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  All of this made 40 Ybbsstrasse a place from which its younger inhabitants could not wait to escape. One by one they left. First Ulli, then Rosemarie, married and left the family home. Next Harald dropped out halfway through an engineering apprenticeship and resumed his education as a trainee chef in the Tyrol. Which left Elisabeth, the eldest of the four siblings who remained at home, to defend herself from her father as best she could.

  Elisabeth, Josef Fritzl’s fourth child, lived upstairs on the second floor in the children’s room next to her parents’ bedroom and her grandmother, Maria. An undemonstrative girl, more obedient than her elder sister Ulli, she had a self deprecating manner that had always rendered her somewhat invisible in a brood of seven. When she was six or seven her hair had been cut into a pageboy style and was so richly blond it was almost golden. By the time she was eleven, however, it was longer and mousier. Her personality also seemed to have become more muted. Paul must have met Elisabeth at least a couple of dozen times during his long friendship with her father, but remembers her only vaguely as “the quiet one.”

  Elisabeth was not Josef’s favourite, but he was quick to notice that her meekness made her malleable. There were even times when he recognized in her traces of himself as a boy: the way she retreated into herself, her dreaminess. And he mistook these familiar traits for a special connection between himself and his daughter. Something about her preoccupied him to the extent that by his forty-third year, when his bald spot was just starting to show on the crown of his head, he started watching her. And soon watching had become spying. And spying had become a feeling that he wanted to get close to her in ways that he knew would make her profoundly unhappy.

  His first overture to his daughter took the form of what he considered to be a practical joke. She was only eleven. He was often in and out of her room anyway, snooping about, but one evening he hid a pornographic magazine under her pillow—a surprise to be discovered when she was alone at bedtime in the dark, when the shadows of the night creep up the walls and bring on terrible feelings of isolation and defenselessness. Then, a few weeks later, he did it again. He thought of it as a joke. He thought of it in the same way as he thought about hiding Easter eggs in the garden for the children.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elisabeth

  Between ages ten and fourteen, Elisabeth Fritzl attended the Hauptschule, the basic-level secondary school in Pestalozzistrasse. It was a short walk from her home in Ybbsstrasse, past Stefan-Fadingerstrasse and third on the left. She was a quiet, pretty, neatly turned-out girl, who wore her thick, blond hair shoulder length and her white, round-collared blouses tucked obediently into carefully ironed skirts, without makeup or jewelry: a picture of compliant, small-town conventionality. “Sissi,” she was called, short for Elisabeth in Austria, the most famous Sissi of them all being Elisabeth, Empress of Austro-Hungary. That was the Sissi of legend. This Sissi, however, was an average-looking student of average ability in a class of thirty-two pupils, always somewhat in the background, much as her father had been at the same age.

  Elisabeth was an Amstetten girl, born and bred. So it was odd that she was practically never seen in the streets of her hometown on weekends or after school. Nobody in Amstetten really knew her. If people noticed anything at all about her, it was that she never went out: She never visited other students in her class after school or went about with them on weekends, as did other children her age, in the park or at the Volksfest, the carnival that occasionally swept through Amstetten. She was hardly ever around, especially during the summer months, when the whole Fritzl family would disappear off to the house at Mondsee.

  Her seriousness did little for her popularity. The few children she knew at school—they weren’t really friends—were never invited to her home, and one of the very few people who ever came close to glimpsing the inside of number 40 was twelve-year-old Susanne Parb. When one day she came to pick Elisabeth up she got only as far as the entrance hall, which was paneled with semiopaque glass through which she tried but failed to make out a few unrecognizable shapes. There was a moment of tension while she waited to be invited in, but from the way Elisabeth stood there, not really saying anything, with a meaningful but not quite penetrable expression on her face, she could tell she was not welcome and after that they drifted apart.

