Ever since the story came to light of how Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a dungeon below the family home in Austria, fathering seven children with her through continuous sexual abuse, commentators have been falling over themselves to find an explanation for his crimes in the country's history, culture or national psyche.
"There is something rotten at the heart of Austria ... a poisonous past," declared Tony Parsons in the Mirror. "A monster like Fritzl could only exist in a country like that." India Knight said in the Sunday Times: "Austria seems to specialise in a particularly vile, furtive, freakishly awful kind of abuse." In the Daily Mail, Peter Millar announced: "The whole of modern Austria is in denial about its recent past; its national identity has been founded on a tissue of lies and wishful thinking."
So now we know: Austria is not all Julie Andrews and sachertorte. Beneath the snow-capped alpine peaks and the whipped cream on mugs of hot chocolate, there is a darker Austria. It is a sick society, in which acts of almost unimaginable depravity go unnoticed because of a so-called "look-away" culture. It is a place where social responsibility is so minimal that neighbours will call the authorities to complain about next door's noise rather than confront the troublemaker face to face. It is a country where racism, particularly towards foreign workers, is rife. It is a country that has never recovered from losing its empire. If only Freud were around today, he would have something to say about the national psyche. And it wouldn't make those on the receiving end feel good about themselves.
There's only one problem with such analyses: the last six sentences of the previous paragraph could easily have been written about another post-imperial, socially cowardly, often racist society - namely ours. In many respects, Britain is not so dissimilar from Austria. You could make a compelling case for the view that what Fred West did in his Gloucester cellar finds its parallel in what Fritzl did in his Amstetten basement. But in West's case we, rightly, don't consider that his crimes are explicable because of a national malaise. We should think more carefully before we indict a nation on the basis of one crime, or try to stereotype 8 million people on the basis of a particularly extraordinary story of incestuous imprisonment.
You could argue that Britain is very different from Austria. We have never had a former Nazi as a postwar head of state. Hitler grew up in Linz, not Leicester. London, not Vienna, is a place where people of colour flourish. And consider all that decadent fin-de-siècle Viennese culture: Robert Musil's neurotic novel A Man Without Qualities, Otto Weininger's misogynistic, antisemitic and self-hating Sex and Character, the atonalism of the second Vienna school, all those morbid Schiele canvases. Didn't Freud make a comfortable living analysing the neurotics and psychotics of Vienna? Isn't Kafka's mad genius unthinkable without the neuroses of the Habsburg empire's bureaucracy and repression? Weren't Austrians a dodgy bunch even before the Anschluss turned them into Nazis?
It's tempting to stereotype a nation thus. Before the Fritzl story broke, I was in Vienna, interviewing the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. I stepped into the Leopold museum to look at some great Austrian art. An hour later, I came out suffocated by the sickly green nudes, the ugly neuroses on canvas. I hated what I'd seen and saw it as providing a clue to what the country was like. Only one problem with my reflex thought: the Vienna outside was a very different one from the ailing, self-loathing, unhealthy art I'd seen inside. It was a civilised, perhaps somewhat too clean, city filled with sophisticated people who loved art, architecture, literature and decent coffee with their cake, who were temperamentally incapable of the vulgarity so common on London streets.
Was I deluded by the cool, mittel-European surfaces of the Austrian capital? Should I consider what lies beneath, the grubby secrets that rise to the surface from Austrian basements? Vienna isn't Austria, just as London isn't Britain, Berlin isn't Germany and New York isn't the US. And surely the fact that three similar crimes have come to light in Austria in the past two years shows that this country is particularly sick?
On Newsnight, Natascha Kampusch, who was held for eight years by her Austrian captor in a basement cell, gave an interview in which she expressed her views on the latest abuse scandal. "I think it can happen everywhere and it also exists everywhere, not just in Austria," she said. Which, to my mind, is a truth insufficiently acknowledged right now. But then she added something else, which pulled her argument in the opposite direction, into the realms of implausible speculation. "I think this exists worldwide, but I think it's also a ramification of the second world war and its connection to education and so on," she said, adding: "At the time of national socialism, the suppression of women was propagated. An authoritarian education was very important."
