7
CAUGHT BETWEEN VISIONS OF MADNESS AND A PERFECT WORLD
The Two Faces of the Kidnapper
There are nightmares where you wake up and know that everything was just a dream. During the first period I spent in the dungeon, I clung to the possibility of waking up that way, and spent many of my lonely hours planning my first few days in the world outside. During this time the world that I had been ripped away from was still real. It was still peopled by real persons whom I knew were worrying about me every second and doing their utmost to find me. I could picture every single detail from that world in my mind’s eye: my mother, my room, my clothes, our flat.
Meanwhile, the world I had landed in had the colours and the smell of the surreal. The room was too small, the air too stale to be real. And the man who had abducted me was deaf to my arguments that originated from the world outside: that they would find me; that he would have to let me go; that what he was doing to me was a serious crime that would be punished. And yet, day by day, I increasingly realized that I was trapped in this underground world and no longer held the key to my life in my own hand. I resisted making myself at home in this unnerving environment, which had sprung from the fantasy of a criminal who had designed it down to the last detail and had placed me in it like a decorative object.
But you can’t live in a nightmare forever. We humans have the ability to create the appearance of normality even in the most abnormal situations so as to avoid losing ourselves. In order to survive. Children can do this sometimes better than adults. The smallest straw can be enough for them to keep from drowning. For me, those straws were my rituals, such as our meals together, the choreographed Christmas celebration or my escape into the world of books, videos and television series. These were moments that were not wholly gloomy, even if I know today that my feelings basically originated from a psychological defence mechanism. You would go crazy if you saw only horrors for years at a time. Those small moments of purported normality are the ones that you cling to, that ensure your survival. There is an entry in my diary that clearly underlines my longing for normality:
Dear diary,
I haven’t written to you for so long because I was in a difficult phase of depression. So I will report only briefly what has happened so far. In December, we put up the tiling, but we didn’t install the toilet tank until the beginning of January. This is how I spent New Year’s Eve: I slept upstairs from 30 to 31 December, then I spent the whole day alone. But he came shortly before midnight. He showered, and we poured lead.8 At midnight, we turned the television on and listened to the Pummerin9 ring out and the sounds of the Blue Danube waltz. In the meantime, we toasted and looked out of the window to admire the fireworks. However, my happiness was spoilt. When a rocket flew into our conifer, a chirping suddenly emerged. And I am certain that it was a small bird that was frightened to death. I wasn’t pleased when I heard the little dickey twitter. I gave him the chimney sweep that I had made for him and he gave me a chocolate coin, chocolate biscuits and a miniature chocolate chimney sweep. The previous day he had already given me a chimney sweep cake. My chimney sweep contained Smarties, no, mini M&Ms, that I gave Wolfgang.
Nothing is all black, or all white. And nobody is all good or all evil. That also goes for the kidnapper. These are words that people don’t like to hear from an abduction victim. Because the clearly defined concept of good and evil is turned on its head, a concept that people are all too willing to accept so as not to lose their way in a world full of shades of grey. When I talk about it, I can see the confusion and rejection in the faces of many who were not there. The empathy they felt for my fate freezes and is turned to denial. People who have no insight into the complexities of imprisonment deny me the ability to judge my own experiences by pronouncing two words: Stockholm Syndrome.
“Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims”—that’s what the textbooks say. A labelling diagnosis that I emphatically reject. Because as sympathetic as the looks may be when the term is simply tossed out there, their effect is terrible. It turns victims into victims a second time, by taking from them the power to interpret their own story—and by turning the most significant experiences from their story into the product of a syndrome. The term places the very behaviour that contributes significantly to the victim’s survival that much closer to being objectionable.
Getting closer to the kidnapper is not an illness. Creating a cocoon of normality within the framework of a crime is not a syndrome. Just the opposite. It is a survival strategy in a situation with no escape—and much more true to reality than the sweeping categorization of criminals as bloodthirsty beasts and of victims as helpless lambs that society refuses to look beyond.
