(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Perhaps
one of the more negative aspects of film's influence on the world audience
is the conveyance of a simplistic good/bad dichotomy. National and international
stereotypes ranging from examples of subtle distinction to virulent
racism have always been the easy danger of cinema. Here, also, a history
written by the victors is undeniable and tends to remain emotional fodder.
Much of the militaristic German that the world seems to know, arose
from American and other Western dominant film aimed at battling the
Kaiser and Hitler — but also from the constructs of Nazi propaganda
film. It is no wonder then that international cinema continues to present
a Nazi stereotype even when dealing with German characters in an era
prior to National Socialism.
Even
Hollywood-Austrian Billy Wilder, whose gritty black and white Berlin
rubble comedy, A Foreign Affair of 1946, which featured Marlene
Dietrich as a seductive ex-Nazi in a city of black marketeering and
guilt evasion, could not find a similar realistic Austria for the screen.
The following year he offered The Emperor Waltz, a romantic imperial
era comedy of aristocratic misalliance and Franz Joseph's puppies, filmed
in a Hollywood back lot and in Colorado (as stand ins for Schönbrunn
Palace and the Alps) in garish, postcard-like Technicolor landscapes
with Bing Crosby singing Strauss. What Wilder could not, perhaps would
not do, Carol Reed accomplished, but his bleak vision of a war torn
and occupied Vienna in his 1949 The Third Man is clearly an exception
among the other films on Austria from the 1940s to the 1960s. There
are several remakes of The Great Waltz and The Merry Widow
as well as Carlo Ponti's Emperor Waltz rehash, A Breath of
Scandal (1962), complete with new songs by renowned Viennese operetta
composer Robert Stolz. Austria as a neutral site between cold-war blocs
adds a new element to the image: Vienna or even Salzburg becomes the
center for spies, neo-Nazis and communist refugees in such films spanning
The Red Danube (1949) to The Salzburg Connection (1972).
Even though there are at least three treatments of the Mayerling tragedy
2 spanning the 1920s to the mid 1960s from German,
French and British cameras, contemporary Austria and the Austrian becomes even less defined than ever. Palaces and Alps
still dominate, and the people and nation seem to be defined as what they are not: neither Germans nor Eastern Europeans,
neither an influential political state, nor one that fulfills the immense cultural legacy of its imperial past. In the 1960s and 70s,
Austrian directors who had fled Nazism for Hollywood3 attempted to
offer images of an Austria that were taboo or at least highly controversial within Austria. Otto Preminger's The
Cardinal (1963) gives us an Austria that cannot escape the mourning for its imperial past, a naive Cardinal Innitzer who
miscalculates the meaning of Hitler's Anschluss, and opera star Wilma Lipp singing Mozart to resistant Catholics while the
Hitler Youth vandalizes the archbishop's residence. Fred Zinnemann's Julia depicts a violent Civil War of 1934, and
draws an over-simplistic comparison of the 1934-38 Dollfuss/Schuschnigg clerical-authoritarian corporate state with Nazi
Germany to favor the film's cause of anti-fascism. I will return to this period in Austrian history in the discussion of The
Sound of Music. More recently, Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), an ambivalent Austrian is caught between the Holy
Grail and the swastika in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail (1989). Perhaps given the fallout of
the Waldheim era, Spielberg's later Schindler's List (1993), which divides the film into a battle of morality between
the good and bad Nazi, offers the German Schindler as hero and humanist; the nominally Austrian Amon Goetz is the
psychopathic concentration camp commandant.
There
is, however, a cinematic representative of Austria that is internationally
appreciated, but it is a collection of fictionalized images most Austrians
have never seen. The Sound of Music,
5 the 1965 Hollywood film based on the Broadway musical
by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and directed by Robert
Wise,6
has consistently been one of the largest money-making films in history
and one of the most popular with world audiences. Although honored with
many film awards including the Academy Award for Best Picture, and having
been hailed for its superb quality as an entertainment film, it has never
been appreciated or taken seriously enough by film critics. The source
of the original musical was the 1949 book The Story of the Trapp Family
by Maria von Trapp,7 which also served as the basis for two West German
features, Die Trapp-Familie (1956) and Die Trapp-Familie in
Amerika (1958),8 both helmed
by German/Austrian director Wolfgang Liebeneiener. The narrative structure
of the first installment, scripted by Georg Hurdalek, appears to have
influenced both the stage and film musical and Hurdalek's name was later
added post-release to the credits of the Robert Wise feature.