  Only two friendships were ever destined to develop beyond the classroom. Christa and Jutta, twin sisters, lived not far from Elisabeth, and the three girls got into the habit of walking to and from school together, drawn together for obvious, if unacknowledged, reasons, the way people from similar backgrounds always seem to find each other instinctively. Like Elisabeth, Christa and Jutta were from a lower-middle-class family of seven children dominated by a punitive and irrational father. Like Rosemarie, their mother had married very young and had given birth to her first child at sixteen. According to Christa, she wasn’t the kind of woman who dared stand up to her husband, although over the course of their marriage he subjected her and her children to many physical assaults. She had always felt helpless against his temper. But there was another part of her—the part that had grown up under the thumb of another volatile man, her father—that accepted her husband’s casual violence and authoritarianism as an innate, perhaps even admirable, male characteristic.

  Their father, like Josef, was an unapologetic advocate of corporal punishment, which was by no means exceptional at the time. According to Christa, he beat his children with a stick, forced them to kneel for hours on a wooden board in Scheitelknien, and would make them hold a stack of books with arms outstretched for twenty, thirty minutes at a time. He restricted their movements as much as possible and was miserly, too, preferring them to run around in scruffy clothes rather than spend money on new ones, Christa would later say. The tiniest thing could inspire a terrifying physical retaliation. “Medieval practices,” the more progressive parents of Amstetten called this kind of behavior, although many other people in this still very conservative and patriarchal country seemed to have generally accepted that “strictness,” even when enforced by violence, was a normal part of bringing up children.

  If there was a feeling among many men (and many women, too) that it was a father’s role to keep order in the family, that was hardly surprising. The domineering patriarch was held up as the perfect expression of masculinity in Austria at a time when its hierarchical traditions were felt to be under threat from the wacky ideologies of the 1970s. The 1960s never really happened in Austria, so went the joke. If you were young and Austrian and living in the 1960s, you’d still rather listen to folk music than pop. It was a very conservative place then. And most people liked it that way. They were proud of the fact that the country had been left largely “uncontaminated” by the hippie culture that was sweeping through much of Europe, the student uprisings in France in May 1968, or even the political radicalism of young Germans.

  But the 1970s were different, even in Amstetten. All of a sudden there was rock music and drugs and women’s liberation. The conservatives didn’t like it, nor did the dominant Catholic Church. There were articles in the paper almost every day about how traditional families were being destroyed. Typical of this attitude was an article in the Anzeiger that asked: “Is so-called free love true freedom, when every marital union can be destroyed with no shame? Is it real freedom when one can murder a child in a mother’s womb?”

  And at the center of this moral panic was the threat to the role of the father, the symbol of discipline and order. In a patriarchal society like Austria, the father was an antidote to dissolution and chaos. Strong fathers were better than weak ones. This was certainly the feeling among contributors to a proposed scheme that was printed in full in one of Austria’s leading law magazines: “Weak fathers” needed to be taught the basics of disciplining their children with corporal punishment. It was further suggested that the state should set up special classes in which an “expert” would demonstrate, with a rod or stick, a ruler, or a belt, how it was done. So it is hardly sur
prising that right up until the 1980s the word strict still carried such positive connotations among the majority of the population. An Austrian man could be proud to hear himself described in this way. Better to be a strong father than a weak one who could not or would not raise his hand to his children.

  By the early 1980s it was impossible for a young girl of fourteen not to notice the vast changes sweeping through the town, now that Amstetten had once again established itself as one of the country’s most important regional centers for the production of metals, chemicals, paper, and wood, and for construction. And although this dramatic economic progress had its disadvantages—two thirds of the Mostviertel’s pear and apple trees had been sacrificed to intensive farming, and the River Ybbs, which now received the toxic waste of several dozen factories, had turned a fizzy, congested yellow—economic success had brought commerce, and with it life, to Amstetten.