To the world outside, Wolfgang Priklopil came across as a shy, courteous man who always seemed a bit too young in his well-turned-out clothes. He wore proper trousers and ironed shirts or polo shirts. His hair had always been freshly washed and neatly styled, in a cut that was a bit too old-fashioned for the start of a new millennium. He probably seemed unassuming to the few people he dealt with. It was not easy to catch a glimpse of what was behind this exterior, because he maintained it completely. For Priklopil it was less important to uphold societal conventions; he was rather a slave to keeping up outward appearances.
It wasn’t just that he loved order; it was necessary for his survival. A lack of order, supposed chaos and dirt threw him completely. He spent a great deal of his time keeping his cars (in addition to the delivery van, he also had a red BMW), his garden and his house meticulously clean and well maintained. It wasn’t enough for him if you cleaned up after cooking. The counter had to be wiped, every cutting board, every knife that had been used to prepare the meal, had to be washed, even while the food was on the cooker.
Rules were just as important as order. Priklopil could get wrapped up for hours in instructions on how to do something and followed them fastidiously. If the instructions for heating a ready-to-eat-meal said, “Heat for four minutes,” then he took it out of the oven after exactly four minutes, no matter whether it was hot enough or not. It must have made a significant impression on him that despite adhering to all the rules he couldn’t quite get his life under control. It must have bothered him so much that one day he decided to break a major rule and kidnap me. But although that had made him a criminal, he maintained his belief in rules, instructions and structures nearly religiously. At times he looked at me pensively and said, “How ridiculous that you didn’t come with instructions for use.” It must have thrown him completely that his newest acquisition, a child, didn’t always function like it was supposed to, and on some days he didn’t know how to get it working again.
At the beginning of my imprisonment I had suspected that the kidnapper was an orphan and that the lack of warmth in his childhood had turned him into a criminal. Now that I had got to know him better, I realized that I had created a false image of him. He had had a very sheltered childhood in a classic family setting. Father, mother, child. His father Karl had worked for a large alcoholic beverage company as a travelling salesman and was on the road a great deal, where he apparently cheated on his wife repeatedly, as I found out later. But outward appearances were maintained. His parents stayed together. Priklopil told me about their weekend outings to Lake Neusiedl, family ski holidays and walks. His mother took loving care of her son. Maybe a bit too loving.
The more time I spent upstairs in the house, the stranger the presence of his mother, hovering over everything in the kidnapper’s life, seemed to me. It took me some time to figure out who the ominous person was who occupied the house at the weekends, forcing me to spend two or three days alone in my dungeon. I read the name “Waltraud Priklopil” on the letters lying near the front door. I ate the food that she had cooked over the weekend. One meal for every day she left her son alone. And when I was allowed up into the house on Mondays, I noticed the traces she left behind: everything had been spotlessly cleaned. Not one speck of dust indicated that anyone lived there. Every weekend she scrubbed the floors and dusted for her son. Who in turn made me clean the house the rest of the week. Thursdays he drove me through all the rooms again and again with the cleaning cloth. Everything had to sparkle before his mother came. It was like an absurd cleaning competition between mother and son that I was forced to bear the brunt of. Still, after my lonely weekends I was always happy when I discovered signs that his mother had been there: freshly ironed laundry, a cake in the kitchen. I never saw Waltraud Priklopil once in all those years, but through all those small signs she became a part of my world. I liked to imagine her as an older friend and pictured being able to sit with her at the kitchen table one day drinking a cup of tea. But we never got around to doing that.
Priklopil’s father died when he was twenty-four years old. The death of his father must have torn a gaping hole in his life. He seldom spoke of him, but you could tell that he had never got over the loss. He seemed to keep one room on the ground floor of the house unaltered to commemorate him. It was decorated in rustic style with an upholstered corner couch and wrought-iron lamps—what you would call a Stüberl in Austria, where people probably used to play cards and drink when his father was still alive. The product samples from the schnapps manufacturer he had worked for were still standing on the shelves. Even when the kidnapper later renovated the house, he left that room untouched.
