The horror! The horror!
Leave it to the Sun to come with "Evil dad Fritzl and the Nazis". But Brendan O'Neill didn't buy the national-guilt-by-association line and he let fly at the British media in a heavily-commented Comment is Free piece. However, Christopher Caldwell deserves praise for pointing out in the Financial Times that horrific and all as the Amstetten saga is, we should not avert our eyes from it. Those "quality newspapers" that turn up their noses at this kind of story, he notes "have grown biased against rare, unclassifiable or once-in-a-lifetime stories. This is another way of saying they have grown biased against news itself. Readers, apparently, have not." Indeed.
Meanwhile, Austria has to deal with the fact that Austrian life, sometimes, has nothing to do with the idyll of the Alps. As in most modern societies, many people live in awful relationships, are lonely and are subjected to violence, often, sexual violence. There is no love in their world. And how does "official" Austria respond to this? By producing the likes of Klingendes Österreich, in which this character wanders around the country, dressed like he's living in the 19th century and speaking a type of faux peasant dialect. In this kitsch Austria, the only thing in the cellars is wine. A horror idyll.
By the way, it was rather tasteless of Ireland's Sunday Business Post to devote the lead story of its property section to explaining how to convert a cellar into living space. "But the humble basement has become a swanky space in many London homes, with owners digging down instead of trading up in order to find more space." What kind of Lebensraum do these people have in mind exactly?