  Ybbsstrasse, for example, no longer had the feel of a dead-end street in the back end of nowhere but had been transformed into the main thoroughfare into and out of the town. Although the street was more than ever polluted by the exhaust fumes of cars and lorries, many young families had chosen to make their home there. At its south end was a gleaming new sports hall. And all sorts of small businesses were springing up along Ybbsstrasse that made it a lively, if not particularly pretty, place to live. Next to the Fritzls’ was a new bakery, and across the road a hairdresser, a florist, and a Spar supermarket. Around the corner in Wienerstrasse, the bakery where Rosemarie had worked part-time when Elisabeth was a child had been replaced by a smart new café, the Eberl, which served cappuccinos for the first time in Amstetten.

  There were, of course, casualties of this new era. The Schillhuber Gasthof, which since the 1950s had more or less single-handedly catered to the leisure requirements of Amstettners, still existed. But its once-unbeatable formula of jazz and swing, performed by amateur local bands the Flamingos, the Pelicans, and the Melodiacs, and its menu of traditional Austrian food, now failed to draw young people to its door. Especially now that the town’s first discotheque, the Bel Ami, had opened at number 7, complete with strobe lighting, a large glittering disco ball hanging from the ceiling of the dance floor, and several other contemporary innovations never before seen in Amstetten. The Bel Ami had a “disc jockey”—the Austrians use the English word—usually imported from one of the larger towns in the area such as St. Pöllen, who played whatever music was currently dominating Austria’s Top Ten: songs like Queen’s theme from the Flash Gordon movie, or, for the obligatory slow dance at the end of every evening, “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. And although the more extreme trends that were becoming popular almost everywhere else in Europe—punk, heavy metal, goth—would never catch on in this cozy enclave of conservative Austria, the feeling among young locals was that traditional Austrian pop music was for the middle-aged. The Bel Ami’s DJs never played Peter Cornelius, the Austrian singer of sentimental ballads. Every Friday and Saturday evening a large crowd would gather at the disco and the noise inevitably drew complaints from the neighbours.

  The neighbours kicked up a similar fuss a few months later when a tattoo and piercing parlour arrived in Ybbsstrasse. Sweet Pain, named by its biker owners in homage to the band Kiss, was across the road from number 40. Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl were among the concerned residents who felt that the stream of people now coming and going from the shop on motorbikes, with their strange haircuts and clothes, would bring the neighbourhood into disrepute.

  There were only two things Elisabeth and the twins talked about on their journeys to and from school: marriage and how to get out of Amstetten. They would get jobs. Christa would train as a maternity nurse and marry a handsome doctor; Jutta wanted to be a chef. Elisabeth’s aspirations were more modest: turning “eighteen as soon as possible” and leaving the family home. Every day for three years Elisabeth, Jutta, and Christa walked to and from school together without mentioning the things that were happening at home. It seemed natural to them to want to protect their fathers, cover up for them. There were things that were supposed to happen in families, and things that weren’t. And the things that were now happening almost constantly to Elisabeth—Josef was coming into her room and touching her—had forced her into an involuntary intimacy; he showed her his frailty, which, in her dependence on him, she was forced to hide. She knew him well. She knew his moods and weaknesses, and she carried his burdens.

  Because most of Elisabeth’s friends had never been in her home in Ybbsstrasse, the facts of her life inside the house were unknown to them. And now that Josef had done it up to make it look like any other house in Amstetten, there was no reason for anyone to suspect that what was going on inside differed in any significant respect from what was going on in any other house in the town.

  The new apartment that Josef had built for himself on the second floor of the apartment block when Elisabeth was thirteen was separated from the marital bedroom by two doors, a corridor, and a staircase. It comprised five rooms: an office, a bathroom, a living room furnished with two sofas and a television, a small kitchen complete with microwave, and another room that Josef left completely unfurnished except for a single bed. And although it had not originally been his intention to actually move into this last room full-time, he soon found himself spending days, then whole weeks, in the apartment. Meals he would take with Rosemarie in the old house.

