Fritzl Watch: Strasse Of Shame, Nazis And Gusenbauer’s Gas
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl and assorted Frtizls in the news
SPIKED: “Is there a Josef Fritzl on your street?”
The heinous cellar-incest crime is being turned into a metaphor for the dangers of family life.
Stasse of shame:Man threatened incest victims with gas death
Yet in much of the response to the Fritzl scandal, observers have suggested that, far from being ‘alien’, Josef’s alleged crimes are all too ‘human’. Rather than being viewed as an aberration, a story which has dominated headlines around the world precisely because it is so extraordinary, the cellar-incest horror is being turned by some into a metaphor – a metaphor for the continued haunting of Europe by the ghosts of Nazism; for Austria’s strange and unknowable ‘Eastern’ streak; and for the dangerous unpredictability of family life in general, especially as lived ‘behind closed doors’.
It takes a deeply disturbed individual to imprison his daughter. It takes a deeply disturbed society to behold such grotesque crimes and think to itself: where else might this sort of thing be happening?
REUTERS: Gas. Like the Nazis:
Fritzl, 73, told police earlier this week he had made threats to pump gas into the cellar where he hid his daughter and three of her children, a spokesman for the national criminal investigation office said.
NEWS24.com: “We’ll defend Austria’s image”
Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer says: “We will not allow anyone to believe they can impute another ‘original sin’ to our youth. We are not collectively responsible for every criminal individual. Quite the opposite.”
Everyone’s mentioning the war…
Posted: 1st, May 2008 | In: Tabloids Comments (7) | TrackBack | Permalink
