the role of Nazism, and I’m starting to feel I’m repeating myself and we’re going round in circles. I do think it’s been a valuable and interesting discussion though.
I’ve had enough too.
I agree. In any case, between 1938 and 1945 (Anschluss), in the strictly juridical sense, Austria wasn’t even a nation.
I think that in the US socio-ethnic factors are more powerful predictors of folks going postal than regional factors.
Laura around 1.31pm.
Yes I WONDER too. Some posters here seemed to be SURE and I couldn’t fathom the grounds of their certitude, is all.
You say, “and over at Monash the casualties were kept down because the state had taken steps to make sure the killer did not have unfettered access to automatic weapons unlike in the USA.”
Yes, but as I recall he had 3 or 4 pistols hidden under his clothing, and the casualties were lower partly because he was swiftly tackled by the tutor in the tutorial room where he started shooting, and by a fellow student. The tutor and student held the (alleged) gunman down for a long time before help arrived.
The gunman was said to have been a legitimate member of a legitimate gun club.
True enough, the state had prevented him from owning a machine gun. But I doubt he could have carried a semi-automatic into the building without being challenged.
I agree that OWNERSHIP of guns must be a factor; I also agree with Kim that CULTURAL influences appear to be strong factors.
Just not “causes”: I think I agree with Katz on that point.
But that’s a worry…..
Cheers, Kim and Laura.
Austrian, schmaustrian. Fritzl’s crime has bugger all to do with being Austrian and everything to do with being a psychopathic mongrel. He would have done the same thing wherever he lived, was born or from what society he originated.
The man who lived in the flat above Elisabeth Fritzl’s dungeon wondered why his electricity bill was so high. He could never fathom it out.
We now know that the dungeon was wired up to his flat, but I guess he should have instinctively known that his landlord had his daughter locked in the dungeon below, raping and otherwise abusing her and his unfortunate children/grandchildren at his leisure. Now an Australian would have known at once and summoned the law. Dem those Austrians and their Nazi, Hapsburg, misogynist past/culture.
I very much doubt that Rosemarie Fritzl knew what he’d done. Teenagers do join impenetrable cults and she was conditioned not to question him. He even told her that one of the adopted children was Elisabeth’s baby by a cult member, but not wanted. Most of us would take that at face value, given what we think we know about certain cults?
And how would the Austrian police have known that he’d committed this ghastly crime simply because he had a record? Does anyone seriously think that PC Plod would have looked at the record and in a blinding psychic flash have deduced that a 73 year-old engineer had imprisoned and tortured his daughter for 24 years?
The neighbours never suspected what was going on, not because they were turning a blind eye, but because what “normal” person would ever suspect such a thing? You might think your landlord/neighbour is a bit of a git or a weirdo, but honestly, how many of us would jump to that conclusion? Let’s face it, even Stephen King hasn’t quite come up with that plotline; although I’ll admit he came close with “Misery”.
I think you’ll find that Fritzl’s crime has more to do with psychopathy and its associated behaviours, than his nationality.
Jane, I quite agree – it would take some bottle to poke thoroughly through all your acquaintances’ houses, running a stud finder over all their walls and quizzing them about potential rape of their own daughters who have ostensibly disappeared years ago.
Not. going. to happen. Not even Neighbourhood Watch would have sussed that one out.
Jane, I disagree. Of course, people aren’t going to jump to those conclusions. But would a mother just take the ‘foundling’ story at face vaue? I’m sure most wouldn’t.
The Australian police may not jump to a conclusion. But given his record, they maybe concerned about missing daughters and foundlings. So might social services. I’m not at all saying that it wouldn’t happen in Australia, or anywhere else. But what you’re suggesting seems to be a bit of a whitewash for all concerned. It seems many people knew enough to be deeply suspicious.
Jane,
I think there’s general agreement that being Austrian had little to do with causing the crimes. The next question is does Austrian society make it easier to get away with them.
And how would the Austrian police have known that he’d committed this ghastly crime simply because he had a record? Does anyone seriously think that PC Plod would have looked at the record and in a blinding psychic flash have deduced that a 73 year-old engineer had imprisoned and tortured his daughter for 24 years?
But he didn’t have just any record, he had a record for indecent assault, indecent exposure and violent rape. Also, he was known by acquaintances to openly dislike Elizabeth the most of his children, and to frequently hit her.
So when Elizabeth went missing, while no police officer would think “aha! he’s got her locked in a dungeon for sex!” they might think “gee this guy’s got a nasty history, I should probe a bit further rather than taking at face value that the daughter simply ran away”. And we’ll never know where that would have led will we, because his record was expunged – which leads to the question – what kind of society thinks it reasonable to give someone with a history of violent sexual crimes a) sufficiently low sentences so that they qualify for record expunging and b) thinks that violent sexual crimes are the kind of record that should be wiped clean? – to which I’d answer: ‘one where violence and sexual violence against women “enjoys” a level of acceptance that is repugnant.’
Just a postscript to clear up a misunderstanding in Katz’ response to me at 107. I was thinking of the US – a very disparate country – as more akin to a range of European states sharing overlapping and related cultural characteristics. But FWIW there are very significant regional variations in the incidence of crime in the States.
Well, it’s not as if there was an impermeable membrane between domestic and public in Nazi Germany/Austria. For example, the anti-semitic laws enabled gentiles to take over Jewish property. In many cases this meant that neighbours of Jewish families turned up with SS backing and declared that they now owned their homes and they had barely moments to leave. In other words, it wasn’t just a machine which was anti-semitic, but ‘ordinary people’.
I agree Su that use of language such as ‘evil’ and ‘dungeons’ obscures what went on. But I’d doubt that a man like Fritz would strike any of us as an unassuming, nice guy. It seems that quite a few people noticed that he was a bully and a tyrant. His sister in law says that she would have been frightened to disagree with him at a barbecue so no wonder her sister was cowed by him in their home. His crime was not completely split off from his public or private face.
Katz [95]:
Thanks for that link to the Swiss Army. Thought they were forbidden to hold military ammunition in private houses these days [might be wrong though]. Link to Austrian Armed Forces at http://www.bundesheer.at
Jane [110] and Helen [112]:
Tend to agree with you.
Suz [115]:
Let’s not forget that Austria was involved in the Thirty Years War either.
myriad, Fritzl had told his wife that their daughter had joined a religious sect and that she was OK, but didn’t want to communicate with her parents. This was not uncommon 24 years ago and it most likely would have stopped his wife going to the police to report her daughter’s disappearance.
Which is my point, Fine, no one told the police that Elisabeth Fritzl was missing, so how would they have known that a crime had been committed? If there is no evidence of criminal activity, it’s unlikely that police will investigate on the off-chance that it may be so. The other point being that if as you say, plenty of people were deeply suspicious, why didn’t they go to the police with their suspicions?
The first the police knew that was something amiss was when one of the imprisoned children had to go to hospital for treatment. When there was no record of her existence, hospital staff became suspicious and notified the police, who took action.
As for the foundlings, Fritzl would have had a very convincing story to explain their appearance in the same way that the repugnant creature who orchestrated the bodies in the barrel murders also had very convincing stories to allay people’s (including police) suspicions and fears about his victims’ disappearances. Fritzl even made phone calls to his wife imitating Elisabeth’s voice to allay her concerns.
I’m certainly not whitewashing what happened and I sincerely hope that his fellow prisoners are making Herr Fritzl’s life a living hell, but the truth is that children do run away from home particularly if they are being abused and often make sure they can’t be found. Unfortunately for Elisabeth Fritzl, no one seems to have been willing to voice their suspicions to someone who could have done something about it.
