I'm No Monster Page 16

  In retrospect, Frau Danielzyck would say, the only clue to Herr Fritzl’s dual nature was to be found in his garden in the years before 1993. It seemed strange to her that a man who paid such close attention to his personal appearance would allow his garden to fall into such a state of chaos. It was a tip, that garden, overgrown with weeds and littered with the evidence of his building work. Grass, unevenly mowed, poked through heaps of cement and sand. Scattered about, along with a child’s tricycle or two, a couple of old footballs, were wrenches and other tools, plastic sheeting, all sorts of junk.

  And in the corner of the garden sat the solitary, rather bedraggled figure of Maria Nenning, Herr Fritzl’s mother, now in her late eighties. Weather permitting, she was always out there, beneath the shade of a nut tree, a “miserable-looking” woman in black, whose crooked frame and tramplike demeanour seemed to emphasize the overall atmosphere of decay. She hardly, if ever, spoke, partly because she had lost all but one of her teeth, but mainly because she hated conversation. Toward the end of her life she would be packed off to a nursing home in Krems, an idyllic little town on the Danube close to Amstetten. And Frau Danielzyck would always remember the day Maria died because of what she would see Herr Fritzl doing with his mother’s belongings. On the day of Maria Nenning’s death, her son had carried all of her clothes and possessions out of the house and dumped them in the garden. There they sat for days, amid the rubble: his mother’s most precious possessions left to rot in the wind and the rain as if they were nothing more than a great pile of refuse.

  As for Rosemarie, from her rented plot Frau Danielzyck would often catch sight of her in the garden hanging out the washing and, naturally, the two women would often exchange a friendly word or two over the fence that separated the properties. Women’s talk, which would often drift in the direction of Rosemarie’s never-ending exasperation with her lodgers. She wanted them out, as they were far too much work. If it had been up to her, she would have evicted them all a long time ago. She didn’t like the lodgers, but she had to put up with them. “All these funny people around the house,” she would complain. “You know what they’re like: They get their relatives to come around for a bath or a shower and it’s us who end up paying for it;”

  Rosemarie wasn’t a particularly discreet woman, that much was clear. She never said no to a good gossip, or for that matter, a good moan. Another of her pet peeves was her bad treatment at the hands of her husband: his stinginess, his cruelty, the shame she feared he had brought on the family for raping that woman in Linz. She had confided in Frau Danielzyck all about the rape conviction. “What will people say?” she had said. “You know how people talk.” Rosemarie was very conscious of her own reputation. Very attached to convention, with her pinafore dress, her hair modestly “done,” and no makeup, she was not much different in appearance from any other woman in Amstetten.

  For all its surface harmony, Rosemarie assured Frau Danielzyck, hers was a difficult marriage. Even though they still lived in the same house, once the children were grown, their lives had started to evolve in two very different directions. They still sat down together for most meals, but Josef spent most of his time absorbed in his work or off on one of his business trips—to Denmark, Hungary, Luxembourg—and days could go by when she wouldn’t see him. Not that these periods of absence had necessarily come as much of a disappointment to Rosemarie. She suffered from health problems, which meant that she had taken advantage of the weeklong stays at medical spas that the Austrian state makes available to the chronically ill and infirm. And the relief she had felt in the first such week away from her husband had been one of the reasons behind the couple’s subsequent decision to take separate vacations: Rosemarie would go off to Italy with one of her sisters; a few months later Josef would disappear to Thailand with Paul Höra, or once even to Kenya on safari.

  What time the couple did spend together was often fractious, because of, according to Rosemarie, Josef’s “tyrannical” moods. Frau Danielzyck had witnessed these for herself only twice: once when Josef had stormed out of the house because Rosemarie had mislaid the money with which to pay an odd-job man, and another time when Rosemarie had apparently lingered too long over the preparation of the couple’s evening meal. The two women had been chatting over the fence when Josef emerged from the house red-faced and shouting. Rosemarie, visibly upset, had immediately scuttled back into the house, and Josef had later attempted to smooth the whole thing over with Frau Danielzyck by turning it into a joke. He could be terribly charming when he wanted to make a good impression, and she soon forgot the whole episode. Wives and husbands, and how they interact behind closed doors, are one of life’s great mysteries—and certainly not, as far as Frau Danielzyck was concerned, any business of a neighbour.