Waltraud Priklopil seemed to have been hit hard by the death of her husband as well. I don’t wish to judge her life or interpret things that are perhaps not true. After all, I have never met her. But from my perspective, it seemed that after the death of her husband she clung even more tightly to her son, making him her substitute partner. Priklopil, who in the meantime had moved out to his own flat, moved back to the house in Strasshof, where he could never escape his mother’s influence. He constantly expected her to go through his wardrobe and dirty laundry, and paid meticulous attention to making sure that there were no traces of me to be found anywhere in the house. And he set the rhythm of his week and how he dealt with me exactly after his mother. Her exaggerated mollycoddling and his acceptance of it were somewhat unnatural. She didn’t treat him like an adult and he didn’t act like one. He lived in his mother’s house—she had moved into Priklopil’s flat in Vienna—and let her take care of him in every way.
I don’t know whether he lived off her money as well. He had lost his job as a communications technician at Siemens, where he had done his apprenticeship, even before my abduction. After that, he was probably registered as unemployed for years. Sometimes he told me that he would go to a job interview from time to time, but then intentionally act stupid so that they wouldn’t give him the job. This allowed him to keep the Employment Service happy and hold on to his unemployment benefit at the same time. Later, as mentioned above, he helped his friend and business partner, Ernst Holzapfel, renovate flats. Ernst Holzapfel, whom I sought out after my escape, describes Priklopil as correct, proper and reliable. Perhaps socially backward, as he never had any other friends, let alone girlfriends. But, above all, unremarkable.
This well-turned-out young man, incapable of setting boundaries vis-à-vis his mother, courteous to the neighbours and proper in a way bordering on pedantic, also kept up outward appearances. He put his repressed feelings in the cellar, allowing them later to come up into the darkened kitchen from time to time. Where I was.
I was a witness to Wolfgang Priklopil’s two sides, which were probably unknown to anyone else. One was a strong tendency to power and domination. The other was an utterly insatiable need for love and approval. He had abducted and “shaped” me in order to be able to express both these contradictory sides.
Sometime in the year 2000, I saw, at least on paper, who was hiding behind those outward appearances. “You can call me Wolfgang,” he casually said one day while we were working.
“What is your full name?” I asked back.
“Wolfgang Priklopil,” he answered.
That was the name I had seen upstairs in the house on the address labels of the advertisement brochures he had neatly stacked on the kitchen table. Now I had confirmation. At the same time I realized at that moment that I would not leave his house alive. Otherwise he would never have entrusted me with his full name.
From then on I sometimes called him “Wolfgang” or even “Wolfi,” a nickname that gives the appearance of a certain kind of closeness, while at the same time his treatment of me reached a new level of violence. Looking back, it seems to me that I was trying to reach the person behind the mask, while the person before me systematically tormented and beat me.
Priklopil was mentally very ill. His paranoia went even beyond the level that you would expect from someone who puts an abducted child in a cellar. His fantasies of omnipotence blended with his paranoia. In many, he played the role of absolute ruler.
Consequently, he told me one day that he was one of those Egyptian gods from the science-fiction series Stargate that I liked to watch. The “evil ones” among the aliens were modelled after Egyptian gods who sought out young men as host bodies. They penetrated the body through the mouth or the back of the neck and lived as parasites in the body, completely taking over the host in the end. These gods had a particular piece of jewellery that they used to force people to their knees and humiliate them. “I am an Egyptian god,” Priklopil said to me one day in the dungeon. “You must do everything I say.”
At first I was unable to tell whether this was meant as a strange joke or whether he was trying to use my favourite TV series to force even more humiliations upon me. I suspected that he really did think himself a god, in whose absurd fantasy world the only role left for me was that of the oppressed, which would simultaneously lift him up.
