Dungeon case leads to gender rethink in Austria

Here's a little-known fact. Opinionators do wake at 3 a.m. after a column has been published and realize that a piece can be incontrovertible and still have missed a target.

I'm referring to last week's column advising readers not to tar all Austrians with the same brush after the revelations about Josef Fritzl, 73, who kept his daughter Elisabeth in a sunless, nearly airless dungeon beneath his house for 24 years for rape and procreation. I stand by it; damning entire nations is absurd and dangerous.

But relations between men and women in Austria are still a bizarre backwoods matter, as one reader e-mailed to inform me. Thank you for the article, she wrote politely, but I am Austrian-German, and you are wrong. Her traditional upbringing by an authoritarian father and passive mother had scarred her as well as her own children, she said, causing one of her brothers to commit suicide and leaving the other emotionally unable to cope with life.