It will not be a trial for those with weak stomachs. Next week the Austrian engineer, Josef Fritzl, faces a possible life sentence for allegedly imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in his specially built home dungeon, raping her about 3,000 times, incestuously fathering seven children and allowing one of them to die.

Everything has been done to shield Fritzl’s children from publicity that could scratch at their wounds and compound the psychological damage. And everything has been done to filter the information from the courtroom in the Austrian township of Sankt Pölten so that the trial does not become a global voyeuristic spectacle.

Yet Fritzl has already become an international brand, the subject of books and a black theatre comedy, and his worn features and fixed gaze have been made into a painting by an avant-garde artist.

Since his daughter, Elisabeth, emerged from his bunker-basement in April 2008, there has been almost compulsive interest in the man who created two families that reflected his Bad Self and his Good Self.

Downstairs, out of sight, Elisabeth scrabbled for existence with her children. Upstairs, the publicly acknowledged children, three of them promoted from the cellar, led a normal Austrian small-town life, attending school and taking karate lessons. The two worlds were separated by 11 steps.

The Austrian authorities will try to batten down the stories of cruelty that have been in the public domain for almost a year and reclaim the country’s reputation as a land of mountains, verdant valleys and tinkling cowbells.

More than 3,000 journalists are descending on Sankt Pölten. Only 98 – mainly Austrian – will be allowed near the courtroom. After they have heard the indictment they will be shown the door and the trial will resume in camera until the verdict. This is expected next Friday: a short, almost abrupt trial. Once a day a carefully edited version of the proceedings will be presented to the journalists. Austria has tight privacy rules and legal action is threatened against any media outlet that violates the rights of the children.

In all there were 13, of whom three – the youngest five years old – lived with Elisabeth in the dungeon. Three were sent upstairs as babies, introduced to Fritzl’s wife, Rosemarie, with a cock-and-bull story: the discarded offspring, he said, of the errant and absent Elisabeth. One died and was burnt in the stove. Fritzl’s “legal” family, by Rosemarie, amounted to six children, now adults, including Elisabeth.

The dead baby forms the basis of a murder charge against 74-year-old Fritzl. He denies murder and will contest it on Monday: the leaked reports during his pretrial arrest have all indicated that he does not want to be considered either mad or a killer.

“He regards himself as normal,” his defence lawyer, Rupert Mayer, says. Fritzl seems ready, however, to confess to many of the other charges: of rape, deprivation of liberty, coercion, incest and abuse. It is not clear how he intends to plead to the charge of enslavement.

Elisabeth, now 43, was allegedly taken to the cellar when she was 18, rendered unconscious with ether and did not see sunlight again for almost a quarter of a century. She will present her story on Tuesday and it will be a remarkable confrontation between father and daughter with the 11 hours of her prerecorded testimony beamed into the courtroom on a giant television screen. The recording will be stopped at crucial moments and her father will be asked to reply.

Plainly it was a horrific existence: the ceilings were so low that the growing children had to move in a permanent crouch. Rats crept in through the piping. Mildew and damp corroded the linings. The children, denied sunlight and vitamins, spat out their teeth.

Little wonder that it has been difficult to find eight jurors willing to sit through the week-long trial. Everybody in Austria has heard of, or has an opinion on, the case, and few people relish listening to the recreation of the airless basement and its daily anguish. In the German cannibal case of 2003 one of the lay judges had to leave the room to vomit. This time smelling salts will be available. Medical assistance, and even therapists, will be on hand.

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