This Austrian horror gnaws at our fears about how we treat our own children

Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world

Most popular

Ed West

Trump is going to give us a thousand years of woke

You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for more than 20 years and fathered a total of seven children with her. The last nutter you read about, meanwhile, was Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted a young woman, Natascha Kampusch, and kept her beneath a manhole cover in his garage for eight years. Both crimes are, of course, beyond appalling: it takes a lot to get Austria on to our front pages, usually either something with Nazi overtones or, failing that, paedophilia. Fritzl’s, though, is the more fantastically grotesque and scarcely believable; his first sexual assault on his own daughter occurred when she was just 11 years old, something which he has already — apparently quite cheerfully — admitted. Indeed, Fritzl has shown not the slightest remorse, claiming that the incarceration of his daughter was initially a sort of noble piece of tough parenting occasioned by her allegedly unruly behaviour. ‘She was a difficult girl,’ he told the police, and being locked up kept her away from drugs. The police, meanwhile, have described Fritzl as an ‘arrogant’ man; yes, that sounds about right, I should think.

The fact that these two similar-ish cases occurred in Austria is a red herring; the country’s statistics for crimes of a sexual nature, crimes against children, crimes of violence and indeed murder are all well below the European average. In fact the Fritzl case seems, despite the lack of a murder, to have far more in common with the crimes perpetrated by Fred and Rosemary West at their terraced house in Gloucester which kept us all transfixed a decade or so ago — the absolute lack of normal parental feelings towards their children, the blitheness and lack of remorse with which they admitted their crimes.