  But it did occur to her to wonder, what with the rapes and the violence, why Rosemarie had never divorced him. Frau Danielzyck had never quite felt satisfied with Rosemarie’s explanation that her husband had threatened to kill her if she left. “He’ll shoot me,” she had told her. “He’s got a gun.” And although Amstetten is the kind of conservative Catholic enclave where couples tend to stay together no matter what and divorce is often looked down upon as a failure of will, it seemed that the reluctance of this couple to separate lay just as much in Rosemarie’s unwillingness to go as in her husband’s insistence on her staying. Because, for all her complaining, Rosemarie never showed any real intention of leaving. She was a listless woman, just a touch self-pitying, with that ability, common in many women, to make other people feel sorry for her: the good mother, the put-upon wife, she would drift through her days quite passively, wrapped up in her role of nurturer. The family was her whole life. Her children were her identity. What life was there for Rosemarie beyond 40 Ybbsstrasse? She had hardly any experience of earning money herself. And either because the personal cost was too high or because, like many couples, Josef and Rosemarie were in some unknowable way enmeshed with each other, life, despite its difficulties, continued largely unchanged for her, a succession of days spent cooking, cleaning, looking after her children and grandchildren. You couldn’t have described her as an imaginative woman.

  It was Frau Danielzyck’s understanding that Frau Fritzl had not been altogether devastated by the abrupt departure in 1984 of her third daughter, Elisabeth. And there had been signs that Rosemarie might even have felt relieved to see the back of this problem child who had spent most of her teens having weight issues and who would have been sacked even from her waitressing job at the service station had it not been for her mother’s repeated interventions. And it was not difficult to see how in some ways it might have been easier to live in the house without Elisabeth’s constant stubbornness and volatile moods. Relations between mother and daughter had been delicate at the best of times and, many years later, Elisabeth would refer to the relationship that she had with her mother during her teens as “not particularly good.”

  “Elisabeth is different,” were Rosemarie’s exact words to Frau Danielzyck whenever the subject of her daughter had come up. “Josef doesn’t like her,” she had once said to Paul Höra’s wife. “It’s just the way it is.” Not exactly spelling it out, but one sensed a coolness there between mother and daughter.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Doorstep

  In the late spring of 1993 Rosemarie had started appearing in the garden with a small child in her arms. The child, a girl, must have been a year and a half old at this stage, a good crawler but not yet able to speak. Lisa was her name.

  Dear Mamma and Papa, I pass on my little daughter Lisa to you. Look after her carefully. You’re probably wondering why you’re only hearing from me now, especially because this letter comes with a big surprise. I have been breastfeeding her for six and a half months. Now she only drinks milk out of a bottle and she eats everything else off a spoon. Fm incapable of caring for her. I hope she won’t be too much trouble for you.

  The tenants and neighbours of 40 Ybbsstrasse were used to seeing various Fri
tzl grandchildren about the house and garden, and so the arrival of this new child hadn’t attracted any particular attention. One day she was just “there” and it was generally accepted that she belonged to Ulli or Harald or formed part of the Fritzls’ large extended family, many of whom would visit the house on weekends or holidays. And none of the lodgers, nor any of the neighbours, would recall feeling particularly surprised when they learned that the child that Rosemarie had taken to carrying about with her everywhere she went had in fact been found abandoned in a cardboard box in front of the house. Perhaps the neighbours’ lack of curiosity was in some part due to Josef’s air of Selbstverständlichkeit, his nonchalance, his matter-of-factness, the feeling he gave you that everything he did, everything that happened in and around that house—even when it seemed to be at odds with the normal run of things—came to pass as a matter of course.

