"Bless My Homeland Forever": Teaching Austria and the Holocaust

Abstract

The image most Americans have of Austria, to the extent they have one at all, is an American one. The Sound of Music undoubtedly did more for the postwar tourist industry than any ad campaign or government subsidy. 1 This film, as millions of viewers the world over know, begins as a predictable love story between a young nun on sabbatical (Julie Andrews) and a widowed navy captain (Christopher Plummer); but it culminates in the AnschluR of 1938. In this respect the film offers a mass audience a decidedly political and historical narrative of a key point in (and world) history. Though of course the film does not explicitly tell us that most Austrians were like the anti-fascist Captain von Trapp, it does focus our attention and sympathy on him and his family. All of the characters we come to care about are either on his side, or belong to that group of people who mean well, but naively assume that politics do not matter much. On the eve of the AnschluR, and precisely at that point in the film where the public and private story lines first intersect (i.e., the ball given in honor of the baroness), the captain becomes unmistakably identified with the good (antifascist) Austria: He has deliberately and prominently hung the flag of Austria in the magnificent entrance hall of his palace and then makes a point of defending this action over the objections of some Nazi guests. Certainly by the time we get to the emotional finale of the Salzburg song festival, there can be no doubt that the words bless my homeland forever are meant as a benediction on the good, pre-Nazi Austria the von Trapp family is forced to flee. I begin with this apparent digression because it is essential to know one's audience, particularly when it comes to teaching the Holocaust. As teachers of twentieth century German and culture to an American audience we are rarely confronted with a tabula rasa. On the contra y, we are virtually always faced with a student body which has already absorbed narratives of all ki ds-historical, fictitious, and often enough ome tangled mix of the two-concerning the Holocaust. In thinking about how best to present Austrian Holocaust Materials, we therefore need to know how the most significant forces of popular culture have already set the parameters for the story we may be trying to tell. In the case of modern Landeskunde, the still popular film The Sound of Music is an emblematic in tance of a pop-cultural inscription that predates any college course. How, then, has this film, which to this day plays in hotel lounges, and lends its name to a whole array of Salzburg Stadtrundfahrten, already formatted the cultural diskette, so to speak, before we even enter the classroom? There can be little doubt that, while Austria is associated with alpine landscapes and a grand musical tradition, Germany alone has become primarily associated in the American popular imagination with Nazism and the Holocaust.2 In a nutshell, The Sound of Music corroborates (in an admittedly indirect, yet nevertheless powerful, manner) the fundamental myth of postwar identity, i.e., that it was das erste Opfer (the firs victim) of Nazi aggression. The beleaguered Captain von Trapp undoubtedly is a victim of nefarious political forces; and the avaricious yet avu cular Max is cast in a sympathetic though so ewhat different light-the conformist with a heart of gold. Obviously, any serious treatment of the Holocaust with reference to Austria must first set aside this untenable claim, for it obscures the central fact that the principal victims of Nazi Ger-