The
film is quite clearly an allegory for the Austrian Ständestaat,
and casts an approving light on the era's very general atmosphere. The
film does not take critical issue or specifically define the period
politically, but sets the action in "The last golden years of the Thirties"
a suggestion of doomed Austrian sovereignty and freedom rather than
the strife of the First Republic. The film's two main characters who
come to represent the Austrian nation and its struggle, Julie
Andrews'
Maria, a postulant in a convent and Christopher Plummer's Captain von
Trapp form the very dualism of the Ständestaat ideology. Like
postimperial Austria, the Trapp family, although living in the remnant
Austrian aristocratic tradition, are motherless and alienated from purpose
or direction. As a naval officer without an ocean (Austria having become
landlocked with the new borders of 1918/19), and a landed aristocrat
without a monarch, Georg von Trapp's identity and lifestyle is connected
with the Habsburg past. He represents that conservative Austria which,
from the inception of the First Republic through the Ständestaat,
defined itself as Austrian author Alexander Lernet-Holenia labled it
in his 1934 novel on the passing of the Empire, Die Standarte
(The Standard): "was übrigblieb, als alles andre vergangen war"
(that which remained after all else had disappeared)
15 His Austria is one defined by a multicultural, cosmopolitan empire, which, given its
otherness to Germany even as a small republic, must continue to create an identity based in its Habsburg heritage. Von
Trapp's Austrian nation is one of polyglot Mitteleuropa, not of a Greater-Germany and it is this historical legitimism of
the post-1918 Austrian state that von Trapp as aristocratic/conservative element of the Ständestaat locates his
patriotism. Despite the international fame of the Trapp Family Singers, it is curious that in passively accepting and in
capitalizing on The Sound of Music, Austria also accepts an officially disavowed regime (labeled in the film as
"golden years") and an elitist (aristocratic) representation of the nation.16 But a representation of Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Austria is incomplete without the inclusion
of the regime's Catholic social philosophy influenced by the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and the
clerico-corporate theories of Othmar Spann (1878-1950). It is the character of Maria as symbol of Catholicism that
completes this sociopolitical allegory. Her joie de vivre and her religious beliefs nurture the children and bring substance to
their lives. She helps the Captain channel his mourning for a "world that is slowly fading away" into an effective role model
for his children and a progressive and pragmatic stance in dealing with the peril to his family.
Wise's
Sound of Music hosts a battle of symbols to challenge any semiotician.
Captain von Trapp is defined by a white Austrian decoration in the shape
of a crusader's cross or Kruckenkreuz around his neck, and displays
the Austrian flag in his entry hall during the ball. The counterpoint
is the Nazi flag that is hung against his knowledge outside his door
after the Anschluss, which he tears down. Here are simple opposites
of the Manichean struggle of light against dark, white against black.
The Austrofascist Chancellor Dollfuss believed the Kruckenkreuz
to be a Christian symbol that would show Austria to be a "better" Germany
in contrast to the Third Reich, which found representation in the pagan
symbol of the swastika.
21 Symbolic white returns in von Trapp's anthem,
"Edelweiss," in which the flower, "clean and white" represents the small, fairly impoverished republican Austria, which is
now preferable (even for this nobleman and former imperial officer) to a provincial annexation to Nazi Germany. Writer
Hans Weigel has said that the birth-date of postimperial Austrian identity occurred "five minutes before the disappearance of
Austria, on the 12th of February 1938."22 This is, of course, not
completely true, given the Ständestaat's sense of national definition beyond the embattled First Republic and its
heroic, if undemocratic and right-wing stance against Anschluss. Austrian photojournalist Lothar Rübelt is convinced that the
regime's ideological organization, the Fatherland Front, crystallized a patriotism that was the forerunner of Second Republic
national consciousness.23 Certainly, many of those associated with
the Ständestaat who fled in exile or remained in inner emigration helped found the Second Republic in 1955.
