Fritzl Watch: Strasse Of Shame, Nazis And Gusenbauer’s Gas
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl and assorted Frtizls in the news
SPIKED: “Is there a Josef Fritzl on your street?”
The heinous cellar-incest crime is being turned into a metaphor for the dangers of family life.
Stasse of shame:Man threatened incest victims with gas death
Yet in much of the response to the Fritzl scandal, observers have suggested that, far from being ‘alien’, Josef’s alleged crimes are all too ‘human’. Rather than being viewed as an aberration, a story which has dominated headlines around the world precisely because it is so extraordinary, the cellar-incest horror is being turned by some into a metaphor – a metaphor for the continued haunting of Europe by the ghosts of Nazism; for Austria’s strange and unknowable ‘Eastern’ streak; and for the dangerous unpredictability of family life in general, especially as lived ‘behind closed doors’.
It takes a deeply disturbed individual to imprison his daughter. It takes a deeply disturbed society to behold such grotesque crimes and think to itself: where else might this sort of thing be happening?
REUTERS: Gas. Like the Nazis:
Fritzl, 73, told police earlier this week he had made threats to pump gas into the cellar where he hid his daughter and three of her children, a spokesman for the national criminal investigation office said.
NEWS24.com: “We’ll defend Austria’s image”
Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer says: “We will not allow anyone to believe they can impute another ‘original sin’ to our youth. We are not collectively responsible for every criminal individual. Quite the opposite.”
Everyone’s mentioning the war…
May 1st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
It took a few days, then I thought ‘Austria spawned Hitler’: how is that relevant? The crime of incest is so bloody heinous and revolting, and if you think about it goes completely against the Aryan idyll that Hitler aspired to.
But surely this crime is not commonplace, it revolts us, Josef Fritzl revolts us. How is it Austria’s fault? No more their fault than the mystery of Madeleine McCann is Portugal’s fault.
At the root of both is family, shall we stick with that?
Dysfunctional families are in every nation, xenophobia is too. Most civilised countries have laws to protect standards,they who transgress, eventually (if caught) are punished
Lets not forget also victims can frequently be ‘foreign’
Do Elisabeth and her children repel us? no , of course not
May 1st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
June - sometimes the most ‘dysfunctional’ families are the ones which appear to be the most ‘normal’
Therein lies the problem.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:31 pm
JuneJohnson, re. your last sentence. Many Austrian (and also German) newspapers STUPIDLY refer to them as “the incest family” - as if they had sexual “relationships” - whereas the truth is: There was an unbelievably criminal father who tortured and raped his innocent own daughter. And what do some papers do? They call them “the incest family”, as if they all were perverts.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Perhaps its the ‘German’ habit now of retreating into ’shame’ which, lets be honest, we Brits are bloody good at too.
Better by far to distance the nation from this, support the victims of this odious person, and help them to recover.
On the other hand is it all so hideous that his victims have to suffer our contempt?
I truly hope not
May 1st, 2008 at 7:05 pm
It seems to me that some reporters in our press have lost all sense of human decency.
How could any one with any ethics at all publish an article headed:
‘Monster Fritzl’s ‘animal’ children’
I find that almost unbelievable…
May 1st, 2008 at 9:52 pm
JuneJohnson
Portugal down now Austria next in press xenophobic attacks . Are the attacks linked to concerns about British multicultural identity and discomfort about what lies within the British islands? It is not just the British press though. Strange to attribute individual crimes to nations and link them to national history.
m and A
Very likely a ‘it shouldn’t happen here’ scenario, but of course it can happen anywhere
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:35 am
We are not collectively responsible for every criminal individual. Quite the opposite.”
the opposite being they’re individually responsible for the nation being a collection of criminals?