Against love
Seeking the literary traces of the Natascha Kampusch affair
In August 2006, the international media went into a feeding frenzy about the story of Natascha Kampusch, who escaped after eight-and-a-half years’ captivity in a tiny room in a suburb outside Vienna. The horrific nature of the crime aside, what was it about the story that exerted such fascination? In a searing critique of social mores, Rainer Just argues that the Kampusch case offered, without it ever being noticed, a distorted re-encounter with a deeply familiar emotional programme: romantic love. “The mass public and its media were able to understand the Kampusch case only as a sensational crime, as a criminal incident, but not as a case of a ubiquitous, socially organized madness.”
