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Josef Fritzl and the new banality of evil!
Stephen Marche,
Weekend Post
Friday, November 21, 2008

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his daughter and their three children in a soundproofed underground chamber for 24 years, has never denied his actions but he's never admitted to being a monster either. Since the discovery of his secret family, Fritzl has consistently chosen the language of addiction to justify himself. And his defence, while irrelevant from a legal standpoint, shows how deeply the idea of addiction has changed our understanding of the reality of evil in the world.

Fritzl has chosen his argument well: We now use the language of addiction to describe many things other than chemical dependency, casually speaking of the addiction to food or pornography or Xboxes.

Fritzl sees his systematic decades-long rape of his daughter as a species of the sex addiction that we have all found so amusing in David Duchovny and Bill Clinton, and he wants us to believe he's an addict because it makes him seem normal. Even as the story of his secret dungeon life grows more and more bizarre, Fritzl's claim to normalcy gets more tenacious. At the end of October, he revealed that he had kept his ill mother locked in an attic before she died. In early November, he was, for the first time, charged with murder, when it was revealed that he had allowed one of his daughter's babies to die underground. And yet last week, Fritzl's sister-in-law, in Oesterreich magazine, told an interviewer that he had suggested turning his house, complete with the dungeon, into a tourist attraction.

"It is completely mad," his sister-in-law continued. "The family was supposed to get the proceeds, but, naturally, all of them rejected his ‘business' proposal." Fritzl is mad, but nowhere more so than in his desire to reclaim a position as a loving, caring father, a nurturer, a provider: "I have tried to provide for my family in the cellar as best as possible," he has always maintained, as if it mattered. Despite his lifetime of secrecy in a soundproof basement, a part of him craves exposure. His interviews have been well-publicized and remarkably candid. A new feature of the banality of evil is that it wants to sell tickets to its own cruel spectacle. At least Eichmann had the decency to hide away in Argentina, under an assumed name. Fritzl's desire for exposure is another sign of his complete entry into the culture of addiction. He needs to testify to his vice. He needs to explain his own weakness.

So he blames his mother. He blames the culture of Nazism in which he was raised. And he has explicitly claimed that he himself was the victim of his own desires: "It was a vicious circle, a circle from which there was no exit - not only for Elisabeth, but also for myself." The language of addiction comfortingly reduces the morality from abnormal action, stressing the inner demons that the addict fails to control. The compulsion itself is not the addict's fault, it's a fact of life, possibly even something genetic. Fritzl was taking this line of justification to the limit when he described himself as "born to rape."

He may not be lying. He may not even be wrong. We all struggle with inner forces we cannot completely control. Fritzl's story, like Eichmann's, is a version of the old story of the capacity for evil that lurks hidden and unacknowledged in society at large. We are all repressing hidden desires.

We are all on a spectrum on which Josef Fritzl is the most extreme fringe. Just like Eichmann, his basic defence boils down to a plea of shared humanity: "I'm just like you."

At the end of Eichmann's trial, Hannah Arendt, who had watched him for fourteen weeks, described the prisoner's personality this way: "Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown."

The same transformation is underway in the case of Fritzl - we need to see him as a monster, he is a monster, but he is also a joke.

Even though the idea comes from an insane man, Fritzl's suggestion that people would pay to see his dungeon is far from crazy. He has recommended 10 euros as the entrance fee. Does anyone doubt that there would be a rush for tickets on the day it opened?

http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=981591