The Sound of Anschluss

[Andre Bolkonsky]

At my daughter's school they are doing the Sound of Music. At this school, there are three history PhD's on staff including the head of school. The director is brilliant, and he and I have become friendly over the past three years.

They need someone to come in and teach the kids the emotional impact of the Nazi Party. All four of them pointed at me. I'm writing out the rough draft so my valuable comrades can find the holes.

The presentation starts with a cold opening questions, getting to the very impressive life of Captain Georg von Trapp. Then comes Anschluss. Trapp takes his kids, travels to Italy, gotes to America. They become a singing group. George dies.

Rogers and Hammerstein pays for the rights to the story and COMPLETELY TRANSFORMS it into the musical we know today, and the stage production is a lot more Nazi than the Julie Andres version.

What Herr Direktor wants to do to represent this is drop the Nazi Party Flag in all its glory and scare the hell out of the Audience, after which Von Trapp goes on a tirade. I am here to feed that tirade.

The Anschluss spearhead are Heydrich's strike teams, grabbing strategic facilities and important individuals - setting the precedent for the ultimate Caravan of Death, the Einsatzgruppen who bring in . The ruling team becomes Hitler's lawyer, Hans Frank and his SD compatriot- the man who lead the assassinaion of Dollfus, Otto Wachter (SD). Eichmann sets up the office of Emigration in Vienna, who answers to Heydrich's guard dog: Gestapo Mueller. This puts the base team on the field - SD will be the engine of decpetion that fuels Hitler's Machine. The same team that takes down Austria executes the Final Solution, man for man.

Walk them through France into Russia. Wannsee, the Death Camps scattered over the Pale of Settlement (as if by design). And the fall of the Devil's Snow from the industrial incenerator's.

Show them why they should be outraged, and let their minds do the work.

What I am looking for are an interesting side comments from any part of the world I might have missed. Some anecdote told by Germans, a joke, something to weave in for levity from their persepctive. Because by my understanding the Austrians do not like this movie, don't get it, and can't figure out why all American's think Eidelweiss is their national anthem.

This rolls through four movies to teach them how the Jews replied to the threat and consequences of the Shoah. Casablanca, The Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, Conspiracy, Schindler's List.

I got an hour and a half to fill. And these kids know jack squat about European history. Whatcha got?

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Second.

I have heard the story before that Detective Heinrich Mueller of the Munich police department investigated the murder strange death of Gelli Raubal. Can anyone confirm or deny this factoid?

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

@Graf Zeppelin @Mder1 @JodelDiplom @Barsoom @Avernite @Stuckenschmidt @Andrelvis

I summon thee, my harsh and valued German friends, to the Stone of Erech

And I know I forgot names on that list, forgive me in advance but unless they fixed that can't be added in after the fact.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

Are there even any Jews in the movie? I thought this was about Austrian patriotism.

And end of civilization, generally speaking.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Are there even any Jews in the movie? I thought this was about Austrian patriotism.

And end of civilization, generally speaking.

Good question.

Austrian Patriotism is the lens they use, but it about the Jewish flight in the face of Nazi occupation.

Von Trapp was a well resepcted man and had an invitation to join the Kreigsmarine from Hitler himself. Von Trapp is Croation, and as such is an Italian citizen. He was freely allowed to return to Italy, boarded a boat in Trieste paid for by a musical producer who took the award winning Von Trapp Family Singers to America to being touring.

Gestapo didn't show up at his door and demand his acquiescence. And the Nazi presence in the play is far more prevalent than in the movie.

The play's subtext is to transfer Jewish anger from The German People to the Nazi Party. Rodgers and Hammerstein are both Jews, Hammerstein's family has a love of Germany despite this and Hammerstein is one of the greatest 'book writers' in Broadway history. Eidelweiss was made up for the play, it is not the national anthem of Austria.

Art is a lie designed to tell a magnificent truth; no?

The goal is to get the kids angry someone took over their country by understanding the process. And if they see a parallel from then to now, my job is complete.

And thank you for participating.

 

[Panzergruppe]

Do as you please, but please don't write "von" with a capital V.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

TBH, I think you might be trying to play the Jewish hand too hard. And tying it to the Holocaust is a bit of a stretch. It is not really what this is about. I know it is common these days to associate Nazis immediately with killing Jews. But there's a lot that's objectionable about the Nazis than just that. Fanaticism, totalitarianism, general brutality, war-mongering, etc.

I think you're more on point on just the basic crime of ruining Germany itself (and our romantic imagination of it).

And in this particular case, the even more unspeakable crime of ruining Austria (and our romantic imagination of it).

I don't know enough about Von Trapp's background, but if he's a proud old Austrian officer in the Hapsburg tradition, there's something that's being decidedly ruined by the Nazi invasion of Austria and the obliteration of that legacy. Hapsburg civilization is piously Catholic, but also refined, liberal and cosmopolitan. The Nazi brute is the opposite.

There's a certain conceit that many Austrians liked (still like?) to think of themselves as the pinnacle of Western civilization. Prussians are brutes, French are savages, Russians are thugs. But Austria - especially the Austria of Maria-Theresa and Joseph II - is the best that there has ever been or will ever be. And they are self-appointed preservers of civilization, they believe they are the ones that hold it together. Obliterate Vienna, they warn, and Western civilization will fall apart.

In many ways, Austrian "patriotism" is more grandiose than other patriotisms. It was a Hapsburg legacy, always imperialistic, it doesn't merely cover a particular people or some particular acres of soil, but is more expansive, almost takes upon itself the very idea of "Europe" itself.

The Anschluss was traumatic, and not merely for marking the end of the sorry little post-war republic. But for the end of everything Austria represents. And von Trapp was not alone, of course, Thousands of Austrians fled Austria - particularly among the upper classes that could. They couldn't stand the idea of seeing Austria obliterated by barbarians. That includes the famous denizens of the "Austrian School" - Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, et al. - only a couple of which were Jewish. Karl Schlesinger, one the most blue-blooded of Austro-Hungarian financiers, committed suicide on the day the Nazis set foot in Vienna. As far as they saw it, it was the end of civilization.

If you want a reference point, I would point you to the Austrian interwar writer Stefan Zweig, who was incredibly popular in his time. He happens to be Jewish, but it was his Austrianism that was most emphatic. All his novels and stories swirl around the idea of "civilization" (the epitome of which he identifies as pre-war Hapsburg Vienna) being swept away by turmoil and fanaticism. He writes about the vanishing "world of yesterday" with such longing heartbreak it bleeds off the page. (Zweig too fled Austria, and ultimately ended up committing suicide in Brazil in 1943, when he thought the Nazis had won the war and all remaining hope for Western civilization was finished forever).

Zweig's biography of "Erasmus of Rotterdam", published in 1934, which was a massive bestseller, is a thinly veiled commentary on the contemporary surging Nazi threat, seen very much from the perspective of Vienna. He paints the despair of Erasmus before the swelling tide of Lutheranism in 1520s. Erasmus represents humanism, moderation and liberal civilization (= Hapsburg values), Martin Luther represents fanaticism, terror and savagery. Erasmus can understand some of Luther's complaints - Erasmus himself is a critic of the church - but he cannot stand Luther's extremism or his methods. Erasmus watches in despair as Luther goes from stubborn critic to demagogue foaming at the mouth, whipping up his fanatical followers, and the orgies of destruction that follow, enveloping town after town, and tearing up the countryside. He tries to plead vainly for restraint, for compromise, for moderation, before the fanatics destroy European civilization entirely.

That is how the Nazi threat was seen from Austria in the 1930s. It was an all-encompassing threat to everything they held dear. Mistreatment of the Jews were just part of the general descent into fanaticism and savagery. Holocaust was not on their minds. The preservation of civilization - meaning Austria of course, and what Austria represents - was.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Yes, please please don't make everything be about the holocaust.

 

[Trinitrotoluen]

The NSDAP did operate in Austria prior to the Anschluss so it didn't exactly appear out of nowhere. In 1934 Austrian Nazis murdered Chancellor Dollfuss and staged an uprising to take over the government but due to lack of popular support police and army had no trouble crushing them within a few days. Like the communist and socialist parties the NSDAP was forcibly dissolved and its members persecuted (for a few years at least until Hitler was ready to tighten the thumb-screws).