Yet even these remarks are hopeless in trying to convince me of the thesis that Austria is a nation more disposed to these kinds of crimes than others. The suppression of women under national socialism finds its parallel and worse in other countries and other regimes where no cases like Fritzl's have taken place.
Did nazism affect the souls of Austrians? Writing in the Daily Mail, veteran foreign correspondent David Jones argues: "As anyone who remembers the plot to The Sound Of Music will recall, during the late 30s and 40s, Austrian society was riven with fear and mistrust, as some connived with the annexing Nazis and others (like the film's defiant naval captain Georg von Trapp) sought to remain free of their malign influence. The Germans encouraged collaborators to spy on their neighbours and report any dissent, and - much as the Austrians now dislike admitting it - this has produced the sort of insular mentality which underpins its towns and villages to this day."
Such speculation is easy to unleash, but difficult to sustain. If Austria is prone to this insular mentality, why have not similar crimes taken place in other countries where collaborators have been encouraged to spy on their neighbours? Why does Fritzl come from Austria rather than, say, Ukraine or East Germany?
What, though, is striking, especially to a Briton like me, is how Austrians have spiralled down into a mood of harrowing and unremitting self-examination unimaginable here. I sometimes think, because we won the second world war, we have never had to develop the self-critical faculty that the losers did. If we had murdered millions of Jews, we might have had to do so. But we didn't, so we needn't. Such complacency is as much part of British national identity as inedible cucumber sandwiches. By contrast, a self-critical national faculty is common among Germans and Austrians, certainly those born since 1945.
Among Austrians, that faculty is being, understandably, overworked. The Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard published an article saying, "The whole community must ask itself what is really fundamentally going on." Another daily, ?-sterreich, had an editorial saying: "The whole of Amstetten should drown in shame. The neighbours have turned a blind eye."
One of the extraordinary things about the case is how Fritzl seems to have done what he did without his neighbours realising. (Incidentally, it is a big moral step from not realising something to what ?-sterreich alleges; namely that Fritzl's neighbours turned a blind eye. The latter point, at least, remains to be proven.) But this national mood is misplaced if it is used to whip a nation for a crime for which it is not, and cannot be, responsible. The "look away" culture that allowed Fritzl to father seven children with his daughter in his basement and to keep many of that family hidden in that subterranean hell is not just an Austrian one. It is one that is endemic to socially mobile western societies. It is one of the prices of how capitalism works.
In any event, what shocks a nation does not mean that a national psyche is relevant in understanding why a crime happened. No nation is devoid of a foul history. You think Austria's past is more shameful than Britain's? Go tell that to the Kenyans who were incarceration in British concentration camps. Go tell that to the Kurds whom Churchill decided should be tear-gassed because they were "uncivilised". If you think Turkish Gastarbeiter are treated badly, consider the peevish record of British treatment of immigrants since the second world war. Read Andrea Levy's Small Island just to get a sense of how lovely our indigenous population was to outsiders. When I interviewed the Austrian-born historian Jörg Friedrich a couple of years ago about his book on the allied bombing of German cities, he told me Britons were incapable of taking responsibility for national crimes they had committed precisely because they had won the war. I think he is right: we are in no position to lecture Austrians, even though we do so almost as a reflex. We are in a worse position than them: as a nation, we want to lecture, but we do not have the temperament to listen to foreigners' criticisms. We haven't properly developed the self-critical muscle.
When I interviewed the author Philip Pullman earlier this week, he told me of driving around Austria, ardently looking for a front garden that wasn't pristine. There is something unbearable about Austria, something repressed, neat, sickeningly suburban. He didn't, sensibly, draw any conclusions from this, but for the fact that he didn't like it very much. His taste differed from that prevalent in Austrian front gardens. Sensibly, that was as far as he was prepared to go. Similarly, to impute any sinister, criminal significance to the nature of Austrian society is a mistake, and one that British writers - so often failing to examine their prejudices and our own subconscious impulses - commit. If there is a national mood of self-disgust sweeping Austria, it is one that we might do well to learn from.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace