German-Austrian Horror (Art/Life, Chicken/Egg) (Discursive Aside page 14)
A particularly interesting article at The New Yorker.
(Here is where you can read it through removepaywall.com if you need it (which I did).)
A now-American photojournalist returns to the Austria of her childhood, to the mental institution for children where she had spent scared months.
A bunch of things stood out, and swirl around my mind because of the vivid unforgettableness of their stark detail. Dare I say, Germanic detail?
One of the now elderly psychiatrist directors of one of Austria´s child psychiatric institutions was, in the year 2000, arrested for directing the murder of his 78 year old wife:
One of the child-observation facilities in Austria was run by Franz Wurst, a pediatrician who’d boasted of being the youngest doctor in the Reich. Wurst sexually abused children in his care; in the past two decades, hundreds of victims have come forward. But when he was finally arrested, in 2000, it wasn’t for this abuse—it was for his role in the murder of his seventy-eight-year-old wife. She had been suffocated, at his behest, by his nineteen-year-old godson, whom he’d molested over a period of years. (Wurst was sentenced to seventeen years in prison but was released after four years, for health reasons.)
And then there are the harrowing recollections of a former psychology student (now psychoanalyst) doing research at one of the child psychiatry institutions, her recollection of a girl whose thumb tips were cut off by her gynecologist father as punishment for and prevention against masturbation:
The stories of two girls in particular had stayed with Wallinger: “The smallest had two thumbs cut—the tops were cut off. She was maybe five. Her father was a gynecologist who’d caught her masturbating, and he’d amputated one thumb and then the other.” The second girl, about eight, had accused her father of sexual abuse. “Because no father would think of doing something like this, it was she who was a compulsive liar,” Wallinger said, bitterly. “And, because she was a compulsive liar accusing her father, she was brought to Nowak-Vogl’s institution.”
Sometimes, when Wallinger worked at night, she’d hear girls crying in the communal bedroom, and she’d slip in and discreetly comfort them. But she typically took the morning shift, arriving at work in her white uniform just before the wake-up routine. “If a bed was dirty or wet,” Wallinger recalled, other children had to “stand around and make fun” of the miscreant.
Hard to say exactly why, but somehow this article reminded me of the case of Armin Meiwes, the German man who advertised for and found another German man, Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, (who agreed to the whole set up) to eat. Together they had a go at eating Bernd-Jürgen Brandes´s penis, and then Armin Meiwes proceeded to eat the rest of Bernd-Jürgen Brandes (necessarily alone by this point). You can read the German or the English write-up of it.
And somehow I was also reminded of the film Das weiße Band, written and made by the Austrian Michael Haneke, who also created that pretty terrifying Funny Games:
And then I start to remember that other Austrian movie — Die Wand (The Wall) — (the original novel written by an Austrian woman) — about a woman who goes up to a nice Austrian mountain cabin, whose hosts leave her, and who is then just stuck there, because of invisible walls.
— Liebe Grüße, aus Germany
Next page Discursive Aside 15, the Goddess who sings of Achilles, and who sings of Ally McBeal