Not that Dollfuss had been a saint himself. He and his conservative party had abolished democracy in 1933 and ruled without a parliament through wartime emergency decrees. The best you can say about him and his sucessor Schuschnigg is that Austrofacism was not as bad as its Italian and German counterparts but Austria wasn't a free and happy country either. Political prisoners were held without a trial indefinitely in a camp ithough contrary to the German KZs it was pretty much run like a normal prison otherwise (i.e. no killings and no excessive brutality). In the end this also made the idea of the Anschluss more acceptable the populace. If you were already living in a dictatorship, you might as well live in one that was economically succesful . The common people didn't know that Hitler needed the Austrian gold reserves to keep up appearences of prosperity while he was busy gearing up for war.

BTW the unofficial national anthem of Austria is Fendrich's "I am from Austria".

 

[Barsoom]

The thing about Sound of Music is the strange switch from the new governess going against the father to her marrying him. I felt sorry for the kids, first she was on their side and then she's on his, even as a kid I though that ain't right. I've never been able to muster any sympathy for the father, he looks and sounds like a fascist. Well, turns out he is one.

I found this interesting essay that shows how the movie rehabilitates Austro-fascism. It's the Dolfuss stuff, so on the Mussolini rather than the Hitler model, but it's still fascism. There's an interesting bit at the end of the essay: "The ideological motivation, however, is understandable. In the midst of the Cold War, it would comforting to view a highly conservative and authoritarian cultural movement as an ally in the fight against Nazism." That's almost it but not quite; Cold Warriors weren't fighting Nazis. The point was to rehabilitate "authoritarians" by dissociating them from Nazis so they could be allied in the fight against Communism. The movie was supposed to make us feel better about Pinochet and other questionable allies of the West.

 

[Jopa79]

About the Anschluss and some events prior to it, I've heard or read, that there were Austrian willingness and readiness to form an union with Germany right after the WWI. This idea leads even further, to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire at the early 19th century, grouping all Germans into a one state, or a nation.

The Austrians wished for "a Habsburgian" leadership which would have meant an Austrian-led union, to my knowledge, Prussia would have had a secondary role in it and didn't like the idea.

Probably, because of being defeated in the WWI and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, partly emerged the Austrian readiness to form an union with Germany. Following the WWI, the newly formed Republic of German-Austria attempted to group German people, but this union was forbade, at least, by the Treaty of Versailles.

I think, the idea of Anschluss was put aside for a while. But in 1933, when the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler rose in power in Germany, the Nazis' desire to group and unite all the ethnic Germans outside Germany was clearly be seen and in English, the annexation of Austria into the Nazi-Germany happened in 1938. The Austrian Nazi-party didn't gain any significant support in the early 1930's, but nearing the mid-1930's, while Hitler came into power in Germany, a change in Austrian opinions also occurred. Simultaneously, the Austrian willingness to join Germany also grew, but according to John Gunther - an American journalist and author - the Austrian public opinion in joining to Germany was at the end of 1933 at least 60% against it.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Yes, please please don't make everything be about the holocaust.

Everything is not about the Holocaust. But when the same players who are present in the engineering of the overthrow of Austria are sitting around the table at Wannsee it is hard to ignore the linkage.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

The NSDAP did operate in Austria prior to the Anschluss so it didn't exactly appear out of nowhere. In 1934 Austrian Nazis murdered Chancellor Dollfuss and staged an uprising to take over the government but due to lack of popular support police and army had no trouble crushing them within a few days. Like the communist and socialist parties the NSDAP was forcibly dissolved and its members persecuted (for a few years at least until Hitler was ready to tighten the thumb-screws).

Not that Dollfuss had been a saint himself. He and his conservative party had abolished democracy in 1933 and ruled without a parliament through wartime emergency decrees. The best you can say about him and his sucessor Schuschnigg is that Austrofacism was not as bad as its Italian and German counterparts but Austria wasn't a free and happy country either. Political prisoners were held without a trial indefinitely in a camp ithough contrary to the German KZs it was pretty much run like a normal prison otherwise (i.e. no killings and no excessive brutality). In the end this also made the idea of the Anschluss more acceptable the populace. If you were already living in a dictatorship, you might as well live in one that was economically succesful . The common people didn't know that Hitler needed the Austrian gold reserves to keep up appearences of prosperity while he was busy gearing up for war.

BTW the unofficial national anthem of Austria is Fendrich's "I am from Austria".