  In any case—so it would emerge in dribs and drabs over the summer months—the girl had been discovered by ten-year-old Doris, the youngest of the Fritzls’ seven children. Doris had found her on the doorstep, and tucked in alongside the child had been a note from Elisabeth in which she had declared herself incapable of coping with the demands of motherhood. Ybbsstrasse was by then a busy thoroughfare even at night, and it was taken for granted that either Elisabeth or one of the strange “cult people” she associated with must have crept into the town in the small hours of the morning; indeed, it was amazing that nobody had seen or heard anything. And it had been Josef who had marched straight down to the children’s welfare office, where he had explained the situation to a social worker and signed a written statement that read: “Today at 6:20 A.M. our daughter Doris found a baby in a cushioned cardboard box on our doorstep.” The social worker had promptly set up a case file on Lisa and noted that the child had been properly dressed at the time of her discovery and that there had been a letter in the box that seemed to indicate that Josef Fritzl and his wife were the grandparents of the girl.

  There followed many communications between the Fritzls and the children’s welfare office and, five days after Lisa was discovered, another social worker visited the couple at home, where Josef expressed his suspicions about the whole incident; although he and his wife were more than willing to take the nine-month-old girl under their wing, he wanted to make sure that the child was Elisabeth’s and one way of doing that, Fritzl had suggested, was to have the letter analysed by a graphologist—luckily he still had a couple of Elisabeth’s old school textbooks lying around against which to compare the handwriting. He also suggested that Lisa herself should be examined by a doctor. In his report the social worker summarized that Herr and Frau Fritzl had recovered from the initial shock. They were increasingly convinced that Lisa was their granddaughter; her appearance and various features alone indicated a great similarity to their daughter, Elisabeth. He could see no argument against allowing Lisa to remain for the time being with her grandparents.

  The next day Lisa was taken to a doctor, who noted that she was unusually small, weighing just 5.5 kilograms, but well taken care of, with a clean appearance and well-trimmed fingernails. It was the doctor’s view that Lisa had probably been born in a hospital because her umbilical cord had been cut and clamped with expert precision. Meanwhile, it was noted by the children’s welfare office that the local police were “attempting” to find the mother. The Fritzl family was taking loving care of Lisa and would like to keep her in their custody, their social worker had observed. Later that week a graphologist confirmed that the letter found with Lisa had indeed been written by the Fritzls’ long-lost daughter.

  Just before Christmas the same year, social services paid another visit to number 40. Lisa was learning to speak and had become the focus of the family’s attention. The social worker observed her grandparents’ claim that she was very similar to their daughter, Elisabeth, and also resembled her mother in her character. During this second visit Josef said that he and his wife would be happy to return the girl to her mother should she, in his words, “exhibit an appropriate change of lifestyle.” But when Elisabeth failed to materialize, it was decided that Lisa would be formally fostered by her grandparents, who, for their troubles, would receive income support of around four hundred euros a month.

  Although they didn’t like to say it to the Fritzls, most of the people who knew them felt that Elisabeth was a Schlampe, a slut, and a Raabenmutter, a bad mother, to have conceived and abandoned her child in such murky circumstances. And their views were almost certainly heavily coloured not only by the straitlaced attitudes that predominate in most small Austrian towns, but by the trial, just two years earlier, of the well-spoken and charismatic Austrian artist Otto Mühl. Mühl had been all over the papers for months after he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for the sexual abuse of children in a commune he had set up in the Burgenland province in eastern Austria. The case had caused a scandal, all the more so because, as an artist, Mühl had for several decades been an established figure in Austrian life. In the 1970s his commune had survived on handsome state subsidies, and Mühl himself had enjoyed the support of liberal politicians who liked to align themselves with a man who was one of the protagonists of an avant-garde artistic movement, Vienna Actionism, whose controversial photographic work and performances often involved the use of blood, feces, and sadistic imagery. By the 1980s, despite a near-constant stream of rumours and bad publicity surrounding Mühl and his cult, many of its members had become successful businessmen in the fields of insurance, agriculture, and property investment, and the commune had amassed an estimated £15 million in various accounts in Luxembourg. It was already widely known that Mühl had founded his commune on the principles of free sexuality, creative expression, and the abolition of both private property and monogamous relationships; that passports and personal documents were confiscated; and that children born there were raised by the whole community. But it was only in the early 1990s that the Austrian authorities uncovered the lengths Mühl had been prepared to go in order to fulfill his artistic vision.

