Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer says “We’re not going to allow Austria and its entire population to be held hostage by a single, barbarous criminal individual,” But the problem remains. many people, including Austrians and including Natascha Kampusch, who thinks that the echoes of Nazi attitudes to women are what leads to girls being held hostage in this way.

It turns out that neighbours and lodgers as well as Josef Fritzl’s wife, saw him disappearing into the basement all the time, taking food there, and were even aware that he spent the night. The wife was looking after three of the cellar children. The best Austrians can say is that they ‘looked away’.

Gusenbauer claims that millions of British people come skiing each year and can testify to Austrians being good people, but there is a great difference between coming to a resort on holiday for a week and living here, understanding the language and indeed, in this country, the silences.

Austrians are saying they are a ‘child friendly’ country, but the students I taught in the schools either told us that they are sick of being lied to about everything, including the past, when indeed a neo-Nazi Waldheim still holds a political position here and as recently as 1986 ran for the presidency! In other schools, the oppression was omniprescent, with the children silent and hang-dog. The onus seemed to be on the children to appear happy and contented, so that no-one said anything.

How do you get to know an Austrian? You can say hallo for years and years, yet never be invited into any further intimacy. Austrians living in quite small towns say they don’t know the names of their neighbours. Words are used mainly to hide your thoughts rather than to communicate. And worse, the memory of past imperial glory, of the history of civilisation which was basically established here in Austria, lies confused with the shadow of the Anschluss and the knowledge that the people of this postcard pretty country annhialated all of its culture, because the key players were mainly Jewish.

Austrians, as they take the well-run train to Hungary to visit the dentist, because they slew all their own dentists, remain complacent and in denial, and they remain largely racist and closed-hearted. Other posts where I talk about my experiences in Austrian, tell of conversations both with immigrants, whose experience in this country are damning but just, and locals who are fighting this nightmare society. If Freud, who had to flee Vienna for his life even as an old old man dying of cancer, raised the spectre of a highly neurotic society, ridding themselves of his psychoanalysis has not helped this people.

Finally, of course many Austrians are aware of all this, and have long been trying to break open the rancid egg of their homeland. The great heart that Gusenbauer and the authorities of Amstetten boast of is indeed part of this schizoid and broken nation.When Austrians are great, they are really great, it is not just Mozart, although those beautiful echoes of the past, highlight the true heart of Austria. The healing music used through the world to heal sick and damaged people, will hopefully ring through the valleys and help Austria come again into the light.

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Tags: Amstetten.child abuse, Anschluss, Art, Austria, Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, Creative Writing, Dog, Freud, Friend, healing, home, hope, Host, Hungarian dentists, Jews, kidnapping, Nazism, Rain, Story, Waldheim, War