Life in Austria seems to be competing with literature. Since late April, we have been learning with horror and fascination how Josef Fritzl lured his daughter Elisabeth into a carefully designed, soundproofed cellar (for which he had secured planning permission), kept her there for twenty-four years, and sired seven children on her; of these, one died, three lived in the cellar, and three, still more incredibly, appear to have been deposited on the family’s doorstep in Amstetten and adopted by Fritzl and his wife as foundlings. This immediately recalls the case of Natascha Kampusch, who escaped two years ago from her eight-year captivity in Vienna. But to anyone familiar with Austrian literature it also calls up a host of literary reminiscences.

“Tourmaline is dark, and this story is very dark”, begins the story “Turmalin” (1852, revised 1853) by the great prose writer Adalbert Stifter. The porter in a semi-ruinous city mansion dies by falling off a ladder; the neighbours enter the cellar where he has lived, and find it inhabited by a tame jackdaw and a teenage girl with a swollen head and a barely intelligible manner of speaking. It emerges that the porter was none other than a wealthy rentier who had vanished, together with his baby daughter, many years before. Apparently deranged by the discovery of his wife’s unfaithfulness and her subsequent disappearance, he kept his daughter in the cellar, locking her in when he went out. By climbing the ladder she could peep through a narrow aperture into the street, but could only see the feet of the passers-by. The girl is taken into care and eventually restored to something like normal life. Stifter’s story is doubly dark: not only gloomy, but obscure. His art consists in giving us enigmatic, indirect glimpses into the interior life of the rentier. But how his life fell apart so drastically, and how he came to sacrifice his daughter to his obsessive grief, remains ultimately mysterious.

A similar emotional paralysis governs the family in Franz Nabl’s novel Das Grab des Lebendigen (1917; “The Grave of the Living”), reissued as Die Ortliebschen Frauen (1936; “The Ortlieb Women”). Nabl (1883–1974) has had his reputation unjustly clouded by his association with National Socialism, but he is ripe for rediscovery as a realist writer keenly aware of the destructive potential of the family. While his great novel Ödhof (1911) centres on a domestic tyrant who crushes his weaker relatives, Das Grab des Lebendigen starts with the death of the father. For Inspector Anton Ortlieb, the family was a closed enclave. His children felt surrounded by an invisible wall. And the dead father proves even more powerful than the living one.

Instead of escaping, the children, led by his elder daughter Josefine, try to remain loyal to his memory by cutting themselves off from the outside world. When Josefine’s younger brother Walter shows signs of rebellion, Josefine locks him in the cellar. Unlike what happened in Amstetten, however, the neighbours do notice something suspicious. The police are fetched and discover a cellar complex consisting of two rooms, furnished, heated and even equipped with musical instruments – virtually anticipating the underground prison Fritzl constructed. Josefine eludes arrest by hanging herself.

Of course it is not just in Austrian fiction that we find people imprisoned in cellars. The obvious British counterpart is John Fowles’s The Collector. Here a clerk called Ferdinand Clegg, a keen collector of butterflies, becomes obsessed with a young upper-middle-class woman called Miranda, kidnaps her, and keeps her in his cellar, where she eventually dies of pneumonia. But there is an important difference. While the Austrian examples are about the power of the family, Fowles’s novel reveals a very British obsession with class. The Caliban figure Clegg, named after a blood-sucking insect, makes it the object of his life to capture and kill beautiful, delicate, airborne creatures. He is a hideous Morlock who has dragged one of the Eloi into his underground domain. The novel is implicitly Nietzschean, showing how an adherent of slave morality resents the aesthetically pleasing lifestyle of a natural aristocrat.

In the Austrian books, however, the common factor is patriarchal authority. Inevitably one thinks of Freud, the Viennese Jew whose analysis of family dynamics centres on the ambivalent mixture of love and murderous hatred directed towards the father. But this theme can of course be found long before Freud. It is striking how much the classic Viennese comedy of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy revolves around abusive husbands and fathers. Raimund’s Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (1828; “The King of the Alps and the Enemy of Humanity”) shows the paranoid Rappelkopf being cured of his violent rages by seeing such behaviour enacted by his double. Nestroy, among many other examples, in a realistic comedy with an exceptionally long title beginning Eine Wohnung ist zu vermieten in der Stadt (1837; “A Flat is for Rent in the City”), presents a truly monstrous egotist as a comic figure. Herr Gundlhuber, intent on moving house because he does not like sleeping in a bedroom painted green, drags his long-suffering wife and four children round various other properties where they inevitably wreak havoc.

