Girl in the Cellar by Allan Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

father or a clinging mother that forces a child to introspection as the only way to really give vent to their emotions. If you put on too much pressure, something has to give somewhere. In the case of Wolfgang Priklopil his choice of a young girl who did not leave him feeling threatened, and his clear hostility to women exhibited in his conversations with workmates, does indicate that he may have had problems with his mother, or his utter dependence on her, his feelings of self-worth only activated by her doting attitude toward him on any given day. Equally it could simply have been that he was impotent.
    The ability to enjoy sex and from this to build a happy relationship is one of the basic tenets of human existence. He may have felt cut off from life through impotency, and removed from society, and this may well have been the enormous pressure that he suffered.
    I believe he must have suffered something that made him in turn want to inflict something on others.
    What was it that Priklopil had experienced that made him feel the victim and want to escape from that by becoming the perpetrator? Look hard enough and all too often you will see the person beaten later becomes the beater.
    Whatever the pressure Wolfgang Priklopil was under, it must have been enormous for him to have committed such a crime; his fantasy world must have been all consuming for him. He spent enormous amounts of time thinking and preparing what he was to do, and how to move from being the victim with no friends and no girlfriend to becoming the perpetrator, and turning the tables on the world. In his mind the fantasy world where he would snatch and mould the perfect woman merged with the real world, until he could no longer seethe difference. The preparation he made in the cellar showed he was obsessed with this idea.
    Ironically, though, what he saw as his salvation was always doomed to end in failure. From the moment he kidnapped Natascha he had made a choice to end his loneliness, and slowly over the years he would have learned to understand feelings and developed an intense relationship with this young girl who was totally dependent on his actions. From her he would have learned to become a better man, because he had to learn to think about her and not just about himself. It was as he allowed himself to care for her, and the healing process started, that his fate was sealed. Another life was not possible for him because of the way he had chosen to escape from his problems. What he had done gave him no chance of a return to normal life.
    People are fascinated by this story because everyone can see it in black and white. They can empathise with Natascha, who was powerless to act, and can see themselves in the same situation and try to imagine how they might react. It is a normal human condition to put oneself in the place of another. But nobody would put themselves in the place of Priklopil; after all, he was a monster.
    In the end his illness was cured: he had no fear of women any more, they no longer dominated. But at the same time the world he knew had ended: he knew he would never see again the woman who had brought him back into the real world. The image he had portrayed to neighbours had been ripped away and he would nolonger have the thin veneer of popularity he had recently started to gain. His true self was revealed. The friendly Wolfgang, the new Wolfgang, could no longer live and he had no choice but to die.
    Another opinion on Priklopil is supplied by Austria’s most prominent court psychiatrist, Dr Reinhard Haller, famous for working on the cases of the mad bomber Franz Fuchs and the Nazi doctor Heinrich Gross: the decorated medical specialist who was revealed after the war to have been involved in the systematic murder of mentally retarded and handicapped children at a Viennese clinic.
    In my opinion [said Haller] Priklopil had a very complex personality disorder, with very low self-esteem and strong fears of failure, most probably