Josef Fritzl and Austrian literature

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Many were horrified by the recent news, from Austria, that a man named Josef Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and had seven children by her. One of the children had died, reports say, while three lived with her in a prison-like cellar and three lived normal lives upstairs with Fritzl and his wife. In all those years the neighbors did not suspect a thing.

Readers of the novels and plays of Thomas Bernhard, however, have always been aware of a much darker reality. Bernhard’s novels ‘Gargoyles,’ ‘Correction,’ ‘Frost,’ ‘The Lime Works’ and ‘Extinction’ immediately come to mind. In fact, a recent TLS article —’Josef Fritzl’s Fictive Forebears’ — Ritchie Robertson discussed an earlier Austrian literature that seemed to fully acknowledge a long history of such creeps as Fritzl and reminded me to take down from the shelf a story by Adalbert Stifter, ‘Tourmaline,’ included in ‘Limestone and Other Stories’ (translated by David Luke and published by Harcourt Brace & World in 1968).

In ‘Tourmaline’ we listen as a girl tells some of her story:

‘He [the father] taught me a great many things and told me a lot of stories. He always locked the door when he went out. When I asked him what he wanted me to write as an exercise while he was away, he would answer: ‘Describe how one day I shall lie dead in my coffin and they will bury me.’ And then I said: ‘But, Father, I’ve described that often already.’ He would answer: ‘Then describe how your mother wanders about the world in the torment of her heart, and how she dares not return, and how in the end she does away with herself in despair.’ When I said: ‘Father, I’ve described that as well many times already,’ he would answer: ‘Then describe it again.’... I would climb the ladder and look out through the window grating. There I could see the hems of women’s dresses going past and I saw men’s boots and fine coattails or the four feet of a dog....’

Stifter takes a little getting used to, but a detail like ‘the four feet of a dog’ eases his writing into the memory permanently. Stifter’s dates are 1805-1868. At the end of his life, he developed cirrhosis of the liver and on Jan. 25, 1868, slashed his throat and died two days later.

Thomas McGonigle