Word: austrians
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...Riedel family has never stamped its name on a single bottle of wine. But over the past 50 years, this Austrian clan of master glassmakers has done more to enhance the oenophile's pleasure than almost any winemaking dynasty. The Riedel revolution began in the 1960s, when the firm created the world's first line of wine glasses shaped specifically for different grape varieties. Now Riedel has designed a new set of lead-crystal decanters inspired by the bird life of Murano, the Venetian island famed for its glassware. The three decanters boast an avian grace: the Swan's swooping...
...hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories...
...Thursday, the Austrian publication News Magazin published comments from the incarcerated Josef Fritzl conveyed by his lawyer. Fritzl declared he was a good father, bringing gifts to his children in what he called "the bunker" and spending time watching videos and having dinner with them. He did say that what he did was wrong and that he "must have been crazy." "With every week that I held my daughter, my situation got crazier," he said through his lawyer. "I repeatedly thought about whether I should let her go or not." But he kept her prisoner through seven pregnancies...
...Elisabeth's successful pregnancies showed, the body can handle realities against which the mind revolts. Max Friedrich, head of Vienna's University Clinic for Pediatric and Adolescent Psychiatry, treated Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian who was held hostage from 1998 to 2006 in a kidnapper's cellar. He says the greatest challenge for the Fritzls will be adjusting mentally to their new reality. Kampusch, now 20, spent a month in a Vienna hospital and a further five months in an assisted-living facility before she was able to begin with formal schooling. But she had experienced at least some direct contact...
...original version of this story was updated with information from an interview published in an Austrian magazine...