His references to Egyptian gods frightened me. After all, I really was trapped under the earth as if in a sarcophagus; buried alive in a room that could have become my burial chamber. I lived in the pathologically paranoid world of a psychopath. If I didn’t want to lose myself completely, I had to have a part in shaping it as much as possible. Back when he had told me to call him “Maestro,” I had seen from his reaction that I was not just a pawn of his will, but that I had modest means at my disposal to define boundaries. Similar to the way the kidnapper had opened up a wound in me, into which he had for years poured the poison that my parents had left me in the lurch, I felt that I had a few grains of salt in my hand that could prove painful to him as well.
“Call me ‘My Lord,’ ” he demanded. It was absurd that Priklopil, whose position of power was so obvious on the surface, was so dependent on this verbal show of humility.
When I refused to call him “My Lord,” he screamed and raged, and one time he beat me for it. But with my refusal, I not only maintained a bit of personal dignity, but had also found a lever I could use. Even if I had to pay for it with immeasurable pain.
I experienced the same situation when he commanded me for the first time to kneel in front of him. He was sitting on the couch, waiting for me to serve him something to eat, when out of the blue he ordered, “Kneel down!” I answered him calmly, “I won’t do that.” He jumped up in anger and pressed me down to the floor. I made a quick turn so that I would land on my rear end at least instead of my knees. He wasn’t to have the satisfaction, not even for a second, of me kneeling in front of him. He grabbed me, turned me on my side and bent my legs as if I were a rubber doll. He pressed my calves against the back of my thighs, lifted me like a corded package off the floor and tried to push me down into a kneeling position again. I made myself heavy and stiff and twisted desperately in his grip. He punched and kicked me. But, in the end, I had the upper hand. In all the years he vehemently demanded that I call him “Lord,” I never did so. And I never kneeled before him.
Often it would’ve been easier to kneel and I would have saved myself a number of blows and kicks. But in that situation of total oppression and complete dependence on the kidnapper, I had to preserve a modicum of room to manoeuvre. The roles we were to play were very clear, and as prisoner I was without question the victim. However, this battle over the word “Lord” and the kneeling became a secondary theatre where we fought for power as if in a proxy war. I was in an inferior position when he humiliated and mistreated me as he liked. I was in an inferior position when he locked me up, turned off my electricity and used me as forced labour. But on that point, I stood up to him. I called him “Criminal” when he wanted me to call him “Lord.” Sometimes I said “Honey” or “Darling” instead of “My Lord” in order to illustrate the grotesqueness of the situation that he had placed us both in. And he punished me every time for it.
It took immeasurable strength to remain consistent in my behaviour towards him throughout the entire period of my imprisonment. Always resisting. Always saying no. Always defending myself against attacks and always explaining calmly to him that he had gone too far and had no right to treat me that way. Even on days when I had given up on myself and felt completely worthless, I couldn’t afford to show any weakness. On days like that, I told myself in my childish view of things that I was doing it for him. So that he wouldn’t become an even more evil person. As if it were my responsibility to prevent him from completely falling into a moral abyss.
Whenever he had his outbursts of rage, beating me with his fists and feet, there was nothing I could do. Similarly, I was powerless to do anything about the forced labour, being locked up or the hunger and the humiliations suffered while cleaning the house. This kind of oppression formed the framework in which I lived; it was an integral component of my world. The only way for me to deal with it was to forgive the kidnapper his transgressions. I forgave him for kidnapping me and I forgave him every single time he beat me and tormented me. This act of forgiveness gave me back the power over my experience and made it possible to live with it. If I had not adopted this attitude instinctively from the very beginning, I would probably have destroyed myself in anger and hatred—or I would have been broken by the humiliations that I was subjected to daily. In this way, I would have been eliminated; this way would have entailed even more dire consequences than giving up my old identity, my past, my name. By forgiving him, I pushed his deeds away from me. They could no longer make me small or destroy me; after all, I had forgiven them. They were evil deeds that he had committed and would rebound only on him, no longer on me.
And I had my small victories. My refusal to call him “My Lord” or “Maestro.” My refusal to kneel. My appeals to his conscience, which sometimes fell on fertile ground. They were vital to my survival. They gave me the illusion that I was an equal partner in the relationship within certain parameters—because they gave me a kind of counter-power over him. And it showed me something very important: namely, that I still existed as a person and had not been degraded to an object with no will of her own.
