Hunks, trunks and living dolls
When the Fritzl story became known Patrice immediately thought of Cliff Richard crooning 'gonna lock you up in a trunk so no big hunk can take you away from me' and understood why the wife, Rosemarie, may have been submissive -- it was expected back in the 1950s -- but she most certainly did not understand why Rosemarie stayed with the monster after he was imprisoned for rape and presumably knew he was abusing her 11-year old daughter Elisabeth. "That an old Cliff Richard song would come back and haunt me now just goes to show how powerful the effect of macho words set to soft, romantic music can be," sighs Patrice. "With songs like that moving a generation, no wonder Josef Fritzl denies being a monster in loving Elisabeth the way he did."
"Who knows, Rosemarie herself may have come from an incestuous family and thought it normal for a father to 'break-in' his daughters -- but in choosing only the pretty daughter, young Elisabeth, couldn’t Rosemarie see how he ogled the girl and understand that the ageing Josef Fritzl was acting like a young man smitten by a walking, talking living doll and because he couldn't marry the girl openly, like he did Rosemarie in 1956 when she, too, was young, slim and pretty, he had to lock the girl up?"
"Bearing in mind that Fritzl was convicted and imprisoned for raping another woman in 1967, a year after the youngest child Elisabeth was born, Rosemarie knew by then that her husband was more than a Cliff Richard devotee -- he was a deviant monster – so what drove this woman to remain married to him?"
“Had Rosemarie not cherished her marriage and lifestyle so much, she, like me, would now be enjoying her 24th year of independence and a blissful retirement, rather than an old age ahead spent wallowing in guilt, misery and shame.”
“There is much about the 1950s that I miss,” says Patrice, “but certainly not the prevailing mentality at the time that men were hunks, girls were living dolls and trunks was the place you kept your dolls in order to stop another hunk from stealing them.”
Read more by Patrice on this issue:
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