Elisabeth’s wish was that neither she nor her family would ever see their father again, that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars where he stood no chance of terrorising his family, which, she felt, he would continue to do if given any opportunity.
Elisabeth and her children now live in a small town in the Austrian countryside. Shortly before the trial a British newspaper revealed the name of her new hometown. And another British newspaper published the first photograph of Elisabeth and her daughter Kerstin in their new life. The picture shows two inconspicuous-looking women—one blond, the other brunette—walking down the street. They are dressed modestly in casual shirts and jeans and have nothing in common with what many members of the press had imagined them to look like.
For a few days in the aftermath of the trial there were some rumours, denied by the court, that a deal had been struck whereby Josef Fritzl had been persuaded to plead guilty in return for a comfortable cell in which to serve out his sentence. Even before he was tried he had been granted the right to a computer—although no Internet—and by the time of the verdict the components were being assembled for his use. Those who have visited Fritzl in prison describe a remarkably upbeat man who is now in the process of writing his memoirs. And a formal complaint made to the authorities by his adult children revealed that their father telephones them constantly, although there is talk of banning him from doing so. Except for his hoarse-voiced confession in court, there is nothing about him to indicate that he is plagued by guilt or in any way on the brink of despair.
The Austrian authorities, in their zeal to find a neat resolution for an episode that has caused the country such embarrassment, have shown little inclination to examine in any detail many aspects of the case. And although the law has been changed so that sex offenses will now be kept on police files idefinitely, the Austrian government has never launched an investigation into the role, over the years, of either Amstetten’s police force or its social services department. Instead, even the prosecution relied solely on the assurances of the district governor, Hans-Heinz Lenze, that the circumstances surrounding Elisabeth’s disappearance had been looked into. Lenze, who had managed to review the conduct of Amstetten’s social services throughout Elisabeth’s twenty-four-year disappearance within days of the story breaking, had pronounced himself satisfied that the authorities shouldered no blame for the incident. Within twenty-four hours of the news of the crime breaking, Lenze declared that the authorities could “not be accused of any wrongdoing.” Social workers had observed no “noticeable problems” with the three children that the Fritzls either adopted or fostered in such quick succession in the 1990s; the children were “very good in school and had been ‘well accepted’ by their schoolmates.” And although there had been some “suspicious moments” when Elisabeth Fritzl had initially disappeared, nothing “inappropriate” had arisen. The mother of the three foundlings was never searched for, according to a press release that had been prepared by the Lower Austrian police, because, in all three cases, the children were without birth certificates and therefore treated as “parentless.” Although in each case a letter had been found from the biological mother, “no court would have accepted [it] as proof of motherhood.” Elisabeth Fritzl was never looked for because “officially the mother was unknown.” Social workers had paid many visits to the Fritzl household and been particularly moved by the way the children’s “grandmother” had looked after the children, who “were educated to a good standard, were integrated in school, and learned musical instruments.”
The journalists have gone. And life in Amstetten has resumed its sedate, provincial pace. Its mayor is keen to rebuild its reputation and has let it be known in one of his newsletters that, as a “mark of respect for the local population and this beautiful town,” the Fall Fritzl (the Fritzl Case) will be referred to only as Fall F.
The journalists have gone. But the house is still there. For a while lawyers acting on behalf of Elisabeth Fritzl attempted to persuade the regional authorities to have the cellar destroyed. But all sorts of red tape and paperwork got in the way: laws and building restrictions, as well as the bailiff’s instructions to sell the house to the highest bidder so that the banks could in some way recoup their loans. The house is still there, and so is the cellar. Demolishing the cellar, even as a symbolic gesture, is not something the citizens of Amstetten see it as their business to undertake.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the following for their invaluable knowledge and support during our writing of this book: Mary de Young, Professor Judith Herman, Karl and Elisabeth Dunkl, Friedrich Leimlehner, Jessica Hynes, Dr. Adelheid Kastner, Richard Dawes, Claire Paterson, Nicoletta Avanzi, Jackie Craissati, Malcolm Rushton, James Lever, Liane Patt and Professor Oliver Rathkolb.
Also of considerable help were the following books:50 Jahre Stradt Amstetten, 1948
100 Jahre Amstetten: Werden, Wachsen, Wandel, 1998
Amstetten 1938—1945, Gerhard Zeilinger
The Austrian Mind, William M. Johnston
Character Styles, Stephen M. Johnson
Cool Memories, Jean Baudrillard
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Father-Daughter Incest, Judith Herman
The Guilty Victims: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider, Hella Pick Hiob, Josef Roth
Incest and the Medieval Imagination, Elizabeth Archibald
The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, Otto Rank
Rethinking Architecture, Neil Leach
Sex and Character, Otto Weininger
Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Judith Herman
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