Yes. The Night of the Long Knives begins June 30 and ends July 2nd. On July 25th members of the SS Standarte Regiment 89 attack and kill Dollfus, stand around waiting for something, then run away before the cops come. This proves to be a major embarassment for Hitler.

One of the leaders of the assassins, Otto Wachter, runs to Germany. He undergoes full SS training and is brought by Heydrich's Secret Master games into the SD.

When the Anschluss occurs, Wacther is standing right beside Hitler and Hans Frank alongside his two best new friends from SD: Adolph Eichmann and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Wachter and Frank will administer Austria, then will run Krakow region following the Polish invasion and will be instrumental in the Final Solution.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

The thing about Sound of Music is the strange switch from the new governess going against the father to her marrying him. I felt sorry for the kids, first she was on their side and then she's on his, even as a kid I though that ain't right. I've never been able to muster any sympathy for the father, he looks and sounds like a fascist. Well, turns out he is one.

I found this interesting essay that shows how the movie rehabilitates Austro-fascism. It's the Dolfuss stuff, so on the Mussolini rather than the Hitler model, but it's still fascism. There's an interesting bit at the end of the essay: "The ideological motivation, however, is understandable. In the midst of the Cold War, it would comforting to view a highly conservative and authoritarian cultural movement as an ally in the fight against Nazism." That's almost it but not quite; Cold Warriors weren't fighting Nazis. The point was to rehabilitate "authoritarians" by dissociating them from Nazis so they could be allied in the fight against Communism. The movie was supposed to make us feel better about Pinochet and other questionable allies of the West.

Thank you for posting the essay, but I find it very difficult to agree with their conclusions. They walk past the entire backstory straight up to an agenda driven perspective, and it is very difficult to believe the two Jews who wrote this story are whitewashing anti-semitism.

Von Trapp's children would agree wiht you on Georg's character. When they first saw the production they objected, saying their father was nothing like the man portrayed in the film. And complained about it, loudly, to no effect.

And Herr Detweiler? He isn't a Jew. He is the straight up representation of Father Franz Wasner, a Roman Catholic priest who was Georg's friend, who lived with the von Trapp's, and becomes von Trapp Family musical coordinator. Wagner will accompany them on all of their tours both in Europe prior to leaving for America, throughout America, and later on world wide tours.

Problem, it is hard to make a Roman Catholic Priest have the same convictions of easy living portrayed by Uncle Max.

Fun fact, Franz Wasner will become the rector of Pontifical Institute Santa Maria dell' Anima which was Alois Hudal's operation during and after WWII.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Do as you please, but please don't write "von" with a capital V.

This has come up before.

Using the name 'von Trapp' is lower case, unless it is the first word in a sentence. Ergo:

Von Trapp was a brilliant submarine commander who married the daughter of Whiteside, the man who invented the torpedo.
vs.
Captain von Trapp was a brilliant submarine commander who married the daughter of Whiteside, the man who invented the torpedo.

I am happy to revisit this, but our German friends have beat this fact into my head. If I am wrong, please correct me. My thanks in advance.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

TBH, I think you might be trying to play the Jewish hand too hard. And tying it to the Holocaust is a bit of a stretch. It is not really what this is about. I know it is common these days to associate Nazis immediately with killing Jews. But there's a lot that's objectionable about the Nazis than just that. Fanaticism, totalitarianism, general brutality, war-mongering, etc.

I think you're more on point on just the basic crime of ruining Germany itself (and our romantic imagination of it).

And in this particular case, the even more unspeakable crime of ruining Austria (and our romantic imagination of it).

I don't know enough about Von Trapp's background, but if he's a proud old Austrian officer in the Hapsburg tradition, there's something that's being decidedly ruined by the Nazi invasion of Austria and the obliteration of that legacy. Hapsburg civilization is piously Catholic, but also refined, liberal and cosmopolitan. The Nazi brute is the opposite.

There's a certain conceit that many Austrians liked (still like?) to think of themselves as the pinnacle of Western civilization. Prussians are brutes, French are savages, Russians are thugs. But Austria - especially the Austria of Maria-Theresa and Joseph II - is the best that there has ever been or will ever be. And they are self-appointed preservers of civilization, they believe they are the ones that hold it together. Obliterate Vienna, they warn, and Western civilization will fall apart.