  The cult was strictly hierarchical and Mühl, as its undisputed leader, would enforce order with routine corporal punishment and humiliation. He would make lists of the men with whom women were permitted to have sex and forbid any man and woman to sleep in the same bed for more than one night, with the result that the children conceived there often did not know who their natural fathers were. Mühl himself had fathered, it was estimated, more than fifty children, some of them the product of his self-appointed right as cult leader to sexually “initiate” any young girl. Police found video footage of him sexually abusing young children. So terrible was the evidence laid before the state prosecutor that he claimed in court that never before in his career had he witnessed a case of such barbaric oppression. “We all know what a concentration camp is,” he said. “What the girls in the ... cult experienced was just as horrifying. Otto Mühl experimented with human beings, he manipulated them.... These young people weren’t there of their own free will. He took them from their parents so that there was no possibility they could escape the commune. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  “You don’t stand a chance”: the strikingly similar words spoken by Josef Fritzl to his daughter Elisabeth after he had locked her in a cellar and forced her into an existence that bore striking resemblances to Mühl’s cult. As a keen newspaper reader, Josef would undoubtedly have come across the reports of Mühl’s excesses that had made headlines not just during the 1990s but throughout the previous two decades: a stream of reports concerning sexual excess, ideas of patriarchy, authoritarianism, and deprivation. Josef might have seen newspaper pictures of examples of Mühl’s work—naked women smeared with blood or excrement, tied up with ropes and wires—and taken them literally, incorporating them into his vision of the cellar, just as he had incorporated pornographic images from videotapes and magazines.

  The two men had some things in common. Both spoke in what has been described as a low, almost “hypnotic” tone; they w
ere charismatic and persuasive; and their prime interest in other people lay in the possibility of manipulating them. Like Mühl, Josef was a respected figure in the community, a successful businessman, and the recipient of state subsidies. Both men were described by their wives as “patriarchal” and “possessively jealous,” and they shared a lifelong preoccupation with their sexual performance; Mühl publicly referred to himself as “the Olympic champion of sex,” and later, when police interrogated him after his final arrest, Josef would go into great, often irrelevant and yet boastful, detail about his erections, the number of times he had achieved orgasm, and his unwillingness to use condoms because he found them emasculating.

  It had been Josef‘s—not the police’s—theory that Elisabeth had left home to live in a “cult,” and it is more than likely that he had copied the idea directly from news reports about Mühl. Possibly Josef identified with him. Like Josef, Mühl saw himself as an exceptional man to whom normal moral codes did not apply. “The artist is a man who cannot be judged by conventional standards,” he said after former cult members alleged that he had molested children. If a woman in the commune became pregnant, Mühl would decide what course the child’s life would take, just as Josef would do with the children his daughter bore him in the cellar. The existence that Josef was attempting to create for himself belowground uncannily resembled what Mühl had already achieved in the world above: Both men sought to create for themselves, through intimidation, isolation, and control, a sort of alternative civilization in which they would act as godlike beings, free to realize their fantasies of domination without the slightest risk of criticism. By the time Mühl’s commune was raided by the police, Mühl had elevated himself to such a figure of fear and awe among the members of his commune that the teenagers who lived there would queue up at the toilet door with tissues to wipe him when he had finished.