The
very sites of the film have strong geopolitical value: von Trapp's Salzburg,
unlike Baroness Schraeder's Vienna, is untainted by politics, military,
memories of war and revolution. Historically a bishopric, it is an ideal
symbol of Catholic values and historical independence. Von Trapp's identity
is shifted after the Anschluss: the order regarding his naval commission
comes from the center of the new Greater German Reich, Berlin, (Vienna
having been degraded to a provincial capital) and it requests he report
to Bremerhaven, a Protestant northern German port city that has little
in common with Terra Austria. Similarly, on a microcosmic level,
the action of the film prior to the Anschluss occurs in locations that
support the Austrian ideology of the Ständestaat: the von Trapp
manor house, Maria's convent, and the cathedral. Exterior shots are
in places of idyllic freedom — the mountains, and of Austrian history
— around Salzburg and Mirabell Palace. Cinematographically, strong
parallelism contrasts Catholic Austria and its fall to Nazism. Maria's
wedding march and the pealing of many joyous bells dissolve into the
single, dull bell, announcing the Anschluss. This is immediately followed
by a wide, aerial shot of the orderly columns of Nazi soldiers marching
across a plaza. Maria's white draped movement toward the altar is similarly
shot from above, her long veil makes her resemble a butterfly. The soldiers,
however, resemble ants. Indeed, Maria's costumes reflect her emotional
growth as the evolution from worm to cocoon to butterfly: she begins
in black habit and presents herself to the Captain in an ugly earth-toned
burlap skirt and jacket. This is followed by lighter but still dull-colored
dirndl patterns and the blue chiffon dress of the party, which is briefly
replaced by the habit in her attempt to seek refuge from her feelings
for the Captain. She returns in a more elegant, strong blue-green dress,
ultimately replaced by the butterfly of the wedding gown and the striking
yellow suit she wears upon her return from her honeymoon. In this color,
one of associated with Empress Maria Theresa, the Habsburg flag, and
Schönbrunn Palace, Maria stands by her husband's side in resistance
to Nazism. He wears his typical Austrian country costume or Tracht,
a patriotic uniform-like look favored by aristocrats. When the butler,
Franz, is briefly seen peering from an upper floor window at Zeller's
confrontation with the escaping family, he is garbed in von Trapp's
or a similar Tracht, signifying him as the new lord of the manor.
It is a clear reference to the lawless and violent National Socialist
expropriation of the property of Jews, Fatherland Front leaders and
members, monarchists, socialists, and other anti-Nazis in Austria beginning
in March 1938. But it is no longer the symbolic house of Austria that
Franz and his like have acquired and want represent. Their "ownership"
has degraded it to the Ostmark (Eastern March) or later the Alpen-
und Donaugau (Alpine and Danube Gau), a province within the Reich,
renamed once to wipe Austria off the map, the second time to eradicate
any lingering reference to its Habsburg history.
25
As a representation of a national image, The Sound of Music
gives the world an Austria that the Second Republic would not choose,
but for its focus on the anti-Nazi Austrian. Still resented by Austrians,
is the old rumor that the film was not an initial success in their country
because it was about a family's abandonment of their Austrian homeland,
even if it was part of the Third Reich. Playing on this is Ruth A. Starkman's
recent suggestion that the film remains unseen in Austria (and Germany)
today primarily because of its anti-Nazi ideology, and that the often
cited rejection of Hollywood's cultural imperialism is nothing more
than a cover for neo-Nazi sentiments.
28 Although the film does not cater to the 1943 Moscow Declaration's concept of a purely
victimized Austria29 (there are no German Nazi characters in
the film), its anti-Nazi characters (ranging from the pragmatic Max Detweiler to the resistant Captain von Trapp) are
representations that would help, not hinder Austrian identification in the wake of Kurt Waldheim's wartime revelations and
more recently, Jörg Haider's Nazi-sympathetic utterances. Aside from Austrian Nazis, the film is also hardly a provocation in
dealing with the Anschluss. It has, for example, no Jewish characters or even a single reference to the coming Holocaust.
The problematic Austrian reception may have far more to do with what is depicted as the resistance — the
representation of the Ständestaat, which German historian Gottfried-Karl Kindermann called "Hitler's first defeat in
Europe."30 The assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss during the failed
Nazi coup of 1934, as well as the doomed attempts of Chancellor von Schuschnigg to keep Hitler out, after having been
abandoned by Mussolini with the Berlin-Rome Axis of 1937 and ignored by the Western powers, have not made these
figures into national heroes. On the contrary, the authoritarian corporate state, which came into being on the back of a near
civil war, economic instability and impoverishment, the rejection of Nazism, and the repression of the Left, is considered by
many as the beginning of fascism in Austria, rather than the Anschluss. That those who stood with it against Hitlerism were
deported to concentration camps and those who fled or survived, returned to help build a postwar Austria, is a subject that is
perhaps still more difficult to broach than the Anschluss itself.
1. Austrian author Robert Musil (1880-1947) referred to a fictionalized Austria-Hungary as "Kakanien" in his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930), and it has since become synonymous with an idealized image of Habsburgian Central Europe. The name was based on the abbreviation "K.u.K." for Kaiserlich und Königlich, or Imperial and Royal, referring to institutions of the dual Habsburg monarchy (Empire of Austria and Kingdom of Hungary) until 1918.