It’s easy to be wise with hindsight, but like Fritzl’s tenant with the extraordinarily high electricity bills, the reason would have been beyond his and any normal person’s comprehension.
jane, I think you are right. Also, I’ve read all the links and I can’t see any evidence that anyone was “deeply suspicious”. Some had noticed odd things, for sure, but the penny didn’t drop until the truth, which was beyond imagination, finally came out.
That said, there is a need for analysis and reflection as to why such defective personalities are produced and flourish generally in modern societies and whether there are any specifics of concern in any particular society. Putting a label on him by saying he’s bad, crazy, creepy or weird or blaming it on original sin or the unfortunate side of human nature are ultimately unhelpful and just as much a displacement as evoking Nazism as the dominant explanation.
Fritzl’s behaviour arose out of the way he confabulated his understanding of his world.
Who knows for sure what fantasies lurked in the padded corridors of his mind? Famously, a German serial killer, for example, is on record as being motivated to his murders by thoughts of Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” (which, remarkably, was also about children attempting to escape from an Austrian Nazi — spooky, huh?)
Fritzl’s motives, however, were somewhat clearer than the way he developed them. He is quoted as expressing often enough the imperative to protect, which he interpreted as complete control.
He presented himself to the world as a family man whose domestic repose had been disturbed by the flight of his daughter into the clutches of a “sect”. Fritzl represented this sect as transgressing fundamentally the proper and appropriate familial bonds, and proper and appropriate sexual behaviour.
Yet, through an act of patriarchal benevolence, Fritzl gained much credit for looking after the offspring of his wayward daughter.
According to the lights of respectable Austrian society, Fritzl was the uncomplaining victim of an ungrateful and slatternly daughter who had turned her back on her still-loving family.
Why should his neighbours and friends and welfare authorities doubt such a story? The story confirms all sorts of prejudices and symbolically reinstates the father as the moral and material centre of the family.
Jane wrote: “Does anyone seriously think that PC Plod would have looked at the record and in a blinding psychic flash have deduced that a 73 year-old engineer had imprisoned and tortured his daughter for 24 years?”
I think you meant Kommissar Plodd, fine chap, used to go hunting with him.
Where was Kommissar Rex when he was needed? He coulda sniffed around that house and found the basement, no worries. Why oh why do they keep him in Wien??
Jane, you have hit so many nails on the head, youse must be a carpenter, right?
cheerio
Katz, there is sense in what you say.
I believe it is important to realise that we don’t spring fully formed into the world, that we get to be who we are as adults through a long and quite difficult path of personality development. In general terms I am an Eriksonian although I’m generally disappointed with the triteness or even triviality of the words used describing his personality theory. The important thing is the structure of the theory.
What’s important here is that serious personality dysfunctions almost invariably have their origins in the very first stage and certainly the first three. According to Erikson if you get an early stage wrong it’s impossible to get the subsequent stages right, although you may learn social texts that mask the problems and conform sufficiently to social norms.
To arrive at a point where one can engage in intimate adult relations on the basis of respect for the other and without any contestation for power within that relationship (to mention a couple of aspects) – in other words, true equality within intersubjectivity – is a very long path indeed.
While the mis-making of Fritzl takes us back to to the times of the Nazis, and before, the important factors were likely to be his early parenting, child-raising and educational experiences.
Which brings us in our patch to the importance of Rudd’s passion for an early childhood revolution here. What you normally find with such things, I think, is that we implement measures that ostensibly should make a difference, but find a way of stuffing it up so that in practice nothing much changes.
Where was Kommissar Rex when he was needed? He coulda sniffed around that house and found the basement, no worries. Why oh why do they keep him in Wien??
Ambigulous, you may have already seen this, but some reports say that someone in the family or one of the flat dwellers had a dog and it kept having to be dissuaded from wanting to go down into the cellar all the time. Just one of the strange and seemingly unrelated things that wouldn’t have seemed particularly important at the time.
Brian, agree utterly with what you say and much better than I did. Labeling him as a monster makes us feel better, but doesn’t address the core issue which is why he did what he did.
Katz, there are his convincing stories for public and private consumption which allayed suspicion and portrayed him, and by extension his family, as victims of this wicked, ungrateful girl. And as you so succinctly put it, his narrative is even more believable because it confirms and reinforces prejudices already held by society about family dynamics.
Thanks Helen
I had missed that detail. Der hund has keener hearing as well as a keener sense of smell. Rex has dozens of other fine qualities too.
Look, about national characteristics: these blokes (Fritzl, shopping mall shooters) are so far off the national average that psychopathology seems a more fertile area of enquiry, IMHO. But what would I know?
You can tell they’re very extreme cases by the fact that the US doesn’t get 200 shopping mall shootings per annum and Austria [let's just hope] doesn’t unearth scores of murderous cellar-builders per annum.
**************
Physical analogy: the average rainfall in a catchment, in generally small rainfall events, versus the “once in 500 years downpour”. Hydrologists and engineers have to study both and anticipate both.
But the “once in 500 year event” really is very very unusual.
Bloody hopeless analogy, as are most analogies.
cheerio
Ah yes, Ambigulous @120, Kommissar Plod. As you say a fine fellow; my sister was engaged to him before she succumbed to the dreaded lurgie. Shocking business, what? If only I was a carpenter, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening and have a bloody sight more money and storage than I do at the moment. Perhaps I should watch the Carpentry & Installation channel instead of Crime & Investigation.
Helen @122, that’s spooky. Once again, one of the things that in hindsight seem obvious, but at the time are irritating and insignificant.
Here’s my (sort of) take, which is more a bit of a segue into what reading this thread made me think!
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/06/a-nationalnatural-history-of-memory-and-forgetting/
The tenant with the dog, the story about the electricity bill and also disappearing food was Sepp Leitner.
Ambigulous, I suspect that if you look into the psychopathology of the case and look into how you can change the conditions which allowed the monster to develop you will end up identifying national pathologies of the culture and institutional arrangements.
This afternoon on local radio there was an interview with a criminal psychologist from Griffith University who specialised in sex crimes. He said that there were many features of the case that were quite standard as well as aspects that were unique. He said that the ability to keep the matter secret from others quite close to the action was common, as well as the feeling of recognition by others of clues that they had not understood in real time.
He said that the situation as it finally manifested itself was reached by a long sequence of quite small steps many of them motivated by a fear of detection.
He said that when the criminal investigation was complete it would be important to understand how the psychopathology of Fritzl developed, especially to identify any institutional failures.
This reminds me of ‘poisonous pedagogies’ and how Alice Miller identified the very authoritarian and violent child rearing practices of 19th and early 20th Century Germanic society as key to both the development of very a authoritarian mindset in individuals and the ready acceptance of a totalitarian regime. It is only part of the puzzle but I think it is very important.
Snap, su — I too have been giving a lot of thought to Alice Miller (which means among other things that I can’t help wondering what Elizabeth is like, and what is going to happen to those children). I don’t want to reactivate the oh pshaw piffle tee hee brigade, but Fritzl is 73, which means he was born in either 1935 or 1934 depending on when his birthday is. He and the Third Reich were children together.