Parallel to his fantasies of oppression, Priklopil nurtured a deep longing for a “perfect” world. I, his prisoner, was to be at his disposal for this as a prop and as a person. He tried to make me into the partner he had never had. “Real” women were out of the question. His hatred of women was deep-seated and irreconcilable, and burst out of him again and again in little remarks. I don’t know whether he had had any contact with women earlier, or even a girlfriend during his time in Vienna. During my imprisonment, the only “woman in his life” was his mother—a dependent relationship with an over-idealized figure. Release from this dominance, which he was unable to achieve in reality, was to come about in the world of my dungeon by reversing the relationship—by choosing me to take on the role of submissive woman who acquiesced and looked up to him.
His image of an ideal family was taken from the 1950s. He wanted a hard-working little woman, who had his dinner ready for him when he came home, who did not talk back and did the housework perfectly. He dreamed of “family celebrations” and outings, enjoyed our meals together and celebrated name days, birthdays and Christmas as if there was no dungeon and no captivity for me. It was as if he was trying to live a life through me that he couldn’t manage to outside the house. As if I were a walking stick that he had collected at the side of the road to support him the moment his life wasn’t going the way he wanted. “I am your king,” he said, “and you are my slave. You obey.” Or he would tell me, “Your family is made up of chavs. You have no right to your own life. You are here to serve me.”
He needed that insane crime to realize his vision of a perfect, small, intact world. But in the end, he really only wanted two things from me: approval and affection. As if his objective behind all the cruelty was to force a person to love him absolutely.
When I turned fourteen, I spent the night above ground for the first time in years. It was not a liberating feeling.
I lay stiff with fright on the kidnapper’s bed. He locked the door behind him and placed the key on a cabinet that was so high that only he could reach it by standing on tiptoe. For me it was absolutely unreachable. Then he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his using plastic cord cuffs.
One of the first headlines about the kidnapper after I escaped was: “The Sex Beast.” I will not write about this part of my imprisonment—it is the last remaining bit of privacy I would like to preserve now that my life in captivity has been picked apart in innumerable reports, interrogations, photographs, etc. But I will say this much: in their eagerness for the sensational, the journalists of the red-top press were far off the mark. In many respects, the kidnapper was a beast and more cruel than can possibly be depicted. But in this sense he was not. Naturally, he subjected me to minor sexual assaults; these were part of my daily harassment, like the thumps and punches, the kicks at my shins when he walked past. But when he manacled me to him on those nights I had to spend upstairs, it wasn’t about sex. The man who beat me, locked me in the cellar and starved me wanted to cuddle. Controlled and manacled by my plastic cuffs, I was something to hold tight to in the night.
I could have screamed at how painfully paradoxical my situation seemed. But I couldn’t make a sound. I lay next to him on my side and tried to move as little as possible. My back, as so often, had been beaten black and blue. It hurt so much that I couldn’t lie on it, and the cuffs cut into my skin. I felt his breath on the back of my neck and stiffened.
I remained manacled to the kidnapper until the next morning. Whenever I had to go to the toilet, I had to wake him, and he came with me with his wrist tied to mine. When he had fallen asleep next to me I reflected on whether I could break the cuffs—but I soon gave up. Whenever I turned my wrist and tightened my muscles, the plastic cut into not only my arm, but also his. He would inevitably have woken up and realized immediately my attempt to escape. Today I know that the police also use cord cuffs when they make arrests. They would never have broken under the muscle strength of a starving fourteen-year-old anyway.
So there I lay, manacled to my kidnapper, the first of many nights in his bed. The next morning I would have to eat breakfast with him. As much as I had liked that ritual as a child, I became nauseated at the hypocrisy with which he forced me to sit with him at the kitchen table, drink milk and eat two tablespoonfuls of cereal, not a single bite more. An ideal world, as if nothing had happened.
