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Book Review
The monster within
VIJAY NAGASWAMI
A compelling account of the horrific Josef Fritzl case that shocked the world
MONSTER: Allan Hall; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 260.
Allan Hall is an experienced Germany-based journalist, and the author of some 20-odd books on crime and related matters. He is widest known for his book “The Girl in the Cellar: The Natasha Kampusch Story” (co-written with Michael Leidig) about the horrifying case of a young Austrian girl who was held captive in the cellar of her abductor for eight years. Within a year of its publication, another shocking event dominated the world press: it was discovered, owing to the persistent efforts of a suspicious intensive care physician, that the psychopathic Josef Fritzl of Amstetten, Austria, had incarcerated his daughter Elisabeth in a bunker-like cellar for 24 years, sexually abused her, had seven children by her — three of whom had never left the cellar until they were rescued — allowed one of the children to die, and burned the body in an incinerator to prevent his secret life from being found out. And Allan Hall took up the challenge, an extraordinarily difficult one even for a veteran journalist, of chronicling it in his customary passionate style.
Terrible
The story is indeed a terrible one. Incest, physical and sexual abuse, medical neglect amounting to murder of a child, kidnapping (Elisabeth was 18 years old when she was lured into the infamous cellar) and a host of other criminal acts that Fritzl was charged with and recently found guilty of. The book is painful to read, as it vividly details the innumerable atrocities perpetrated on the teenager and describes her life with her children in the hidden, sound-proof, stinking, 55 sq metre dungeon, engineered with such brilliance that no one from outside, including Fritzl’s wife and other children who lived in the same house, had even the remotest idea of what was going on beneath their floorboards. Or had they, but chose to stay in denial? We’ll never know, but Hall implies that they must have had more than an inkling. In fact, he goes one step further and indicts the city of Amstetten and even the whole of Austrian society as being “rotten at the core” for permitting such horrors to happen. While this may sound a bit over the top, there were several clues that Fritzl, a convicted sex offender who had served a prison term, had left. Sadly, nobody had pieced them together because his story that Elisabeth had run away to join a cult had been benignly accepted by the authorities.
Reasons
Where the book tends to lose out is in its attempt to analyse Fritzl and the reasons for his behaviour through the facile conclusions arrived at by an Austrian psychotherapist: an excessively cruel mother who dominated and beat him regularly, his own Nazi indoctrination during childhood, his uncontrollable sexual libido and his difficulty in handling rebellion against his authority (Elisabeth tended to be rebellious). I wouldn’t hazard an opinion on what made Fritzl do what he did or how he found the courage to keep up the charade for 24 years, knowing full well that had anything happened to him, nobody would have known of the existence of his cellar victims who would have surely died of starvation. Obviously he is a psychopath and deserves to be locked away for the rest of his life (the only pity is that he’s already 74), but he was certainly conscious of what he was doing, going by the fact that he pleaded guilty to all his charges. Fritzl and his actions can only be judged by moral parameters, not by psychological ones.
If one accepts Hall’s premise that Austria’s sick society had a major role to play in creating a conspiracy of silence around this hideous crime, then our society too must be considered sick for perpetrating or turning a blind eye to incest and sexual abuse of children. In recent months, the popular press has been replete with stories of incest rape and incest abuse, and research has demonstrated the extraordinarily high rates of sexual violence against children (often by relatives) in our country. Austria at least has laws against incest; we don’t. Hopefully we won’t need a Fritzl in our midst to galvanise us into accepting the reality that we do have a big problem on our hands. Until this happens, we would do well to get our hands on Hall’s ‘Monster’, a compelling read, but certainly not a bedtime one.
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