I think your last paragraph is spot on and I also think the corollary is true — that that particular totalitarian regime and its ideology and practices at least enabled the development of particular psychopathologies, opening up a space for particular behaviours and making them thinkable in particular ways. Which is a very long way from saying ‘Oh well it must all be because of the Nazi past’ which actually nobody here was ever arguing in the first place, as Kim’s comments in the wake of her highly nuanced original post acknowledge.
I’m wondering how many of the people here making Kommissar Rex jokes have ever actually watched the show. As an animal tragic and a listening-to-spoken-German-which-I-love tragic I’ve watched it quite a lot, and despite all the cute doggie stuff some of the actual plots, scenes and events are absolutely gruesome, and completely in keeping with my own memory of Austria and its ever-present reminders in art and memorials (not to mention on the footpath) of the human body and its more florid disorders and derangements in the fields of sex, violence, misogyny and disease.
Fritzl was born in Amstetten in 1934 or 1935 and grew up there; as I’ve already pointed out, Amstetten was the site of a sub-branch of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-Gusen_concentration_camp which the wikipedia article says was an extermination by slave labour camp; inmates were hired out to local businesses; overseers and camp staff were recruited from local towns.
Two comments to make about this:
one, methodical brutal dehumanisation and enslavement of powerless people was part of the town’s everyday reality for much of Fritzl’s childhood and youth. The ‘blame’ for his crime can’t be sheeted home to that fact but in my opinion it is strange to entirely rule it out as a contributing factor. It might have suggested the specific forms of carefully administrated brutality Fritzl employed, for instance. ‘So what’ is the fair comment many are making.
two, the real, tangible, problematic legacy of Austria’s role in helping make the Holocaust is the way it appears to have afterwards gone about rebuilding society in legislation. After 1945 people with various degrees of knowledge, complicity, responsibility and criminality had to go on living with each other. It’s fair to ask if one of the ways they managed this is by instituting practices like the wiping the slate clean of criminal records after fifteen years which we have heard so much about. I understand this is thought of as enhancing ‘rehabilitation’ of offenders. In Fritzl’s case we know it meant that even though he had been sent to prison for one rape and had a history of sexual assaults, he was allowed to keep three children he produced out of thin air, and further back, Elisabeth was returned to the family home when she ran away in her teens. We have rapists galore in this country but I’d be surprised if any of them were allowed to keep foundlings with no quesstions asked about where they came from: not because we’re any better at evaluating character or respecting women, but because we don’t go out of our way to forget crimes people have done and been held accountable for.
Sorry – should have been “We have convicted rapists galore in this country but I’d be surprised if any of them were allowed to keep foundlings with no questions asked about where they came from”.
Laura, I think perhaps we are little better at respecting women, but progress in real terms may be slow.
I’ve been reading Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. After reading what happened to civilian populations during the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) at the hands of the Swedes among others, and then what happened in the Silesian War of 1756 – 1763) at the hands of soldiers that were partly paid and had to live off the land, there was marginal progress, perhaps, in 100 years. But I fell to wondering whether northern European troops would ever behave as badly in similar situations today. It’s completely hypothetical but tentatively I’d say “no” but with very little confidence.
Su, Dr Cat, there is a lot of stuff I don’t know about and Alice Miller was one such. Thanks. But it fits in with my general position on these matters.
One of the main functions of schools, for example, is to transmit dominant values within society. They do so in a predominantly conservative manner. The egg-crate classroom of modern industrial education is structurally authoritarian. I spent a quarter of a century in education trying to do my bit towards breaking down the effects of hierarchy and towards democratising classrooms, in all probability to little effect. But the modern use of sources of information beyond the classroom walls and classroom management practices that release initiative and encourage empowerment for students are more important for their contribution to the hidden curriculum than any improvement in academic results that might flow therefrom.
At 121 I said;
Mark would have picked up the reference, but let me be more specific. ‘Intersubjectivity’ (which I picked up from Mark’s writing on Merleau Ponty) is a term I sometimes use for ’solidarity’ which is a term Mark uses as a more inclusive version of ‘fraternity’. From thence to the Enlightment concepts of “liberty, equality, fraternity’.
So in other words in our imagining of a more livable world there needs to be a consonance of values and concepts from the micro interpersonal level to the broader arrangements of a political economy. We are nowhere near working out a way of living that gives full expression to those three concepts. And as we go, as a living project, we are burdened with our past which we drag along with us. It’s more than that because the past is part of how our beings are constituted, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.
‘
Thanks for that ref to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp Laura. I was unaware of the existence of that particular institution. But the world should know of it.
It’s a truly chilling read.
That camp complex was larger, lasted longer and had more intimate relations with surrounding communities than any other Nazi camp complex.
The local population were thogoughly implicated in the torment and destruction of a wide range of “thought criminals”.
I imagine many locals took a grimmer pleasure in destroying homosexuals, intellectuals, religious dissenters who were perceived to be personally responsible for their deviancy, than in sinking the slipper into Jews and Gypsies who, after all, couldn’t help it.
Dark, dark, dark…
Yes, I explored that link of Laura’s fairly thoroughly and shuddered, too, not least because I once spent a month teaching in a summer school at the University of Klagenfurt, which is a very pretty Austrian provincial capital (of Carinthia) near the Slovenian border. Klagenfurt, like Amstetten, is listed as a sub-branch and apparently contains a former SS barracks where prisoners were held. I’m very glad I didn’t know that at the time.
Mauthausen was featured in a TV doco about 4 or 5 years ago I think.
Sorry Pavlov’s, Kommissar Rex calls out for jokes, and in my case I suppose it was a weak attempt to dodge the horror of this story. You’re right of course, some of the cases Rex solves are truly gruesome; but some of the plots are weak too, nicht wahr? We watch it partly to enjoy the Wien streetscapes and architecture. Yes: incredibly shallow. A critic of our TV viewing might say, “Piffle!”
Brian at 12,27am: thank you. As others have already said, you made some strong points. Danke schoen.
Ambigulous — wasn’t meaning to diss the Kommissar Rex jokers, just taking the opportunity to make the point. I agree totally re the streetscapes and so on, though if you are a fan of Vienna I don’t recommmend The Piano Teacher — it chills and numbs and washes out the streetscape to a near-uniform greyish-icy sort of colour.
Is there an emoticon with a ham roll in it?
Ach, the ham roll!
We had a few hours to stroll around Wien. Too short! It’s the favourite city of my Bavarian sister-in-law. I can see why. More beautiful than Muenchen.
Does “The Piano Teacher” have other qualities to recommend it? We sometimes watch a film hoping for something in addition to streetscapes
[Is it OT to wander off into a chat about the character of a historic city??] Beats talking about Herr Fritzl, IMHO.
Indeed, but here’s something pertinent to the Fritzl / Austria / Nazi past a factor? Yes/No discussion:
We’re going around in circles now, Dr Cat: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/04/analysing-austria/#comment-463401
So we are, I missed (or repressed) that — sorry, Laura. I was reading the various OS reports this afternoon (and God knows there’s plenty of the simplistic commentary that Kim’s original post addressed there, too) and hadn’t realised this charming detail had emerged earlier.
Su, Pavlov’s Cat and Laura, I really don’t think we can read too much into the violent and authoritarian treatment of children in Germanic society in the 19th and early 20th century. You only have to read Charles Dickens to understand that childhood was no picnic in Victorian England, either. Further testament to that is the child convicts who were sent to Australia.
A lot of this is can be explained by understanding that until recently ie the 20th century, children were believed to be contaminated by “original sin” and had to have the wickedness beaten out of them. Pretty startling when you consider the horrendous crimes and other sinful behaviour adults got up to.