That summer I tried for the first time to take my life.
In that phase of my imprisonment I no longer had any thought of escape. At the age of fifteen my psychological prison was complete. The door to the house could have been standing wide open: I couldn’t have taken a single step. Escape, that meant death. For me, for him, for everyone who could have seen me.
It is not easy to explain what isolation, beatings and humiliations do to a person. How after so much mistreatment the mere sound of a door can cause you to panic so that you cannot even breathe, let alone run. How your heart pounds, the blood in your ears drones and then suddenly a switch in your brain is flipped and you feel nothing but paralysis. You are incapable of action, incapable of reason. The feeling of mortal fear has been indelibly branded on your brain, and all the details of the time when you first felt that fear—smells, sounds, voices—are preserved in your subconscious. If one detail should reappear—a raised hand—the fear returns; without the hand even closing about your throat, you feel yourself suffocating.
Just as survivors of bombing attacks can be panic-stricken at the sound of New Year’s fireworks, the same happened to me with a thousand small details. The sound I heard when the heavy doors to my dungeon were opened. The rattling of the fan. Darkness. Harsh lighting. The smell upstairs in the house. The rush of air before his hand struck me. His fingers around my throat, his breath on the back of my neck. Our bodies are programmed for survival and react by going limp. At some point, the trauma is so immense that even the outside world does not promise any relief, but rather becomes a threatening terrain associated with fear.
It may be true that the kidnapper knew what I was going through. That he understood that I would not run away when he allowed me out in his garden for the first time. Some time before that he had made it possible for me to sunbathe for short periods. On the ground floor there was a room with windows that reached to the floor, which no one could see into from the outside when he closed one of the blinds. There I was permitted to lie on a lounger and absorb the sunshine. The kidnapper probably viewed it as a kind of “maintenance” for me. He knew that a person cannot survive forever without sunlight and therefore made sure that I got some from time to time. For me it was a revelation.
The sensation of the warm rays on my pale skin was indescribable. I closed my eyes. The sun made red circles behind my eyelids. I slowly dozed off and dreamed I was in an outdoor pool, listening to the cheerful voices of children and feeling the cool water, the way it washes over your skin when you jump in all hot. What I wouldn’t have given to go swimming, just once! Just like the kidnapper, who from time to time appeared in my dungeon in his bathing trunks. Neighbours, distant relatives of the Priklopils, had the same swimming pool as he did in their garden—only there was water in theirs and it could be used. When they weren’t home and the kidnapper checked up on the house or watered their plants, he sometimes went for a swim. I envied him deeply.
One day that summer, he surprised me by saying that I could come swimming with him. The neighbours weren’t home and because the gardens of the two houses were connected by a path you could reach the pool without being seen from the street.
The grass tickled my naked feet and the morning dew gleamed like miniature diamonds between the blades of grass. I followed him down the narrow path to the neighbours’ garden, got undressed and slipped into the water.
It was like being reborn. Underwater, my imprisonment, the dungeon, the oppression, all fell away from me for a moment. My stress dissolved in the cool blue water. I came up and floated on the surface. The small turquoise waves sparkled in the sun. Above me stretched an infinite cerulean sky. My ears were underwater and all around me was nothing but soft splashing.
When the kidnapper nervously ordered me out of the water, it took me a minute to react. It was as if I had to return from a faraway place. I followed Priklopil into the house, through the kitchen into the hallway and from there into the garage and down to the dungeon. Then I was locked up again. For the time being that was the only occasion I was permitted to swim. He didn’t allow me to go in the pool for a long while after that. But that one time had been enough to remind me that in spite of all the despair and powerlessness, I still wanted a life. The memory of that moment showed me that it was worth holding on until I could escape.