In many ways, Austrian "patriotism" is more grandiose than other patriotisms. It was a Hapsburg legacy, always imperialistic, it doesn't merely cover a particular people or some particular acres of soil, but is more expansive, almost takes upon itself the very idea of "Europe" itself.

The Anschluss was traumatic, and not merely for marking the end of the sorry little post-war republic. But for the end of everything Austria represents. And von Trapp was not alone, of course, Thousands of Austrians fled Austria - particularly among the upper classes that could. They couldn't stand the idea of seeing Austria obliterated by barbarians. That includes the famous denizens of the "Austrian School" - Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, et al. - only a couple of which were Jewish. Karl Schlesinger, one the most blue-blooded of Austro-Hungarian financiers, committed suicide on the day the Nazis set foot in Vienna. As far as they saw it, it was the end of civilization.

If you want a reference point, I would point you to the Austrian interwar writer Stefan Zweig, who was incredibly popular in his time. He happens to be Jewish, but it was his Austrianism that was most emphatic. All his novels and stories swirl around the idea of "civilization" (the epitome of which he identifies as pre-war Hapsburg Vienna) being swept away by turmoil and fanaticism. He writes about the vanishing "world of yesterday" with such longing heartbreak it bleeds off the page. (Zweig too fled Austria, and ultimately ended up committing suicide in Brazil in 1943, when he thought the Nazis had won the war and all remaining hope for Western civilization was finished forever).

Zweig's biography of "Erasmus of Rotterdam", published in 1934, which was a massive bestseller, is a thinly veiled commentary on the contemporary surging Nazi threat, seen very much from the perspective of Vienna. He paints the despair of Erasmus before the swelling tide of Lutheranism in 1520s. Erasmus represents humanism, moderation and liberal civilization (= Hapsburg values), Martin Luther represents fanaticism, terror and savagery. Erasmus can understand some of Luther's complaints - Erasmus himself is a critic of the church - but he cannot stand Luther's extremism or his methods. Erasmus watches in despair as Luther goes from stubborn critic to demagogue foaming at the mouth, whipping up his fanatical followers, and the orgies of destruction that follow, enveloping town after town, and tearing up the countryside. He tries to plead vainly for restraint, for compromise, for moderation, before the fanatics destroy European civilization entirely.

That is how the Nazi threat was seen from Austria in the 1930s. It was an all-encompassing threat to everything they held dear. Mistreatment of the Jews were just part of the general descent into fanaticism and savagery. Holocaust was not on their minds. The preservation of civilization - meaning Austria of course, and what Austria represents - was.

Well said as always.

the problem is I'm not speaking to a group of 30-40 year old men in the Paradox forums.

I'm talking to 15-18 year olds who have ZERO clue the history of the Second World War or the Nazi Party.

I have one hour, and the effect must be strong enough emotionally to feed their reaction when the Nazi flags drop.

 

[JodelDiplom]

This has come up before.

Using the name 'von Trapp' is lower case, unless it is the first word in a sentence. Ergo:

Von Trapp was a brilliant submarine commander who married the daughter of Whiteside, the man who invented the torpedo.
vs.
Captain von Trapp was a brilliant submarine commander who married the daughter of Whiteside, the man who invented the torpedo.

I am happy to revisit this, but our German friends have beat this fact into my head. If I am wrong, please correct me. My thanks in advance.

It's quite correct, you have the proper rules down as if you went to German school

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

It's quite correct, you have the proper rules down as if you went to German school

I listen to my betters.

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

I have to admit that I did not quite get what this is about. A Musical? Teaching kids history? I am confused. What do you actually want to do?

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

I have to admit that I did not quite get what this is about. A Musical? Teaching kids history? I am confused. What do you actually want to do?

The Sound of Music is a Broadway musical that became a famous motion picture, which you probably already know.

The director needs someone to educate these high school kids as to understand the reality of what happens on March 13, 1938. The visual representation is dropping the Nazi Flag to gain shock value. I have been requested to teach von Trapp, the Nazis, and the entire cast specifically what is going on and how each of them should react to it individually.

Von Trapp goes on a tirade, the Nazis on stage start 'Heil Hitler'-ing like they are introducing Freddie Finkel.

I have come before my most astute critics to sharpen my blade.