Although the complicit behaviour of the local population in the operation of Mauthausen-Gosen is appalling, I’d bet it hasn’t produced a higher number of child-abusers, rapists and serial criminals than anywhere else. And the police returning a runaway child to their abuser/s isn’t confined to Austria or uncommon. Jeffrey Dahmer’s last victim, who had managed to escape his clutches was returned to that charnel house after Dahmer “explained” that they’d had a lover’s tiff. The boy was only 14 and was promptly slaughtered after the cops left. This was in spite of lengthy remonstrations by an extremely concerned fellow tenant in Dahmer’s building. She had no idea of the true horror of the situation, but she knew that the boy was young wasn’t Dahmer’s lover and that things weren’t kosher.
When it became public, there was an enormous hue and cry, with accusations of racism levelled at the police because the boy was Asian-the perception was that the white police couldn’t be bothered investigating the situation more thoroughly because the boy was a “gook”.
Some years ago I read a book by an American psychiatrist who started interviewing serial killers for her post-doctoral thesis. For the life of me, I can’t remember the book title or the doctor’s name and I haven’t been able to locate my copy. She interviewed Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey and I think BTK among others whose crimes I can remember, but not their names. (The curse of advancing years.)
Anyway, she is of the opinion that there is a basic element missing in the psyche of serial killers and other psychopaths. She believes that emotionally they don’t mature beyond the toddler stage, which explains their ego-centricity. Toddlers and very young children are unable to feel empathy for others; their needs and desires are paramount which is at the core of psychopathic behaviour. Thus the tendency to torture animals as children.
There is a view that an abusive childhood is a prerequisite for becoming a psychopath, but in her interviews with serial killers, she found that many had perfectly normal childhoods in which no abuse occurred.
Even in families which were seriously dysfunctional, siblings of psychopathic individuals did not become psychopaths themselves. Her theory is that psychopathy, is congenital. ie nature, not nurture is the determining factor.
It will be interesting to see what the shrinks have to say about Fritzl. I don’t buy the line that his lawyers are putting about that he was just an over zealous father who was trying to keep his family together or that he wanted to have a younger better looking wife. If that was the case he would have done what plenty of other men do-get the trophy wife.
It was never about those things; it was about power and control and satisfying his desires.
Yes but not everyone who commits a crime, even a serious and deviant crime is a psychopath. A selection of serial killers with known psychopathic characteristics (the smallest subgroup of violent criminals) is not a good basis for making judgements about violent and sexually deviant offenders. I don’t believe enough is known to say anything definite about the etiology of psychopathy and I certainly don’t believe that a single characteristic either genetic or environmental will be able to account for it.
Also empathy is a skill which can (and should) be taught.
Well, Jane, I certainly agree with your last point. But Laura’s quite right, we’re going round in circles.
Jane, who cares what it was about for him personally? The only useful question to ask is why was it not found out and stopped?
Imagine a system where children are assigned guardians who haven’t had even the cursory police background checks done on them which are required for tutoring a kiddy craft class in this country. Then wonder about what gives rise to that degree of institutional incuriousness.
In one of the many documentaries about the Nazi era released over the last ten years there was one about the final days before Berlin fell. One of the interviewees was a man who had been about 16 in ‘45 and was assigned to command an anti-tank unit (who promptly deserted). He commented that the kids who’d grown up entirely under Hitler were all fanatics and capable of the most insane acts.
>
Interestingly enough the guy went on to live in the GDR and was the only person ever to reach high office in that country without joining the Comm Party.
Psychopathy or sociopathy known as dissocial personality disorder is defined by a total lack of empathy and hence consience. Some papers differentiate psychopaths from sociopaths. But the common factor is lack of empathy. How definitive such classifications can be considering how much we don’t know is anyone’s guess. However I believe there is no cure.
>
I dunno if Fritzl is a sociopath but he’s definitely a class A arsehole.
Following what Adrien said, and not in contradiction, the use of the term ‘psychopath’ seems to be problematic to say the least. Wikipedia calls it a “psychological construct”. In other words it’s a term invented to describe a cluster of characteristics. But it now has passed into common usage, which means it’s meaning may change with usage.
I think it’s true to say that “Not all criminals are psychopaths” and especially “Not all psychopaths are criminals”.
“man who had been about 16 in ‘45 and was assigned to command an anti-tank unit (who promptly deserted).”
I used to work with a bloke who was a member of the Hitler Youth during the last days of Berlin, y’know school kids with panzerfausts ready to die in the rubble for the Fuhrer and all that jazz.
So over a few drinks I asked this old and very sardonic German dude who’d emigrated to Australia in the early fifties and married a local lass what it was like being a teenage Hitler Youth soldier during the fall of Berlin. His response was not quite what’d you expect. As I recall the conversation went something like this.
Me: “Were you really a member of the Hitler Youth?”
Him:”By then it was a capital crime not be a member.”
Me: “What was it like fighting against the Russians?”
Him: “Who could fight? The army unit I was attached to had about a dozen bullets left. I spent most of my time doing their laundry.”
Me: “So what did you think of Hitler?”
Him:”Since that bastard, I will never trust any politician ever again.”
And Austria – which managed to convince the world that Mozart was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.
Nabs, I know someone whose father has exactly the same history and says exactly the same things, except for the part about the laundry. I’ve been thinking about him a lot since this Fritzl stuff came out. There is much food for thought there, too, although as far as I know he is not actually psychotic. Can I just say (again) to Jane that to argue that sometimes someone might be damaged by historical conditions is not to argue that everyone always is. It’s the first lesson one ever learns in formal logic: (a) All swans are white, and (b) this bird is white, but that does not mean that (c) this bird is necessarily a swan.
“It’s the first lesson one ever learns in formal logic: (a) All swans are white, and (b) this bird is white, but that does not mean that (c) this bird is necessarily a swan.”
Really? My logic classes only used the white swans malarkey to show the flimsiness of inductive statements of an absolute form. That is, to go from ‘all swans ever observed have been white’ to ‘all swans are (necessarily) white’. Leaves one a little exposed to a single counter-instance, which we can see easily in the example, but are inclined to forget when formulating our own little arguments.
Well, FDB, I guess what that indicates is that I am older than you. But even so, I did say “first”, and you’d need to learn the simple version first, surely, before the sophisticated exception to it made any sense at all!
PC I’m even older than you, I’d hazard a guess and did a course in logic with one of the more hopeless lecturers it has been my misfortune to encounter.
The little lesson you describe was the first and probably the only lesson I ever learned from his lectures.
Okay, perhaps for we spring chickens *guffaw* they consigned the simpler swan-derived lessons to Critical Thinking or something. I wagged a bunch of those early on cos it was all a bit obvious. Time better spent honing my drunken pool skills.
Su, my point isn’t that Fritzl <strong<is a psychopath, although he could be. As I commented, that’ll be up to the shrinks but his behaviour certainly lacked empathy, a quality that most people manage to acquire before they reach school age. Obviously he didn’t.
Laura, I was commenting on the excuses his lawyers are making for his behaviour. And I think you do need to know what motivates these people to stop them.
It’s pretty obvious as we get more information that there were all sorts of lucky breaks for him that made it possible for him to get away with it for so long and those things need to be addressed, in particular wiping the slate clean after 15 years for violent and deviant sex offenders.
There was a report today that he frequented brothels (legal in Austria), but a lot of the sex workers refused to have anything to do with him because he was too weird wanting them to pretend to be dead and other nastier stuff. More power and control issues, I think.