But Gundlhuber, though a trial to live with, is bearable compared to the monsters we meet in twentieth-century literature. In a chapter of Die Blendung (Auto da Fé, 1935) headed “The Kind Father”, Elias Canetti describes the former policeman, now a caretaker, Benedikt Pfaff:

"At meals he proclaimed himself in favour of family life, at night he derided his enfeebled wife. He exercised his rights of discipline as soon as he came home from work. He polished his red-haired fists on his daughter with real pleasure, he made less use of his wife. He left all his money at home; the sum was always perfectly correct, even without his checking it over, for the only time he had found an error his wife and daughter had had to spend the night in the street. Taken for all in all he was a happy man."

Züchtigungsrecht, which C. V. Wedgwood translates as “rights of discipline” in fact means something more like “rights of chastisement”. Such rights were legally accorded to husbands and fathers by the Austrian pre-1918 civil code. Even when husbands were accused of maltreating their wives and children, judges sometimes ruled that they had practised only legitimate chastisement; victims could request leniency for the accused, and were no doubt often pressured into doing so. In Canetti’s novel, nobody hinders Benedikt Pfaff, after his wife’s death, from locking his daughter in a back room as his “prisoner”, thrashing her, and (as the text hints by words like “honeymoon”) sexually abusing her. Nor did anyone hinder Josef Fritzl, according to a schoolfriend of his daughter, from making his children kneel before him and striking them with his fists.

There is a close and complex intertextual relationship between the work of Elias Canetti and that of his wife Veza, whose literary importance has been increasingly recognized since the publication in book form in 1990 of Die gelbe Strasse (“Yellow Street”), a collection of linked stories that first appeared in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1932–3. The horrifying story “The Ogre” presents a husband who is known to the rest of the world as a jovial companion, but dreaded at home as a tyrant who pressures his wife into handing over her money by inflicting simple but effective torture on their children. Veza Canetti, a courageous socialist and feminist, shows how, even in the more liberal First Republic, Frau Maja Iger is denied any redress by the law. After a brutal attack, she goes to her lawyer; but because the attack was followed by “intimacies” (that is, rape), the law prevents her from obtaining a divorce.

Other protests were raised against the legal sanctioning of domestic abuse. Karl Kraus commented in his journal Die Fackel (“The Torch”) on many scandalous cases, including that of a man who had killed his three-year-old stepson by whipping him every day for several months:

"The age of humanity knows nothing of a rigid paterfamilias who has power of life and death. In the sanctified family, it knows only parental love – which chastises. And because it considers chastisement the expression of love, and the latter is deduced from the former, there is a right of chastisement, and when it is taken to excess, a mild reprimand."

Such incidents helped to strengthen the campaign against the nuclear family mounted by the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who, because of his drug-taking and his promiscuity, was declared by his father, a distinguished professor of criminal law, morally insane and confined to a psychiatric institution, causing an outcry in the press. After his release, Gross met Franz Kafka, and the two discussed founding a journal to be called Blätter zur Bekämpfung des Machtwillens (“Pages on Combating the Will to Power”). As sons of domineering fathers, they had much in common (including the fact that Kafka, as a law student, had attended lectures by Gross Sr).

These abuses of paternal authority seem to fit into deep-seated cultural patterns, and any attempt to investigate them would have to take into account the influence of the Catholic Church in Austria. The later nineteenth century saw a conflict between the Church and the liberal government which, on taking office in 1867, introduced laws permitting freedom of religious practice, state education, mixed marriages, and civil marriages in cases of emergency. The Church saw free-market liberalism as destructive of society. A balance of rights and duties, it was argued, had been replaced by a ruthless, egoistic system in which an employer was encouraged to exploit his economic power. This system must destroy the family by turning all its members, men, women and children alike, into economic units obliged to work full-time. These concerns – which were far from groundless – eventually found an authoritative expression in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). Catholics therefore did all they could to strengthen the family, which meant reinforcing the authority of the father as head of the household.

One literary response and warning was the play Das vierte Gebot (1877; “The Fourth Commandment”) by Ludwig Anzengruber. The fourth commandment enjoins one to honour one’s father and mother, and the heroine, Hedwig, obeys it by allowing her parents to pressure her into marriage with a brutal debauchee. When she asks a priest what she should do, he thoughtlessly tells her to obey her parents and trust in God. Later the priest admits that in giving this advice he was mainly concerned to please his own parents, who were listening proudly as their son delivered pastoral advice. But by then the damage is done. After enduring years of violence from her husband, Hedwig has obtained a divorce, but their sickly child (presumably having inherited venereal disease from his father) has died after living only a few months; Hedwig hopes soon to follow it. Anzengruber, like Nabl, belongs among the critical realists whose work has been overshadowed, if not blacked out altogether, by the enormous prestige of Austrian modernism.