  In the days when he and Rosemarie still shared the bedroom in the old house, his wife’s presence had been an obvious obstacle to any intimacy between Josef and his daughter. But with the new living arrangements there were suddenly plenty of opportunities to spend time alone with Elisabeth. He moved into his private apartment permanently in 1980, a few months after he turned forty-five and Elisabeth turned fourteen.

  The coy seduction phase, or, as Fritzl saw it, his daughter’s initiation into the world of sex by a real man—the phase during which he would hide pornographic magazines under her pillow—was now over. He was touching her and masturbating in front of her. When they were alone in the car it would happen. When they were alone in one of the rooms at Mondsee, while Rosemarie was busy in the kitchen, it would happen again. He would masturbate in front of her and tell her afterward that the police were idiots and that nobody would take her word against his anyway. Or that he would kill her and that she should do what he said unless she wanted to bear the consequences.

  But worse than this was his watchfulness. His peeping and spying. His endless fascination with everything that was hers. He had taken to confiscating her letters, letters that she would never receive but which her father was now filing away in a special folder he kept in his office. He was following her and keeping her in check. He was reading all her letters and finding out about her private life. So that, no matter where she was, he always seemed to be standing right behind her, an overbearing and threatening presence, anxious now that she was growing up.

  The abuse of his daughter was compulsive, because he could never seem to get it right. As with the house that he would spend his entire time endlessly fixing and remodeling—trying to give it the elusive feeling of “home” by boring holes in its walls, or partly installing a new sink, or ripping down the wallpaper but never quite getting around to replacing it, so that the place was in the continual process of being renovated, not just for a month or two, but for the next thirty years of his life—the abuse of his daughter was a letdown. The feeling it gave him always fell short of the desired effect. No matter what he did or how far he went, it never felt right. The escalation of Josef Fritzl’s sexual attacks on his daughter was a symptom of his perpetual disappointment. He was expelling his feelings, but then they would come back. And he would find himself wanting to be near her for reasons that he chose never to explain to himself. It got to the point where he found it more or less impossible to leave her alone.

  As was usual for students of the Pestalozzistrasse Hauptschule, Elisabeth was transferred at fourteen to the polytechnic in Siedlun
gsstrasse for a year, after which, had her marks been good enough, her aspirations high enough, she might have continued her education at a Realschule, a superior secondary school. But, like most of the young men and women in her class, including Christa and Jutta, Elisabeth now faced the more immediate problem of how to earn a living. Of one thing she was sure: She had to break her financial dependency on her parents as soon as she could.

  Even at this crucial juncture, the question of what Elisabeth might like to do with her life was taken out of her hands by her father, who judged his daughter to be too young and willful to make such life-changing decisions for herself. According to Christa, the same thing had happened to her: Her dreams of becoming a maternity nurse had collapsed when they were vetoed by her father—and she was made instead to train as a cook, the kind of solid job for which there would always be a demand, and in which Christa had never expressed the slightest interest. Elisabeth saw Christa for the last time one afternoon in August. Christa was holding a cigarette, an unforgivable transgression in the house she came from. But Christa was rebelling. She was pleased that at least in the Tyrolean Alps she would be several hundred miles away from her father.

  Two months after Elisabeth turned fifteen, in April 1981, she graduated from the polytechnic in Siedlungsstrasse. Over the summer months at Mondsee, where her friends imagined her lolling on the beach, Elisabeth worked in her father’s bed-and-breakfast as a waitress, to save him money. She would start her course in Waldegg, a tiny market town twelve miles from Amstetten, in September, where she would train for two months every autumn for the next two years. It was far enough away to warrant her living there rather than home. To support herself she would work as an apprentice waitress at the Rosenberg, the “restaurant” attached to a gas station on the north side of the Westautobahn at the junction for Strengberg. So as to build on her experience of waiting tables at Mondsee, Josef thought it sensible for his daughter to enroll in a course in tourism and gastronomy.