Whatever, I’m thankful he’s behind bars where he belongs. Also, Austrian police are agitating for legislation to make sure he dies behind bars. Currently, the maximum sentence he can receive is 15 years for his crimes. No wonder he’s reported as being relaxed and calm.
Well, he’s 73. Can’t see him committing too many more sex crimes at 88 (assuming he lives that long in either solitary confinement or the hell of vengeful fellow prisoners), or physically overpowering anybody much. And I wonder who’d be prepared to take care of him …
Yes yes yes, that was me.
Stupid predictive comments box ID thingy.
Really? I thought Noel had stolen your gravatar and website!
Sometimes if I drop in on LP while I’m at work, the comments box thinks I’m Harry Clarke. I have no idea if his computer ever thinks he’s me. L.O.L.
The reason why this case was so shocking was because of the ruthless deprivation of freedom, coming from a seemingly well-adjusted and supposedly normal person in Western Society. Fritzl looked like your normal average Joe, in the community. Parties, holiday, and so on. Not some depraved kid from the ghetto.
Deprivation of freedom involves an inability to see the other as an autonomous human being with inalienable rights, and therefore is by far the greatest form of cruelty. Even your average mass murderer, isn’t capable of prolonging cruelty for that length of time.
The Fritzls of this world actually don’t grow up in a vacuum. A lot more than we’d like to admit has to do with the prevailing social culture. Anybody who watched his personality closely would have probably noticed that he had a tendency to ‘bully’ those who are weaker than himself. It goes back to the competition vs. cooperation question, which lies at the heart of Capitalism. There are basically two forms of competition. Healthy competition and unhealthy competition! So much of capitalism entails the latter rather than the former. The latter involves seeking unfair advantage over the other, often through duplicity, trickery and more. This of course is carried over into the realm of relationships between the sexes. Where, a woman is seen as a conquest, rather than a partner.
In fact socially speaking, the more power and control you have over others, the greater your social status tends to be. For most people, this may be at the sub-conscious level – but that in fact is what it amounts to.
Had Fritzls peers stood up to his bullying of his daughter or his wife or whatever, in front of him – and made this a this will not go on issue, he would have very soon seen that his actions had adverse personal consequences for himself. Even though he may have lacked social empathy, or was a born psychopath, or whatever, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been able to experience personal pain, or rejection. (Inaction stems from cowardice as well.) I am surprised that so few people see this problem in the “bullying” context, which in fact it is – and seems so obvious to me to be the real issue here.
Perhaps there again lies the real blind spot of Western Society!
As all psychological terms are. They’re simply collective nouns used to classify generically similar behaviours. These days they use descriptions of disorders: antisocial and disocial personality disorder are the terms that describe what used to be psycho and socio pathologies.
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On the Hitler Youth thing. It’s important to not the difference between those inducted into the Hitler Youth as older children and those indoctrinated virtually from birth. I haven’t read anything about it in depth but the few skerics I have would seem to say that someone brought up from scratch as a fascist product would have the ethos fused with their personality. Fritzl would fit into this second category but then so would a lot of other people who haven’t (we hope) locked their children in cellars for the purposes of sex slavery.
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I do know one ex-Hitler Youth dude myself (second husband of mother’s friend). He was about 11 when Berlin fell. He’s not a sadist but he is pretty much a Nazi: blames everyone but himself for his shitty life, treats all and sundry like crap…
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And votes One Nation.
Adrien, the words “Hitler”, “Marx” and “Stalin” are in the moderation filter. The first is actually relevant to this thread, but in general we find mentions of these three gentlemen are often made by thread derailers!
As an addendum to this, I have a friend here who actually is Austrian, and identifies herself and her family very strongly as such. I had the first chance to discuss this with her yesterday and she was adamant that this case did indeed express a particular dysfunction in Austrian society. She said Austria has an unerring ability to produce these domineering, patriarchal men for whom power is their imperative. She felt the need to escape it.
This makes me think of Captain von Trapp in ‘Sound of Music’. Domineering, disciplinarian, patriarchal, a control freak. It’s an interesting construction of the Austrian husband/father in popular culture.
Interestingly, Fritzl himself has apparently opted for a pop psychology account of his own crimes, citing Hitler as a ’subconscious’ influence:
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=559998
He also expressed concern that his daughter was associating ‘with persons of questionable moral standards, who were certainly not a good influence on her’. Dear god.
OTOH, the wonderful Sid Spindler was “outed” as having been in the HL in a brilliant “gotcha” by some tabloid dirtbag – in fact, as Sid pointed out at the time, registration was compulsory for all kids (or all boys, I’m not sure which).
All boys, I think – hence also the Pope. And then some very young boys were conscripted into the army at the end of the war.
This was for lasses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls
Wnat?! The Pope is like Fritzl?
No the Pope was in Hitler Youth and the German Army.
Wasn’t serious, Mark.aybe I shoulda put one of these.
I love the daughter associating with persons of questionable moral standards. This from the bloke who impregnated his imprisoned daughter 7 times. Obviously he reckons this behaviour is characteristic of a person of impeccable moral standards.
The mind boggles, Jane. The mind truly boggles at what this man is saying.
And to think this “person” is saying that he had an addiction re: his abuse of his daughter. What a way of trying to alleviate his guilt for a truly, truly atrocious crime; implying that he had limited control over it. The use of the word “evil” is wrong in 99% of case, but this man surely is as close as you can get to it.
Darlene added “And to think this “person” is saying that he had an addiction re: his abuse of his daughter. What a way of trying to alleviate his guilt…”
Oh, I dunno Darlene. There were people (not I) who claimed President Clinton [the First] suffered from a “sex addiction”; this after the matter of “that woman… Miss Lewinsky” caught the headlines. The cases aren’t comparable of course, but as President he had a duty of care over White House staff, which surely included “that woman”.
If “sex addiction” is ever recognised by a Court, or by ‘the court of public opinion’ in exoneration, it could excuse a wide variety of brutal crimes, generally regarded as very damaging to those abused.
What about “self control”, “integrity”, “empathy”, etc.? let alone “dignity” and “humility”….. “self-awareness”…??
His latest pieces of self-excusing – he didn’t touch his daughter til she was 18. And .. there was a self-opening time lock on the cellar door so they could get out if something happened to him, except he told them if the door did open they would be electrocuted as they crossed the thresh-hold. And, oh, yes, he brought them books and lollies.
The excuse of sex addiction doesn’t hold, even if its a partial explanation. (I don’t think it is; I think all this was ro do with power.) As Darlene says, this guy was just plain evil.
And I regret to say there are probably many more evil people similar to him out there in the world.
My main problem with this thing is, mainly at the metaphysical level. Anyone committing a crime of this magnitude, I’d expect their bodies to be reacting negatively. Their face would become distorted; or, they’d develop a huge ulcer. Some outward physical expression would be present, of the 24-year long agony they’re causing others.
None of that happened here. He seemed to have a normal physical life as well. His body wasn’t punishing him, and his face hadn’t become distorted, because of the pain and suffering he was causing others. That concerns me. I wonder if there’s any explanation for this.
Na, mate. The bastards always win.
Paul and Darlene, I’m just a bit concerned with the re-introduction here of the label “evil”. I’m not saying he’s not, but it doesn’t help us understand his behaviour and can lead to dismissing him as not human.
I’m afraid he’s one of us. We need and especially the Austrians need to own him. I agree with jane at 153 that “you do need to know what motivates these people to stop them.”