I was immeasurably grateful to the kidnapper back then for such small pleasures, like the sunbathing or swimming in the neighbours’ pool. And I still am today. Even if it seems strange, I can recognize that there were small, humane moments during my time in captivity. The kidnapper was unable to completely shut himself off from the influence of the child and young girl with whom he spent so many hours. Back then, I clung to even the tiniest human gesture, because I was dependent on seeing goodness in the world in which I could change nothing; in a kidnapper with whom I had to cope simply because I was unable to escape. Those moments were there and I treasured them. Moments in which he helped me paint, draw or make something, encouraging me to start again from the beginning if I was unsuccessful. By going over the school subjects I was missing with me and giving me extra maths problems to solve, even when it gave him particular pleasure afterwards to correct my mistakes, and when he only paid attention to grammar and spelling in my essays. Rules had to be followed. But he was there. He took time, of which I had more than plenty.
I succeeded in surviving by subconsciously suppressing and splitting off the horrors I experienced. And from these terrible experiences during my imprisonment I learned to be strong. Yes, perhaps even to evolve a strength I would not have been capable of had I grown up in freedom.
Today, years after my escape, I have become cautious in saying such things. That, within the evil, at least brief moments of normality, even mutual understanding, were possible. That’s what I mean when I say that there is neither black nor white, neither in reality nor in extreme situations, but rather many subtle shades in between that make the difference. For me, these nuances were decisive. In time, by detecting mood swings I was perhaps able to avoid a beating. By appealing to the kidnapper’s conscience again and again, he spared me perhaps even worse. By seeing him as a human being, with a very dark and a somewhat lighter side, I was able to remain human myself. Because he was unable to break me.
This may be why I so vehemently oppose being placed in the pigeonhole of Stockholm Syndrome. The term came about after a bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973. The bank robbers had held four employees hostage for five days. Much to the amazement of the media, the hostages, once free, were more afraid of the police than they had been of the hostage-takers—and they had developed an understanding of them. Some of the victims asked for mercy for the robbers and visited them in prison. Public opinion has no understanding for the “sympathy” they showed to the robbers and turned the victims’ behaviour into a pathology. The findings: compassion with the perpetrator denoted illness. This newly created illness has been called Stockholm Syndrome ever since.
Today, I sometimes observe the reactions of small children as they look forward to being with their parents, whom they haven’t seen all day, and then their parents greet them only with unpleasant words and sometimes even strike them. Each of these children could be said to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. They love the people with whom they live and on whom they are dependent, even if those people do not treat them very well.
I too was a child when my imprisonment began. The kidnapper had torn me from my world and placed me in his own. The person who had stolen me, who took my family and identity from me, became my family. I had no choice other than to accept him as such and I learned to derive happiness from his affection and repress all that was negative. Just like any child growing up in a dysfunctional family.
After my escape I was amazed—not that I as the victim was capable of making that differentiation, but that the society in which I landed after my imprisonment does not allow for the slightest nuance. I am not permitted to reflect at all on the person who was the only one in my life for eight and a half years. I cannot even hint that I need that outlet to work through what has happened without evoking incomprehension.
In the meantime I have learned that I idealized this society to a certain extent. We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay.
Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from society itself. It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps—even when they ask for help.
Crimes such as the one committed against me form the austere, black-and-white structure for the categories of Good and Evil on which society is based. The perpetrator must be a beast, so that we can see ourselves as being on the side of good. His crime must be embellished with S&M fantasies and wild orgies, until it is so extreme that it no longer has anything to do with our own lives.
And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society’s simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.
For this reason, I have sparked unconscious aggression in some people. Perhaps it is what has happened to me that triggers aggression, but because I’m the only one within reach after the kidnapper’s suicide, they strike out at me. Particularly violently, whenever I try to get society to see that the kidnapper who abducted me was a person too. One who lived among them. Those who are able to react anonymously in Internet postings unload their hate directly onto me. It is society’s self-hate that rebounds on society itself, begging the question of why it allows something like that to happen. Why people among us are able to disappear so easily without anyone noticing. For over eight years.
Those who stand across from me in interviews and at events are more subtle. They turn me—the only person who experienced my imprisonment—into a victim for the second time with those two small words. They say only “Stockholm Syndrome.”