What has Freud to say about all this? A liberal and anticlerical writer, who identified imaginatively with the Semitic Hannibal against the power of Rome, he was well aware of the influence exercised by the Church, and the principal thrust of psychoanalysis is to recognize the family as the problem rather than a solution. But the immediate impact of Freud on people who consulted him is a different matter. I do not mean here to revive the debate about Freud and child abuse: as is well known, he at first surmised that his patients’ hysterical symptoms resulted from physical abuse in early childhood, then, finding it impossible to believe that abuse was so widespread, he concluded that it was sexual fantasies involving one’s parents that were universal. This shift to fantasy limited the ability of psychoanalysis to intervene in real cases of child abuse. As Larry Wolff showed in Postcards from the End of the World (1989), based on his extensive researches in the Viennese press, such cases were numerous and horrific. But I want to make a different point. Much of our knowledge of what went on in Freud’s consulting room comes from the four case histories he published – those of Dora, Little Hans, the Wolf Man, and the Rat Man. All are extremely peculiar, with wild imaginative leaps to flimsy and fanciful conclusions. Their general effect is to reinforce the existing family, with a conservative bias.

This is most apparent in the much-discussed case of “Dora”, who in reality was Ida Bauer, the sister of the Austro-Marxist theoretician Otto Bauer. Freud’s case history lets us glimpse a domestic hell in which Ida’s father was having an affair with “Frau K.”; “Herr K.” had made advances to Ida, who concluded that her father wanted Herr K. to have her in return for tolerating his own affair with Frau K. Freud’s deduction from all this was that Ida was secretly in love with her father, with Herr K., and even with Frau K. Still more revealing are his remarks about Ida’s mother, Frau Bauer, whom he never met, but to whom he attributes a “housewife’s psychosis” which made her so obsessed with cleaning the family’s home that it was impossible to live there comfortably. This, he thought, was because her husband had fallen ill and subsequently neglected her. In fact, Herr Bauer’s illness was venereal, and he had infected his wife with it. Her obsession with cleaning might therefore be seen in part as the revenge of the helpless. Freud reveals an astonishing lack of interest in her situation, let alone insight, but he treats her much as he does her daughter. In both cases, he transfers his attention from the external circumstances of their domestic life to their supposed internal conflicts and desires. It looks very much as though Freud is blaming the victims in order to uphold the authority of the father.

In recounting the story of the Rat Man (“A Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, 1909), Freud digresses into that of another patient, a civil servant, who had many eccentricities. One was an obsession with cleanliness: he paid Freud in banknotes which had been ironed in order to get rid of bacteria. Another was his treatment of young girls. Among his friends he would play the role of a jolly uncle. In this role he would invite his friends’ daughters out for a day in the country and would contrive to miss the train so that he and the girl would have to spend the night in a hotel. Although he always arranged a separate room for the girl, he would come to her bed during the night and masturbate her with his fingers. Freud suggested that this was not a good idea on grounds of hygiene: “But aren’t you afraid of doing her some harm, fiddling about in her genitals with your dirty hand?”. To this remarkably mild objection – would such conduct have been acceptable with clean hands? – the civil servant responded by flying into a rage and declaring that his attentions had never done the girls any harm. He stormed out of Freud’s consulting room and never came back. The pattern that emerges, I suggest, is of extreme and excessive indulgence towards patriarchal authority and its abuse, and a lack of sympathy with the women and children who were, and evidently still are, its victims.

This is the cultural matrix from which Josef Fritzl emerged. His case may, as has already been suggested in the Austrian press, reveal inadequacies in society’s monitoring of domestic abuse. But when we place it in a literary context, it seems also to disclose deep-seated patterns. Fritzl existed in literature before he existed in life. We should attend more carefully to those critical writers – Nestroy, Anzengruber, Nabl, the Canettis, and numerous others – who are too readily dismissed as caricaturists. Their monstrous and grotesque characters, from Gundlhuber to Benedikt Pfaff, actually turn out to embody some of the twisted energies at work in Austrian society. In his writings on realism, Georg Lukács praised writers such as Balzac or Dickens whose characters do not represent a kind of statistical average but are unique, extraordinary, larger than life, like Balzac’s master criminal and police chief Jacques Collin (alias Vautrin, Saint-Estève, Carlos Herrera, Père Jacques and William Barker). Precisely such a far-fetched character, says Lukács, represents a triumph of realism, because in him the conflicts and contradictions of society find their expression.

The last word belongs to Austria’s 2004 Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, who in her novel Lust (1989) undertook to expose the intertwining of capitalist and sexual domination by recounting in minute and impassive detail how a factory director inflicts monotonous sexual abuse on his wife. At the time, Lust looked like a bitterly over-the-top satire on domestic life. But now reality has outstripped and vindicated it with events which, unimaginable until recently, were nevertheless adumbrated in literature.

Ritchie Robertson edited (with Katrin Kohl) A History of Austrian Literature 1918–2000, 2006.

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