MH at 161 has a friend who:
Returning to the original issue of Nazism, if MH’s friend is right Austria appears to have social and cultural pathologies that produced AH and Fritzl. Nazism at the very least found greater resonances in their society than one could be comfortable about. It seems to me they need to recognise a problem and do something about it. Neither step is easy.
On punishment, I’d lock the sod up for 24 years, plus another year for the sum of the years the three children severally spent locked up. I’d consider solitary confinement. He may be human but he has forfeited the right to interact with other humans.
Brian,
Being evil is very human, not at all ‘not human’. But usually its not something you recognise immediately. Evil prople tend to creep up on you over a period of timr. which is one of the reasons they can do so much damage. And you’re right, if they’re caught, the only way to deal with them, to stop their corruption from spreading, is to shut them away from the world,but not for 25 years, but for forever.
I agree Paul Burns,
To call someone “evil” is not to say they’re an ape or a swine, it’s to say their crime was monstrous, excessive, utterly lacking in wit and nuance. We MUST make every effort to detect this type of person and nip them in the bud, (or in Fritzl’s case, a quick schnitzel mit den Genital Shears, ja?)
I mean, this is really serious stuff. Stop the AHs, JSs, Ms before they reach the levers of power (respectively Deutschland, USSR, PRC, Mr Spaminator). And on a domestic level, reduce the family violence, detect the paedophiles, stop incest with childen, etc.
How? Well, mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse was worth a try. Has it worked? The TV ad campaign last year against “blokes hitting their sheilas” was worth a try. Did it achieve any results? Reform the laws on family violence. Support battered women. Stop priest kiddy-fiddlers. Sack/jail teachers who abuse schoolkids. Etc etc etc etc
No excuses for these sick behaviours, unless the perpetrator is insane. Shine the glare of publicity on the pattern of behaviour, the devious methods.
And don’t suppose Austria is unique. Cases occur in Australia too. Be alert. It’s alarming.
I think this might be my last post, as it were.
Paul, I’m fine with all that. And the punishment needs to be commensurate. Under my scheme Fritzl would have been due for release when he was 140.
Ambigulous, there was a film a couple of years ago that made H*tler human rather than a raving lunatic. Many Germans found it hard to cope with, I gather.
Back at 99 su mentioned the problem of metaphorical language.
That’s in part what I was concerned about.
Back at 74 Kim drew attention to the problem of individual and social pathologies and the relationship between the two.
What needs to be done is a huge topic, but for my part it would include initiatives to improve effective parenting and a certain philosophy of early childhood education. The big problem being intervening when there is bad parenting and deeming certain parental attitudes undesirable. You can get huge fights about that, but how else are you going to prevent undesirable attitudes, values and behaviour patterns from being transmitted through the generations?
This is a difficult issue.
There are several children alive today who would not be alive but for what Fritzl did to his daughter.
These children have every right to hate their father/grandfather. Yet we don’t know whether that is the case.
Should these children be reared from now on as if Fritzl never existed?
Society has a right and a responsibility to draw and to enforce boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
Yet it could be argued that Fritzl’s children/grandchildren are the ultimate victims of Fritzl’s misdeeds. How are they to integrate this stry into the story of their lives in such a way as they may have as good a chance as posible to live fulfilling, autonomous lives?
Is locking Fritzl away forever and calling him an unspeakable monster the best way to proceed from the point of view of his ultimate victims?
Another problem with the evil/beast/monster type of language (actually ‘evil’ is a special case because it belongs to the discourse of spirituality and assumes a metaphysical economy and simple dichotomy of good/evil that some of us don’t accept) is that not only, as Brian points out at #176, does it not help us to understand his behaviour, but I’d go further and say it actively hinders us from understanding his behaviour. Saying ‘Oh well he must be a monster’ or ‘Oh well he must be evil’ is just another form of looking away, it seems to me. And no society can even begin to prevent something that it doesn’t comprehend.
The town community is trying to claim they didnt fail Elisabeth!
Helen:
I think it was the H i t l e r Youth for boys and the League of German Maidens for girls
PC, I think I’ve grasped your point. Perhaps not.
I accept that evil is a nasty term and has religious overtones, but I think it may be used in a civilian sense too. As Katz wrtote, society has the right (duty) to set limits on acceptability of behaviour. I wouldn’t want Austrian (or Australian) society to “look away”. I want this bloke to be an exemplar of the devious, cunning, premeditated nature of such schemes of abuse.
I heard of a local example (not as bad as Fritzl) where a particular locale [a new kiddies playground] was used in a slow, methodical way to recruit paedophilia victims, by careful targetting …. and systematic (apparently innocent) actions. It would make your sjkin crawl. These perpetrators were nothing if nnot patient. And cunning. And ruthless, in their own quiet way.
The few suggestions I made earlier, mostly already in some form of action in Australia, were possible ways of reducing the likelihood of such crimes, or of their less extreme cousins; and increasing the probability (never a certainty) of prevention.
I don’t want us to look away. I don’t think the use of thev word “evil” is solely a way of pigeonholing his actions in a little box marked “never to be opened”. Some wish to forget AH, others don’t. It’s not simple. It’s never simple.
Some wish to forget Chairman M. You might care to comment on how the leadership of the PRC has put him in the forget-hole. Not healthy for China, IMHO. One day, one day…… not in a frenzy of hate sessions, just in memoirs, films, histories; the fragrant details of his heroic life will emerge. What a horrible bastard he was.
Years ago, around 1977, a friend visited the PRC. A guide said, “We had terrible trouble when the Gang of Four was in power”, and held up five fingers. A simple gesture straight out of Orwell’s “1984″. That guide wan’t looking away. He sent a message in a bottle to far off Australia. Lest we forget.
On Austria: if we’re going to point the finger at that nation, would somebody like to say how the murderous and bizarre regime of PP in Cambodia (1975 – 1979) was able to flourish? Unspeakable atrocities, mundane cruelty, evil, smashing of the old society. I will say “evil” of PP and consider the term hardly adequate. I don’t wish to “look away”.
I understand a few of the top blokes from that era are now, finally on trial. Hardly any coverage in the Australian MSM. Why not? Does Australia have a habit of “looking away”? Is it Bob Menzies’ fault? Or do we share fundamental psychological characteristics with Austrians, Chinese and Cambodians, perhaps?
Generally speaking, the use of the word “evil” is not something to be encouraged. The vast majority of people have the capacity for goodness (and we are not created in the image of something bad), and our prisons are full of damaged, abused and addicted people.
However, I am not sure it’s possible to explain the dreadful behaviours of some people (perhaps it’s a modern conceit to think we can) beyond acknowledging that some people are evil.
Katz, this man doesn’t have any right to be near those children ever again.
When he started using language like “addicted” it made my blood boil. What a world we live in when a person can make excuses for such behaviour.
Darlene,
Many of us share your anger. I read that his notes about his actions, which he apparently intended as self-exoneration, may be used by his lawyer in court to prove his insanity.
I agree with you, Darlene: he should not be allowed near the children, nor his daughter. The importance of blood ties must occasionally be put aside, when other more urgent considerations (child safety, rehabilitation, medical care, etc.). A guy who commits incest rape cannot claim “the rights of a father” which are held dear by law-abiding fathers, who respect other human beings.
Should a convicted jailed murderer be permitted to send taunting letters from prison to the families of his victims? Should a convicted paedophile be allowed access visits to his victims? Only in these debased days could such questions be considered for more than a second.
