Peter Popham: Austrians Are Only Now Being Allowed to See a Stage Production of "The Sound of Music"?

THE NAZIS will take over a Viennese theatre tonight. An enormous swastika will drop from the flies, a squad of armed soldiers in Nazi uniforms will burst into the auditorium, sirens, whistles, furious orders will ring around the chandeliered ceiling. And as the audience nervously titters, stormtroopers with dogs will fan out in search of those daring to evade them, namely a warbling Austrian family with an inordinate number of children.

Yes, The Sound of Music is in town. It is the first full production of the musical to be staged in Austria. And that is curious, because the musical is actually set in Austria, in the city of Salzburg. All the characters in the play are supposed to be Austrian. The whole look of the film, from the introductory aerial view of Salzburg to the final dramatic escape over the mountains, is a paean of praise to the Austrian landscape. The historical event around which it revolves is the Anschluss of 1938, in which Nazi Germany swallowed Austria whole.

And yet for all these years the Austrians have wanted nothing to do with The Sound of Music. Curious. They could not keep it out altogether, of course. Sound of Music tours of Salzburg have been an important source of tourist dollars for many years. Everyone in Austria has probably heard of the play. They know it is popular abroad and they know roughly what it is about. But it has never been staged before, and the film has never been screened in Austrian cinemas. It has been shown once, and once only, in the mid-1990s, on state television.

But this year the new director of Vienna's state-owned Volksoper, Rudolf Berger, has made it the highlight of the present season. ...

If The Sound of Music were merely a Yankee fantasy about Middle Europe, the Austrians might have found it easier to laugh the thing off. But it is substantially based on fact. Maria Kutschera really was a postulant in a convent; Georg von Trapp was a real-life First World War Austrian war hero, whose submarine sank a French warship. Maria came to the family home to nurse his sickly daughter. The von Trapps all took up singing. And Kapitan von Trapp repeatedly and very courageously defied the Nazis after the Anschluss.

"Three times he refused the Nazis," said Renaud Doucet, the director of the show in Vienna. "Twice he refused to become the commander of a U-boat. And then he refused to sing at Hitler's birthday party. With that third refusal, the family realised they had to get out. They took a train and crossed into Italy, and at midnight on the same day, Hitler closed the borders."

The von Trapps first stayed in Trieste then moved to the United States. For the best part of 20 years, they travelled the world, making their living as a choir. It was with the publication of Maria von Trapp's memoirs, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers in 1949, that their dramatic story came to the attention of the world.

Her story was a vision of Austrian history through the prism of her family's unique experience. Heroic in the first war, as she saw it her kapitan was equally heroic in the second. Broadway and Hollywood, of course, were never really bothered about historical facts. As the director of the new production puts it: "For me Austria is merely an anecdote in the story. We're discussing freedom, we're discussing finding yourself, finding other people and dealing with life. That's why it's famous all over the world." Yet for Austrians it is stubbornly an Austrian story, and one that looks substantially different depending on whether you stayed in Austria, like many, or you left, like the von Trapps.

I asked Rudolf Berger, the Volksoper's director, why he thought the play had taken 50 years to reach Austria. "I think it's a kind of feeling, what do they know about us to write a piece like that?" he said. "And in a country like this where tourism plays an important part, many people come here and tell us that that is the image they have of Austria, and there's a resistance to it.

"In the 1960s, when the film came out, it was still not easy to talk about these things: the scars were still very raw. And to make not an Ibsen drama but an entertainment piece about that part of Austrian history hurt some people's feelings. Some people might have said, We stayed here through those hard times and they left and after the war they made a profit out of it and they lived happily ever after'."

Austria did not need The Sound of Music. God knows, we in Britain have enough experience of our history and literature being turned into absurd Hollywood packages to understand the urge to shun; how much better off we would be without Disney's versions of Pooh and Mary Poppins or Mel Gibson's absurd Braveheart.

But there is more to the Austrian rejection of this juggernaut of schmaltz than cultural disdain, or pique at the von Trapps' profitable American reincarnation. The Sound of Music deals with a period of Austrian history which most Austrians, even today, can only deal with by not thinking about.

The union with Germany represented by the Anschluss was not rejected by the mass of Austrians, Rudolf Berger points out, because it was what the nation had wanted since the end of the First World War. "After the first war, Austria was the only country stripped of everything," he said. "All the other powers became nation states, but Austria was not allowed to join the new German state, which was what all the political forces except Communists wanted."

During the 1930s, Austria's totalitarian Christian regime mirrored the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany. And when Hitler proposed the amalgamation that had been denied at the Versailles conference, a popular referendum in Austria overwhelmingly backed the idea. Hitler was welcomed with open arms. Kapitan von Trapp's rejected fiancee Elsa spoke for her nation. Georg was the odd man out.

As the happily Seig-Heil-ing postman in the play makes clear, Austrians fell into line with the Nazis without protest. They were recruited in disproportionate numbers to work in the Nazi concentration camps. Austria also willingly fell in with Hitler's plans for Austria's own Jews, and 65,000 from Vienna alone perished in the camps.

Yet Austria, unlike Germany, has never come to grips with its Nazi past. "The process of de-Nazification in Austria stopped in the early 1950s, because of the Cold War," said Tina Walzer, a historian of the period. The West needed Austria as a bulwark against the Warsaw Pact countries, and the pressure to purge society and politics of former Nazis and to restore the property of expropriated Jews was removed. It was only in the late 1980s, with the revelations of the UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim's past as a Nazi officer, that the degree to which Austria had failed to reform became clear. Even today the task remains undone. Rudolf Berger said: "The Social Democratic Party has just published a book lifting the lid on just how many former Nazis came into the party after the war. That was never talked about and now suddenly it's being talked about. And it's created pain and accusations. So there are a lot of things still to be done."...