Deborah Orr: The man that still lurked in the monster

Thursday, May 01, 2008

I don't believe the geography is important in this most abject story – the nationhood, the location, the really quite simplistic Natascha Kampusch connection, familiar from the old human tales we tell our children as a matter of course, round the world, of incarceration in a cellar, in a sleep, in a tower.

I don't even believe that the most inexplicable thing is that so many people failed to spot the enormity of the 24-year crime taking place below their feet. What would you believe if you were Rosemarie Fritzl, or one of Elisabeth Fritzl's six siblings? That your daughter, your sister, had run away with a cult, as she said herself in a letter posted from far away? Or that her father, your father, your husband, had sexually abused her, raped her, abducted her, made up stories about the drug problems, and her "difficulty", built her a little-ease prison on a government grant, and would eventually assist her in giving birth to seven unlucky incestuous children? Young women do run away with cults. But fathers don't do quite what this man did, not ever, not as far as we know. Why that one child anyway, and none of the others? There's a texture to this story of imprisonment that speaks of choices, not compulsions, from its beginning until its denouement.

I think, conversely, that the astonishing, frightening thing about this dismal, unbelievable narrative is that Josef Fritzl let the world know himself what he had been up to, for the normal, paternal reason that one of his daughters was dangerously ill. It's that germ, that sliver, of everyday paternal instinct that must surely have survived all along somewhere in his flamboyantly abnormal psyche, that is the most scary thing of all. His monstrousness was not so complete that no humanity, no sympathy, no understanding of the sacredness of the life of his child remained. However strong the desire to brand this man's evil unique, the sucker punch is that he is human, all too human.

What was his switch, what flicked, after 18 years of watching Kerstin, his first-born daughter to his daughter – growing up in the dark, stunted in her growth, ill, deficient, unexercised, losing her teeth, talking to her two similarly captured siblings in grunts and coos – and made him take her off to hospital, for the life he has ruined so callously to be saved? And what tough little seed of understanding blossomed in his grotesque little brain, when after 24 years in that tiny tiled cellar, Elisabeth saw an appeal on the television, requesting that she come forward and answer questions about her comatose daughter's medical condition, and asked her father to help her to comply with the request?

And the three children who surfaced as babies, complete with notes from Elisabeth, asking that they should be cared for by their grandparents. Fritzl says he was worried about their crying, that it might be heard. But all babies cry. Were these three babies privileged enough just to have been born during a more quiescent phase in their father's rollercoasting pathologies, when their cries discomfited him, and he found the compassion to grant them sunlight, air and society? It's more horrible to believe that Fritzl was at times susceptible to something approaching decent behaviour than it is to shelter in the blanket idea that he never, ever had such ordinary instincts.

Family ties bind, however tangled they may be, however impenetrable the knots. That has to be why, despite all the worries of the army of head-doctors now gathered round this weirdest of families, their reunion, amid the horror, was reported as being happy, smiling, loving and forgiving. We don't, of course, need experts to tell us that no one can put this family back together – though they have told us this anyway. But there is a chink, again, of functionality in the news that they were all basically quite pleased to get acquainted, or even reacquainted.

However dehumanised the victims in this story may be presumed to be, especially the young man Stefan, and the little boy Felix, who had never seen daylight, the description by the police of their release into the world is touching because it is so recognisably a description of two lads revelling in an exciting new experience. The headlines may say that the children act like animals. But those reports suggest that they act like children too. It is, again, a fragment, all too human, all too close to the reality of happy domestic existence.

For that's where our most primal horror at this story is located, right at the deep, dark precipice between happy, evolved, civilised, families and fucked up general, free-wheeling human cruelty. Once you step off the straight and narrow, where, in all honestly, might it stop? Somehow, despite all we understand of human history and its catalogue of barbarity, still going on, right now, this minute, between sects, between tribes, between ethnicities, between nations, between factions, between families, between genders, between fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, we all still like to think that we as individuals are something akin to the Dalai Lama, wreathed in the absurd "knowledge" of our own, and humanity's, inherent goodness and gentleness.

Is it right, at this moment, to look away from Britain's most recent parental preoccupations – the dereliction of the McCanns in Portugal, and the heavy price they paid; or the indiscriminate breeding of Karen Matthews, and the strange abduction of her own little daughter; or the abandonment of poor murdered Scarlett Keeling in Goa – and concede that these failings may be comparatively slight, in the light of this story?

Or is it right instead to consider that maybe the most civilised impulses of humans do have to start with families, that this story is so frightening because we can still, if we try, espy the shell of a father in Josef Fritzl, an evil old man, and also a father who his lawyers say is "broken". In parenthood, this story may tell us, we have to police our duties and our morals with the utmost care, and protect most rigorously the purity of our compassion and our love. Few of us, as individuals, are capable of the obscenities carried out by Fritzl. Yet the simple complacency, or carelessness, or ignorance, we have seen here in Britain, in recent weeks and months, can blow a family to pieces.

As Tolstoy told us, there's only one tight blueprint for ensuring that your family is happy, and an infinite variety of choices if you want to risk messing it up. Perhaps the most ghastly thing of all about that Austrian cellar is that we can all learn something horribly banal from it, about the perils of being a human, and of being a guy looking after his family.