If you “do the crime”, it may be more than just “doing the time” you have to face. No respite for these bastards.
cheerio
Darlene, can you point to the passage where I asserted that Fritzl should have access to those children?
I was addressing another issue entirely. That is, how is the narrative of the lives of these children to be constructed or reconstructed in such a way as to give them some opportunity for their lives to achieve some integrity?
Perhaps these children already stand at the head of the mob who want Fritzl to be locked up and tormented for the rest of his life.
Perhaps, on the other hand, this man represents something more to them than merely a gaoler and torturer.
We simply don’t know.
Whatever happens to Fritzl should be explained to the children in terms that make sense to them. And given the extraordinary nature of their lives so far (Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?) this task may be quite difficult.
I’d hate to think that a vengeful public response to Fritzl may serve to exacerbate the suffering of these children.
My apologies, Katz, for inferring something that didn’t exist.
“I’d hate to think that a vengeful public response to Fritzl may serve to exacerbate the suffering of these children”.
Oh yes, that’s true. They’ve been through enough, as has the mother of the children. This case just boggles the mind. It’s hard to find the right language for it, which is why, perhaps, some of us resort to the old language of good versus evil, a language which may always have a place because some things can’t be explained by psychology, sociology etc
This man trying to alleviate his guilt just boggles the mind. If he had a shred of human decency (and it’s hard to see that he does which makes the use of the term “evil” apt) he’d simply admit that what he did was horrific and not to try to mitigate his crimes.
Yes, the children have got to come first. If the general public just compounds their suffering, well, that would be horrendous. Perhaps it’s time to allow the justice system to do what it needs to do.
Oh OK, that’s where we differ then, because I think everything can be explained, analysed or at least theorised about in secular terms, in this case within some matrix of history, psychology and sociology (which is pretty much what I’ve been arguing all along in this thread anyway), and ‘evil’ is not a secular term: it presupposes some metaphysical entity or force. It’s just a matter of what your world view is. I wasn’t dissing ‘the old language of good versus evil’, merely saying that it belongs to a certain world view and if one doesn’t hold that world view then ‘evil’ is a problematic term to use.
I’m trying to think of a value-neutral analogy that will clarify what I mean without enraging anybody, but I don’t think it can’t be done. If I’m labouring the point here a bit it’s because I so detest the way that religious terminology has infiltrated public/political discourse. I’m thinking in particular of Bush, of course, but Howard had begun to do it too.
At 180 Katz said:
It’s a difficult question, I agree, and I don’t have any answers. Often mothers tell white lies to children when a father is locked up in jail. The public nature of this case makes this option impossible, whether it is ever justified or not.
Also the daughter/mother might be so damaged as to not be able to provide adequate parenting.
I’m not up with the current health state of the elder girl whose illness and hospitalisation led to the discovery of what was going on. Earlier reports suggested that she had multiple organ failure and was unlikely to survive. One would think that the older boy would suffer severe psychological and personality problems which would be hard to overcome. It’s a mess.
There is also a problem of the self concept of a child who is the result of incest even of consensual adults because of taboos and social norms.
PC I don’t quite have the same aversion to religious terms and could accept them for their metaphorical force to express subjective feelings, which I’m not afraid of. But at the same time I take your point in the last comment and at 181.
Professionals in criminology and the psychology of crime shouldn’t need to resort to metaphor. If they don’t know they should just say so. So I was appalled a few years ago when Paul Wilson, Professor of Criminology and Forensic Psychology at Bond University reserved the term ‘pure evil’ for hard cases that were beyond explanation.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend in Germany who had worked as a Lutheran minister all his working life. What he called ‘original sin’ I tended to explain as a darker strain in human nature, which may have worked quite well in tribal life when the mob over the hill were presumptive enemies. He said we were on the same page with different frames of reference, which was more or less true.
It’s just that I was working in a spirit of inquiry and would have no trouble changing my mind if I was convinced by the evidence that I was wrong. He was dealing with a higher authority for his knowledge with high status gate-keepers, lots of associated baggage and behind it all this character who is all-knowing and all-wise.
I’d rather travel a bit lighter.
PC wrote:
“I so detest the way that religious terminology has infiltrated public/political discourse. I’m thinking in particular of Bush, of course, but Howard had begun to do it too.”
oh, c’mon PC…..
Detest it you are free to do, of course, but religious (and Biblical) terminology has been in public discourse for centuries. The majority of folk in Australia are not religious believers, but the terminology is deeply embedded in our everyday language. I’d say “it has not been removed yet”, rather than that Teh Bush and Teh Howard are/were introducing it.
In many countries that “old” language is still used, whatever the Church/Synagogue/Mosque attendance figures may be.
I think a case can be made for a “secular” use of “evil” without saying “the Devil made him do it!”
Let’s not go down the hollow path of “non-judgemental equals progressive”. We all make judgements. Life’s replete with them. Personally, I don’t need a God to tell me that Fritzl’s acts were abominable.
Religious terminology has a place, and often it’s used for quite progressive causes. The religious terminology of a Jim Wallis is very different to that of a Brian Houston, for example.
Surely lots of people use terms like “hell” and “devil” and “evil” in secular ways, and indeed religious people use these terms differently as well. Some religious folk might think that hell is literally fire and brimstone and others might think hell is the absence of God.
Yep, we all make judgements all the time.
No, Ambigulous, you’re not reading properly. I did not say that I detested religious terminology. (As a matter of fact I spent yesterday morning in church at a memorial service for the mother of an old friend; quite enjoyed it, though not quite in the way I think I was supposed to; and got bloody annoyed by the Good News non-King-James language. Bring back the Latin mass, I say.)
What I said is that I detest the way it’s been used by politicians over the last decade, and no not just conservative politicians, I’m extremely sorry to say, though mostly so. I also did not say that it was something Bush and Howard had introduced; I just noticed it more when they did it.
I know ‘a secular use of evil’ is very common in secular discourse but that is exactly what I’m questioning. The word has a specific meaning: it denotes a supernatural/metaphysical quality of presence or force. I don’t believe the devil made Fritzl do it and therefore I would not use the word ‘evil’ to describe either him or his actions. Pathological, yes; sick, yes; repulsive, yes; criminal, yes; patriarchal, yes yes yes.
Nor was I particularly advocating non-judgementalism, much less equating it with the ‘progressive’. Please don’t put words in my mouth or assume what my motives are. My main concern here, as in most places, is with language and the power of language: power to do things like, oh, say, casually co-opt a religious world view, whether Christian or oh, say, Wahhabi, into political statements and, Goddesses help us, policy writing.
In a broadening field of government concern, religious metaphor and language are used to spin, to discipline and to close down debate. The mystique of the supernatural is mobilised to short-circuit debate and discourse.
Bush’s cartoonish use of such language, unfortunately, also serves as a roadmap to his mind. He not only uses this language, he also believes in its explanatory power.
Progressives are compelled to believe that metaphysics do not provide the truth. Moreover, they usually believe that knowledge is power and that knowledge is tested by its ability to be used to enact beneficial change. Beneficial change is what defines progressivism.
Thus, a man like Fritzl serves as a test case to understand the tensions of society and the blind-spots of culture which drive a man to behave in such an irrational and atavistic manner.
Lurking behind this notion is the presumption that human beings don’t “naturally” behave like Fritzl. Rather they have to be twisted by exterior, but secular, forces to behave in such a way.
Progressives are then motivated to attempt to change those conditions.
