The Josef Fritzl story has now been running for almost two weeks, and the tabloids show no sign of scaling back their coverage. That in itself is astonishing - it's almost unheard of for a story that doesn't in some way involve either Britons or Americans to keep the notoriously nationalistic press in such raptures for such a period of time. The last time such a story did capture the lurid and ghoulish imagination in such a way was when Natascha Kampusch escaped, conveniently for every tabloid writer in the land in the same country as Fritzl committed his perversions.
The story itself, all those involved, and the response to it both by the press and indeed those now under arrest could not be more suited to the modern media age. With Natascha Kampusch, the media assumed that she would be frightened, afraid and easily malleable, able to get all the juicy but suitably horrific details without much effort. As it turned out, despite her incarceration for 8 years, she proved to be a fiercely independent, intelligent young woman who refused to sell her story and asked the media to leave her alone. This time round everything has been different, possibly because the "monster" in this case declined to kill himself once his secret had been exposed. Both the Austrian police and Fritzl's lawyer have been more than helpful to the media, giving updates on how Elisabeth and her children are progressing, revealing that the younger ones don't so much speak as grunt, while Fritzl himself has been pouring his heart out, apparently informed of how the media have decided that he isn't an especially nice person and determined to prove that he loved his daughter and their children as only an incestuous father who locked them in the cellar can. There has been absolutely no room for subtlety, for any of the more unpleasant details which could be overlooked to be discarded, to let the complete unpleasantness of the case to be watered down and then the coverage scaled back. After all, if it didn't sell papers they wouldn't be saturated with it, would they?
If such diligence went into reporting the mechanics of the European Union, we might not be so ignorantly informed of it, and I hold myself in the category. It hasn't simply been enough though for the tabloids to publish the stomach-turning, blow-by-blow account of what Fritzl did to his daughter however; instead it's been open season on Austria as a whole. To an extent, this has been because the country itself has obviously been shocked to the core by one of its own citizens constructing a prison in his basement for his daughter without anyone becoming suspicious for 24 years, even while she apparently dumped her unwanted children on the doorstep without anyone ever catching a glimpse of her, but Austria's understandable introspection has been a boon to the armchair psychologists here. For most, it simply comes back to the Nazis, a view encouraged both by Fritzl himself, who in his latest dispatch has blamed his inclination for discipline and order on growing up during the Anschluss and second world war. Kampusch, in an interview with Newsnight, also suggested that the control and subjugation of women during the Nazi era might also have been a contributory factor. Again, this is partially to do with our own continuing obsession with WW2 and the Nazis as much as it is with Austria's own not as resounding renunciation and guilt for the crimes committed over 60 years ago. However much the years of Nazi rule still haunt Europe, to still be blaming them now for incredibly rare but brutally visceral crimes is a refusal to look not just as modern society, but also into the minds of both those responsible and the victims' themselves.
Of course, even doing that results mainly only in cod-psychological answers, and Fritzl's own bringing up of his mother will do nothing to alter the emerging stock Oedipal and Freudian explanations for his crime. It is at least more worthy than blaming Austrian society as a whole, as some of the press have taken to doing. According to them, as Brendan O'Neill writes, Austria is a look-away society; its inhabitants wary of too much familiarity, and they don't care about what's happening next door. Even if this were true, this is astounding hypocrisy from the likes of the Mail and the Sun, who when not feigning shock at the apparent indifference and lack of questioning by Fritzl's neighbours rail against the nanny state, social workers, local councils and anyone who denigrates from the view that an Englishman's home is his castle. O'Neill concludes with:
The truth is that the Fritzl horror reveals precisely nothing about the Austrian people - but the rabid reaction to the Fritzl horror reveals a great deal about the sense of loss, confusion, desperation and chauvinism amongst opinion-formers here at home.
The only part I would demure from is that while it may not tell us anything about the Austrian people as a whole, it will obviously tell us something about Austrian society. Those who go on to commit notorious crimes are shaped not just by their upbringing and their family but also by their country at large - and let's face it, we're hardly slouches in that regard. We can go all the way back to Jack the Ripper, whose crimes in effect created the media obsession with murder and killers, but our more modern "monsters", if viewed through the same prism as Austria is currently being judged by, hardly show us up as being any less guilty. From Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nielsen, Colin Ireland and perhaps most pertinently, Fred and Rose West, in most of the cases warning signs were ignored, or those nearby didn't suspect anything, even if they thought their neighbours were a bit strange or different. The closest we've perhaps come to Austria's current mood and navel-gazing was the James Bulger case, which like Fritzl's was an almost uniquely terrible and perplexing crime which has not been repeated. If anything, that crime led to the "prison works" mantra and our continuing obsession with locking ever more individuals up, despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that Bulger's killers were released after what were only relatively short sentences.
Furthermore, all nations have their own inherited monsters, whose cases and crimes continue to shock generation after generation: America has Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, not to mention the more recent, even more troubling school shooting killers such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and last year, Seung-Hui Cho; Japan has Futoshi Matsunaga and Tsutomu Miyazaki; Belgium has Marc Dutroux; France Michel Fourniret and Russia Andrei Chikatilo. We ourselves have the ignoble distinction of having Harold Shipman, possibly the serial killer with the highest number of victims which we know about. There was little questioning of society as a whole when his crimes were exposed; rather, it was the health service that was called into question. As Stuart Jeffries has written, perhaps our lack of mulling over such crimes tells us more about ourselves than it does the Austrians. Even after Diana, which some saw as the moment when the cliched stiff-upper lip was shed, our capability for self-criticism has not developed in such a way. Sure we're renowned for our self-deprecation, and we can why-oh-why about how our public services are rubbish, but when it comes to us ourselves we're far more defensive. Back when Steve Wright was committing his crimes in Ipswich, a town which could be described similarly to how Amstetten has been if you were so inclined, the slightest amount of questioning about how those women came to be on the street was answered by the likes of Richard Littlejohn who declared we were not all guilty and that the death of the five prostitutes was no great loss. Elsewhere, the liberals were (inevitably) those who got the blame. At the time the Sun complained about how some of the coverage was more sensitively referring to the women as "sex workers"; once the trial was out of the way and political capital was to be made, one of those women's mothers was used to demand the restoration of capital punishment and removal of the human rights act, two of the policies that might just signify our move towards a more civilised society.
Partly this is because our current fears have moved on from killers such as Wright, and even paedophiles such as Ian Huntley to that other bogeyman: the binge drinking, ferret-faced yob, ready to kick anyone to death for so much as looking at them in the wrong way. Similarly though, we care little about why the yob is why he is; all the debate is on what should be done to them after the event or what the punishment should be when they first step out of line, with epithets such as Broken Britain being thrown in when they know it isn't true but is a catchy soundbite. Hence why Fritzl is so attractive to the tabloids: an incredibly easy story to cover without having to get into such unpleasantries as thinking about ourselves and where we're going when we can do the same about the foreigners who are yet to get beyond their Nazi heritage. Even the recent Shannon Matthews case, rather than wondering about how estate had got how it had, or whether it really was as bad as they were making out instead concentrated on how awful they were rather than anything towards a solution. Thinking takes time; relying on prejudices takes moments.Labels: Austria, bullshit, crime, Josef Fritzl, media anaylsis, media coverage, sensationalism, tabloid stupidity