2. The still mysterious suicide/murder of heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, Archduke Rudolf and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera took place at the imperial family's hunting lodge at Mayerling in 1889 and has been the subject of many books and international film treatment.
3. A significant pool of Austrian and Austro-Hungarian talent made up "Golden Age" Hollywood. Three waves of immigration were responsible: silent filmmakers who arrived following the First World War, those who left Vienna and/or Berlin for career growth during the 1920s and 30s, and those who fled the Anschluss in 1938. An excellent record of Austrians in the American film industry, including those who arrived from the postwar era to the present, can be found in Rudolf Ulrich, Österreicher in Hollywood (Wien: Edition S, 1993).
4. Shaffer and Forman may have been inspired by Pushkin's drama and Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart and Salieri, but the stage play and subsequent film lifted much and without credit from two previous Austrian Mozart biopics, the 1942 Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love), and the 1955 remake, Mozart, both directed by Karl Hartl. See Robert von Dassanowsky, "Wien-Film, Karl Hartl and Mozart: Aspects of the Failure of Nazi Ideological Gleichschaltung in Austrian Cinema," Modern Austrian Literature 32/4 (1999), 177-88.
5. The Sound of Music, dir.
Robert Wise, perf. Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker,
Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, and Daniel Truhitte. Twentieth
Century-Fox/Argyle Enterprises, 1965
6. Prior to its actual production, The Sound of Music had been an unpopular property in Hollywood. Paramount had originally bought the rights to the 1956 West German film, Die Trapp Familie as a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, but abandoned development. After the success of the stage musical, Robert Wise, who had so successfully brought West Side Story (1961) to the screen, was asked to direct the film by Twentieth Century Fox, but he was occupied with The Sand Pebbles (1966) and remained unconvinced of the possibilities. After both Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly had turned down the opportunity, German-American director William Wyler agreed to direct the film if the script would incorporate substantial changes. He eventually dropped out of the project in pre-production. With The Sand Pebbles production on hold, Wise agreed to direct The Sound of Music. For interesting background notes on the film and its talents see: The German-Hollywood Connection: The Sound of Music at: http://www.german-way.com/cinema/som_main.html
7. Maria von Trapp was born Maria Augusta Kutschera (1905-1987).
8. Johannes von Moltke examines the two earlier German films on the von Trapp family, particularly their U.S. adventures in "Trapped in America: The Americanization of the Trapp Familie, or ‘Papas Kino' Revisited" in German Studies Review, 19/5 (1996), 455-78, and in a revised German-language version, "Heimatklänge: Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika, in Montage, 7/1 (1998), 95-122.
9. For a history of the Austrian Heimatfilm see: Gertraud Steiner, Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in Österreich 1946-1966 (Wien: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987).
10. Eric Rentschler offers an incisive examination of the genre vis-à-vis Weimar Germany's artistic and cultural ideologies in his article, "Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm," New German Critique 51 (1990).
11. See Robert von Dassanowsky, "A Mountain of a Ship: Locating the Bergfilm in James Cameron's Titanic, Cinema Journal 40/4 Summer (2001), 18-35.
12. See Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
13. Ständestaat = the Austrian corporate state (1934-38) modeled in part after Mussolini's fascist Italy.
14. Austrian examinations of the relationship between the film and the city can be found in Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann and Alexander G. Keul, Eds., 'The Sound of Music' zwischen Mythos und Marketing. (Salzburg: Salzburger Beiträge zur Volkskunde, 2000).
15. Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Die Standarte (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1955). 204. Translation by Robert von Dassanowsky. See also Robert von Dassanowsky, Phantom Empires: The Novels of Alexander Lernet-Holenia and the Question of Postimperial Austrian Identity (Riverside: Ariadne, 1996), 20-56.
16. Titles of nobility have been forbidden by constitutional law since 1919. However, this has never managed to remove the historical nobility from social consciousness. The names of important historical nobility are so well known or so associated with everything from major historical sites to street names, that the removal of a title or the noble particle "von" (of) makes little difference. Only lesser and thus lesser-known historical nobility lost its immediate recognition status with the removal of title or "von. The imperial nostalgia and later monarchist leanings of the Ständestaat helped relax this issue especially since its final Chancellor was Kurt von Schuschnigg. The anti-nobility law was not an issue during the Third Reich, but the Second Republic reinstated it. Titles of nobility and the "von" are never used officially in Austria today, except in rare cases, when it can also be considered an artistic name (e.g. the conductor Herbert von Karajan), but social and media use is more prevalent than in the past. Since 1918, Germany has considered titles and the "von" to be part of the surname -- a solution that has brought its own problems.