The “draining the swamps” metaphor to combat terrorism is a variant of this progressive worldview. It is here that neocons expose their marxist roots.
Fascinatingly, Bush seems to be wedded to that notion as well, but he doesn’t seem to notice just how contradictory it is to his view of the fallen nature of mankind.
Sorry, PC: that final paragraph was NOT directed towards you. I should have made that clear. I didn’t think you were arguing in that way.
I agree that “evil” has a secular meaning which long ago derived from a widely held religious worldview. I believe the two meanings have by now separated sufficiently that a non-believer may use the word “evil” when speaking to other agnostics, and none of them are likely to think he’s suddenly converted or believes (in President Chavez’s phrase) “the Devil was here yesterday.”
But I could be wrong.
PC: I admire immensely the King James Bible’s language and abhor the new versions of the last 50 or so years in English.
PC: I didn’t assume you never go near any church.
His daughter says it all. She never wants ro see him again. And she wants to feel rain on her face.
Back at 179 Brian said:
From a layman’s perspective:
How prison terms are calculated so precisely almost to the nearest day/minute truly escapes me. Like somebody’s criminal act can be measured like in an exact science! Like you’d put vegetables on a scale to be weighed or something like that!
The fact that F kept his captives in a windowless room for 24 years, deprived them of sunlight, and from ever seeing the moon with their own eyes, is actually far worse than holding hostages captive in a five star hotel, in the top floor penthouse with a swimming pool onsite for a hell of a lot longer. Yet there’s talk of suing him X amount of euros a day for kidnap, based on the Austrian penal code. We’re talking apples and oranges here. How do they ever come up with these ridiculous formulas?
Now which legal code and what clause actually mention anything about windowless rooms or, deprivation of sunlight, or the moon? Even from birth! How can deprivation such as this ever be quantified?
In an attempt to make justice all black and white, codify everything, and lay it all out very neatly, they’ve lost sight of what’s really important. The legal establishment needs to throw away all their mould ridden legal books, and just focus their attention on the “humane” aspect – so starkly absent from jurisprudence today. What we need are Solomonic judges, who use wisdom and common sense. Not ridiculous formulas.
Now to the whole business of putting people away in prisons, this for the most part is a criminal and pathological act in itself. (That’s what they often are in most parts of the world.) Putting F in the same cage with another pathological case like himself, who will take revenge on him isn’t an indication of how much society chooses to rid itself of the scourge, but rather is a sign of society’s unhealthy love affair with evil itself. That in fact is what normally goes on. That in fact is how most people are reacting to this issue. The pedophile is removed from society; only so that bad or worse will be done to him in return in prison. The vicious cycle is never broken.
What does that say about society? How can society pass judgment when it uses criminal methods to mete them out? I take the R.D. Laing view, and I’m afraid society is as much part of the problem, as the problem itself.
“His daughter says it all. She never wants ro see him again. And she wants to feel rain on her face.”
Not much to ask is it? So sad. I hope she gets to feel that rain on her face soon.
Chappati
In Victoria (at least) a prisoner likely to be assaulted by other prisoners is kept away from them.
The result (until recently) was that many convicted paedophiles were kept together at Sale Prison. There, the rumour goes, they “networked” to plan for future collaborations in kiddy-fiddling upon release. That’s partly what I meant about cunning, devious, methodical, etc (in an earlier post)
But I still think they deserved prison terms.
They wouldn’t be the only offenders who used Prison as a Training College.
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I believe ‘evil’ is a word used to describe the utterly heinous, that devoid of virtue. It is a problematic word as people have pointed out (and on which Nietzsche elucidated) because it renders whomsoever deemed ‘evil’ with no claim on human empathy. Nothing you do to the ‘evil’ person is wrong.
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That said I’m not sure what wit and nuance have to do with whether someone regarded as evil. Many wicked persons throughout history have displayed wit, nuance and excellent taste. Try for example Sigismondo Malatesta also known as The Wolf. But then some’ve see him as a hero.
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“Evil’ is not a particularly useful concept because it seeks to to distil everything we find unacceptable in ourselves and externalize it as if it’s out there. As if some external force, like Lucifer Morningstar or Baal, is respinsible for our shitty behaviour. Fritzl’s behaviour is reprehensible and worthy of the term ‘evil’. But I’m not sure using it will do anything for our understanding of him, nor to prevent further Fritzls.
Hot Chappati, at 176 I said:
Paul said “forever” and I pointed out that the formula I’d suggested was effectively forever.
The principles are more important than any formulas, but formulas do seem to exist, even in justice within traditional societies. I have a lay interest in justice systems, because manifestly there is room for improvement IMHO.
In the past I’ve thought of the proper punishment for truly unforgivable crimes, such as first degree murder. Full-on murder is truly unforgivable because the primary victim is dead. No form of restitution is possible. I don’t think it’s appropriate for secondary victims, or the state on their behalf, to forgive such a crime.
There are more dimensions to this than I can cover in a short post, but I believe in this case it is logical that the perpetrator forfeit freedom forever.
One of the things you have to worry about is what a prisoner can arrange from behind bars for others to do on his/her (usually his) behalf. So the safety of the public is an issue.
I’m not big on punishment as it works against some of the other purposes of justice, especially rehabilitation. Also I agree with the notion that the state meting out punishment is problematic. Generally I’d favour attempts to rehabilitate even first degree murderers so that they may come to be personally productive in some way, though ‘productive’ isn’t quite the right word. Erik Erikson used the term ‘generativity’ to cover both ‘productivity’ and ‘creativity’.
You can’t keep the state out of these things. One of its roles is to defend the defenceless against the powerful. Judges are not always wise. I’ve just come across the story of miller Christian Arnold and his wife who refused to pay their rent to their landlord, Count Schmettau, in Prussia in 1779 because the local commissioner, Baron von Gersdorff, had excavated a system of carp ponds that had cut off his mill-stream. King Frederick 11 (the “great”) let it be known that the mill-stream should be restored and when the local justice department found against the miller King Fred had the case removed to Berlin to the equivalent of the High Court. When three judges there found against the miller King Fred had them locked up in a fortress for a year to concentrate their minds and ordered the mill-stream to be restored.
King Fred was an unusual bloke and saw his job as working for ‘the state’ which he saw as providing justice for all, independent of station.
Not an exact recipe for our times, but the principle remains. If the judges don’t give justice then the legislators need to look at the laws, the procedures and anything else that needs to be done to fix the situation. But the state is the ultimate guarantor of our rights, which are socially constituted, and has the responsibility for preventing revenge.
In this case the crime is the most serious kind and essentially unforgivable. An appropriate punishment is for the perpetrator to be locked up for life and for his contact with others restricted. That said, he should be treated humanely, healed psychologically insofar as it is possible his age notwithstanding, and a productive, even satisfying life facilitated within the constraints appropriate to his and our safety.
But with the perpetrator appropriately quarantined and treated humanely the viscious cycle ends there.
BTW the ‘Miller Arnold Affair’ was written up by Thomas Carlyle. I read a shorter version in Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. Also last week Phillip Adams was talking to Jared Diamond about traditional forms of justice. It was interesting but Diamond is going to publish the case history of revenge-based justice in PNG in a book illustrating aspects of what traditional societies do better than so-called advanced societies. In child-rearing and the treatment of the aged he might be onto something, but revenge killing – no thanks!
Will the millions she’ll make from the TV deal really help her?
At least we won’t see a crass TV movie ala Elizabeth Smart