My essay

While discussing The Sound of Music, a German professor at Columbia told me that “Austria managed to convince the world that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Austrian." Of course, the opposite is true but this idea reflects the spin with which Austria has managed to fool the world about its involvement in World War II. No piece of work defines the success of this deception more than The Sound of Music, the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein musical which was adopted into a popular film in 1965. By sidelining the emergence of the third Reich and portraying the Austrians as victims, The Sound of Music reinforces the lie that Austria was not complicit in Hitler’s war.

Throughout the film, the image of Austria 1938 is one of pastoral beauty. Long shots highlight the extraordinary Alpine vistas. The people are presented as highly cultured and sophisticated. Although the stage production made attempts to address the rise of Hitler through a song that advises Captain Von trap to sit quietly and wait it out, the film reduces the conflict to a few lines of dialogue. One of the children cutely refers to the swastika as "the flag with the black spider". We never see the violence or the chaos associated with Hitler‘s regime.

While other countries put up varying degrees of resistance, the Anschluss was relatively bloodless. In 1933 it was estimated that 80% of the population supported reunification with the Germans. However, a long cycle of Nazi terrorism reversed that trend, and Hitler had to resort to political maneuvers to make it happen. Still, the Austrians were hardly Hitler's victims, as they are portrayed in the film. Austrian victimhood is introduced through the trials of the Von trap family, forced to give up their home in order to escape the Nazi threat. But this resistance is echoed in the final scenes when an entire auditorium of Austrian patriots is gently requested by the Captain to join him in seeing "Edelweiss", a treacly, lamenting song about a white (read purity) Austrian flower. In this scene we are expected to see the Nazis as the bad guys and the family, including their fellow Austrians joining them in song, as the put-upon victims. No attempt is made to address the real victims of the war; no mention is made of the 200,000 Austrian Jews who were stripped of their citizenship in an attempt to increase the numbers of votes for annexation. No one would guess that this was the same country that within a few months would hold the infamous 'Kristallnacht', a riot in which Jewish-owned shops and businesses were destroyed during "the night of broken glass".

Frankly, I enjoy this movie as much as the next person. Still, it seems unfair that Austria has been given a pass on its involvment in the war. The final word on Austria‘s involvement in the rise of Hitler and the destruction of Europe is, in fact, The Sound of Music.