17. See Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96) and drama, Die natürliche Tochter (1803), and Thomas Mann's Königliche Hoheit (1909).
18. The Gau was a medieval district. The term was adapted by the Reich as an appropriately Germanic and non-republican concept for its provinces. The Gauleiter was the governor of the area.
19. Freidrich Heer, Der Kampf um die Österreichische Identität (Wien: Böhlaus Nachf. 1981), 423.
20. In addition to the product of the major studios and production companies, there was a "secondary" Austrian film industry after Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 known as the Emigrantenfilm (immigrant film). This consisted of independent productions (often co-produced with Hungarian, Czechoslovak or Dutch studios) featuring exile German talent and not exportable to Germany, due to the restrictions the Nazi regime placed on subject matter of Austrian films and the "racial quality" of its cast and crew. Although Germany attempt to ruin the Austrian film industry if it did not follow "Aryanization" standards as a preparation for Anschluss (Germany was Austria's greatest export audience and most of the primary studios subsequently made the required concessions) the Emigrantenfilm nevertheless proved successful as export throughout Europe. It is recognized today for having created many classics of the era featuring such stars as Franziska Gaal, Hans Jaray, S.K. (Szöke) Szakall, Hans Bressart, Rosy Barsony and Otto Wallburg. See: Armin Loacker and Martin Prucha, Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige Emigrantenfilm 1934-1937 (Wien: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000).
21. Irmgard Bärnthaler, Die Vaterländische Front: Geschichte und Organisation (Wien: Europa, 1971), 28.
22. Alan Best, "The Austrian Tradition: Continuity and Change," Modern Austrian Writing: Literature and Society after 1945, ed. Alan Best and Hans Wolfschütz (London: Wolff, 1980), 25. Translation by Robert von Dassanowsky.
23. Lothar Rübelt, Österreich zwischen den Kriegen. Zeitdokumente eines Photopioniers der20er und 30er Jahre (Wien: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1979).
24. See Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 232.
25. Ostmark still recalled Österreich, the German name for Austria. Hitler wanted to remove any suggestion of the once independent country and its imperial multicultural, polyglot history.
26. Novalis's 1802 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Joseph von Eichendorff's late-Romantic novel of 1826, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, are particularly representative of the mountain/valley and nature-mystic ideals of German Romanticism.
27. See Robert von Dassanowsky, "Wherever you may run, you cannot escape him": Leni Riefenstahl's Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland," Camera Obscura 35 (1995), 107-29.
28. Ruth A. Starkman, "American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music Fails in Germany and Austria." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20/1, 2000, 63-78.
29. The 1943 Moscow Declaration took the following position on Austria: "The
governments of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States of America are agreed that Austria the first
free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression, shall be liberated from German domination. They regard the annexation
imposed on Austria by Germany on March 15, 1938, as null and void. They consider themselves as in no way bound by any
charges effected in Austria since that date. They declare that they wish to see re-established a free and independent Austria
and thereby to open the way for the Austrian people themselves, as well as those neighboring States which will be faced
with similar problems, to find that political and economic security which is the only basis for lasting peace. Austria is
reminded, however that she has a responsibility, which she cannot evade, for participation in the war at the side of Hitlerite
Germany, and that in the final settlement account will inevitably be taken of her own contribution to her liberation." A
Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941-49 Prepared at the Request of the Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations by the Staff of the Committee and the Department of State. (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1950). The first part of the declaration supported the Second Republic's official avoidance in dealing with the Nazi
past. The scandal surrounding Kurt Waldheim is generally regarded as the rupture of this policy. The former United Nations
Secretary General served as President of Austria from 1986-1992 despite the revelations that he had been an officer in a
German army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia. An investigation cleared him of any complicity, but the political
fallout and critical reaction to Austria abroad promoted national discourse on Austria's past as both a victim and perpetrator
of Nazism.
30. See Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Hitler's Defeat in Austria, Trans. Sonia Brough and David Taylor (London: Hurst, 1988).
31. Jacqueline Vansant, "Robert Wise's The Sound of Music: The 'Denazification' of Austria in American Cinema." From World War to Waldheim: Politics and Culture in Austria and the United States. Ed. David Good & Ruth Wodak (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 165-86.
32. See Reinhold Wagnleitner, "The Sound of Forgetting meets the United States of Amnesia in 'The Sound of Music' zwischen Mythos und Marketing and in From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States (New York: Berghahn, 1999): 1-16.
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