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The blue and yellow tourist board posters are supposed to conjure up a charming Sound of Music idyll:

“Austria — holiday with friends!” or “Austria — countryside with passion”.

It is a country, in short, that prides itself on its mountain air and sunshine, not the musty smell of a windowless home-made dungeon.

Commentary: a society that nurtures secrets

What society would accept the probability of three children being left on the doorstep of Josef F and grant him adoption?

Multimedia

• Pictures: house of horror

BACKGROUND

• Why are child abuse scandals happening in Austria?

• Analysis: damage caused may never be healed

• Brutal double-life of Josef Fritzl emerges

• Police search other Fritzl properties in Austria

But we should save our pity for the 18-year-old youth and his two siblings found in the cellar at the weekend, who had never been to school, never seen daylight and never drank in the mountain air. The three F children, aged between 5 and 19, were trapped in the home by a tyrannical man who was both their father and their grandfather.

The two teenagers have not only been robbed of their childhood by a crime so macabre that it is being described as the crime of the century, but, with their younger brother, have been let down by the Austrian state.

Austria is — as is clear from the appalling F family saga, from the case of the “girl in the cellar” Natascha Kampusch and from the 1996 case of Maria K, who was locked in a coffin-like wooden chest — a “look-away” society.

Perhaps the travel posters tell part of the story. It is in the nature of Alpine geography that some villages are sunny, while elsewhere in the valley there are communities that grow up in the shadow of the mountains. These places are invariably cold and cheerless; young people leave and tourism trickles away.

Only this time the darkness envelops a small town fringed by orchards and vineyards in Lower Austria.

It is here that three children, abused and born of an incestuous relationship, went to school and were treated as future upstanding Austrian citizens. Their three siblings and their mother appeared to vanish from the face of the Earth.

What society would accept the probability of three children being left on the doorstep of Josef F over a decade and grant him adoption rights without inquiring after the location of the mother? Perhaps only a cosy, incurious community concerned with Schein nicht Sein, or “appearance, not reality”.

“How is it possible that nobody heard or saw anything, that nobody asked questions?” asked Petra Stuiber, columnist of Der Standard in Vienna.

“What does this say about neighbours and the extended family, acquaintances and above all civil servants dealing with the family?

“A whole country,” she reflects, “has to ask itself what is going fundamentally wrong.”

Colonel Franz Polzer, head of the police investigation team, is also puzzled. Over decades Mr F acquired food and baby clothes for people who did not officially exist. Why did no one notice?

Still, the detective was right to brush off a suggestion yesterday that the F tragedy was a specifically an Austrian crime. After all, Marc Dutroux, a Belgian, held schoolgirls captive in his cellar and abused them. Germany has had its cannibal and countless cases of infanticide. There is no monopoly on cruelty.

But Austria is a society that nurtures its secrets, that suppresses its history, that blocks out uncomfortable biographies.

There is a consensus mentality, an aversion — as the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf once said of the Germans — to open conflict, that has reached almost neurotic proportions.

It locks out whistle-blowers and malcontents as surely as Mr F locked up his daughter and children/grandchildren. Perhaps there is something Habsburgian about this; an echo, too, of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna.

The tone politically was set in the 1920s by the feuding Austro-Marxists, national and Christian socialists, and then in the 1930s by the sense of relief — enthusiasm even — felt by many Austrians when Nazi Germany incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. The ignoble fact is that 40 per cent of the staff and three quarters of the commandants of concentration camps were of Austrian origin. It was Austrians largely who organised the deportation of the Jews: 80 per cent of the staff of Adolf Eichmann, the logistics planner of the Holocaust, were from Austria.

After the war many Nazis were swallowed up into democratic party structure. Heinrich Gross, who supervised experiments on child euthanasia victims, joined the Nazi party in 1932, the post-war Social Democrats in 1950 and for decades had a seamless career as a neurologist and expert witness in hundreds of court cases. Far longer than in Germany, Waffen SS veterans met to chat about old times. The central question for post-war Germans has been: how many facts do I need to know about my father to know myself? It is a good question, rarely posed in Austria.

It would be wrong, of course, to see a Nazi lurking behind every floral patterned sofa in provincial Austria. But a cod psychologist might draw the conclusion that 73-year-old Mr F, whose early childhood was spent in Nazi Austria, came to accept certain patterns of behaviour.

His daughter was perhaps seen as wayward, in need of discipline. He devised the ultimate punishment — the impossibility of escape.

Whatever the truth in the Amstetten house, it is the interlocking circles of secrecy that make Austria special in the way that it deals with, or ignores, individual tragedies.

The power networks are closer, more intense, spread over generations and professions. Sometimes they mask corruption, more often they mask inefficiency.

This month a tabloid newspaper, Heute, released intimate details about the sex life of the kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch — quoting directly from confidential police transcripts. One article even ransacked the transcript of a conversation between Ms Kampusch and her doctor, unthinkable even in the more robust Anglo-American school of journalism. The leak seemed to come from a parliamentary committee.

The subsequent arguments have been revealing. One conservative politician blames a colleague from the Green Party, declaring that “giving him secrets is like putting sausages in front of a dog”. His outrage was not so much about the betrayal of medical information as the surrendering of secrets that form part of the membership of the political caste.

Every Austrian town has its hierarchies and codes. Did leaving Mr F in peace form part of this code of discretion? It is difficult to believe that he acted without the knowledge of others. Either way, his crime was made possible by a society that is inclined to look away rather than experience discomfort.

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