Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 20, No.

1, 2000

American Imperialism or Local Protectionism?

The Sound of Music (1965) fails in
Germany and Austria

RUTH A. STARKMAN, University of Utah

FIG. 1. The Sound of Music (1965) publicity still: Jaffa Oranges—Produce of Israel. Author’s collection.

When The Sound of Music crews constructed a Salzburg market scene on location, they
accidentally included a box with the words ‘Jaffa Oranges—Produce of Israel’ in the
scene. Although editors excised the tell-tale prop before the Ž lm’s release, the studio
had already distributed some publicity photos of the still [1]. For many years after-
wards, Twentieth Century Fox received letters from around the world inquiring about
the box of Jaffa oranges in a Ž lm set in 1938—10 years before the founding of Israel.
That viewers would take such an interest in the Ž lm’s memorabilia and marginal details
signiŽ es its enduring popularity. Indeed, this box ofŽ ce hit, nicknamed ‘The Sound of
0143-9685 print/1465-3451 online/00/010063-16 Ó 2000 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis Ltd
64 R. A. Starkman

Money’, rescued Twentieth Century Fox from near bankruptcy in the early 1960s and
reigned as Hollywood’s all-time grossing Ž lm until 1972 when it was surpassed by The
Godfather [2]. The viewers’ response also suggests a public interest in Hollywood’s
portrayal of history. However, where The Sound of Music buffs intervened to show a
Hollywood studio their grasp of historic events, German-speaking audiences displayed
a similar attentiveness to the Ž lm’s construction of history and yet rejected Hollywood’s
rendering of the Trapp family story. Despite its popularity in the USA and elsewhere,
The Sound of Music, dubbed and retitled Meine Lieder, Meine Träume, ran for only 3–4
weeks in West Germany and a few days in Austria before it was discontinued in the
theaters.
Some clues to the Ž lm’s failure can be found in the box of Jaffa oranges, as this image
represents the Ž lm’s repressed historical context. The box bore the name of a country
founded and legitimized by the Western Allied governments in response to Nazi
Germany’s annihilation of European Jewry. It also symbolized a post-war condition in
which nations were more or less reconciled by the dictum of a global economy. In such
a world, Austria purchased oranges from the newly established country of its former
victims, whose economy was in turn sustained by the USA. The Sound of Music arrived
in West Germany and Austria during the summer of 1966 representing the perspective
of the Second World War’s ‘victor’, who now ruled the global economy. But was it
simply this global perspective that produced such a negative response? The American
trade press presumed as much and even suggested the ingratitude of the locals, whom
it described as basking ‘in the bonanza of tourist booty’ despite having rejected The
Sound of Music at the box ofŽ ce [3]. Yet, if this was indeed the case, what motivated
this act of protectionism against American cultural intervention? Were German viewers
expressing a certain loyalty to their domestic cinema? And, Ž nally, what are the political
ramiŽ cations of such a response?
From the outset, it appears Hollywoods’s assumptions of local resistance to Ameri-
can cultural intervention were correct. Austrians interviewed by Hollywood trade
journals reportedly objected to the lack of authenticity in everything, from the clothing,
to the music score by Rogers and Hammerstein, to the split-location shots of Salzburg
and the Trapp family villa [4]. However, if Hollywood’s image of Austria seemed
reinvented from the American perspective, neither Hollywood’s globalizing approach
nor its efforts at market domination were by any means new to German and Austrian
audiences. The American quest for domination of the world Ž lm market began in the
interwar era. Keen to adopt German cinema’s technological advances and formal
innovations, Hollywood also campaigned for the attention of German-speaking audi-
ences. Such an interest generated much debate in German trade journals about
Americanization and the nation-building function of Ž lm. Whether or not Hollywood
actually attained its goal of world market domination, however, remains a matter of
debate. In his recent study, Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany
[5], Thomas Saunders has described the vicissitudes of Hollywood’s success in
inŽ ltrating the Weimar Ž lm establishment. Where he stresses the enormous in uence
and popularity of shorts and slapstick comedy in the Ž lms of Buster Keaton, Charlie
Chaplin and Harold Lloyd from 1924 until 1929, the number of American and
German feature Ž lms shown in German theaters remained equal. Afterwards, the
invention of sound eventually enabled German producers to regain the feature Ž lm
market. Other scholars have maintained that, despite American efforts, German box
ofŽ ce records show that Germans have traditionally remained loyal to their own feature
Ž lms [6].
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 65

Entertaining no different global aspirations than the Americans, both Weimar and
Nazi Ž lm establishments ultimately borrowed many of Hollywood’s styles of dramatiza-
tion, sensationalism and publicity. Under Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany attempted
to emulate and instrumentalize Hollywood’s brand of visually stimulating mass enter-
tainment for the purposes of securing the population’s conformity [7]. These efforts
yielded roughly 1000 Ž lms, some of which rivaled Hollywood in their persuasive
nonchalance [8]. After the war, Hollywood saw the Allied programs of ‘denaziŽ cation’
as an ideal moment to attempt once again to secure the German market for its products
[9]. Although many scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have emphasized the
hegemonic role of the USA in exporting its Ž lm products to Germany, this cultural
domination was also contested by local loyalty to German feature Ž lms [10].
Given the long-standing competition for the German market, it would be wrong to
assume that viewers in 1966 rejected The Sound of Music because they had suddenly
grown hostile to American cultural imperialism. Even under a post-war situation of
massive American intervention, where the German Ž lm establishment expressed its
anxieties about the fate of its domestic product, German-speaking audiences them-
selves were not always perturbed by Hollywood representations of culture, either
American or German. Older audiences remained well accustomed to the Hollywood
style of appropriation through consumption of American Ž lms and through German
emulation, whereas younger viewers found a source of a new post-war identity in
American cinema. Star personalities in particular could retain their hold on younger
audiences, even in a Ž lm shot on location, which thematized the past. In his study on
German youth culture during the 1950s, Kaspar Maase argues for the special attraction
of rebellious male Hollywood stars, who represented an anti-authoritarian civilian life
style. Referring to the cover of Bravo, the popular German fan magazine of that era,
Maase describes the appeal of Marlon Brando even though the Hollywood star had
been on location in Germany in 1957 for the Ž lming of Young Lions, a Ž lm in which he
appears in Nazi uniform. Maase makes much of the fact that Bravo chose to emphasize
the free-wheeling, masculine Brando in civilian attire while attenuating the pictures of
Brando in Nazi uniform to the margins [11].
Heide Fehrenbach and Gerhard Bliersbach also elborate on the younger generation’s
response to Hollywood [12]. Fehrenbach comments on Germany’s response to the
gender politics of American cinema and refers to Bliersbach, who presents himself as a
typical (enthusiastic, by his account) German viewer whose masculine sense of self and
post-war German identity were shaped by Hollywood [13]. Bliersbach nevertheless
describes The Sound of Music as the exception to the rule of American popularity. Was
the Ž lm not masculine enough to attract young German males who used their spending
money to see such stars as Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, James Dean and Marlon
Brando? Having re ected on his childhood dislike of the unmasculine gender politics of
the HeimatŽ lm, Bliersbach refers to The Sound of Music as a HeimatŽ lm and suggests it
missed its moment: ‘The Sound of Music, one of the biggest box-ofŽ ces successes of Ž lm
history, failed in West German theaterhouses—its time had already past’ [14]. The
HeimatŽ lm, a cinematic form that  ourished during West Germany’s Adenauer and
Erhard eras, depicted ‘a dream world fulŽ lling the desires for a healthy Germany, for
beautiful German landscapes and naive, but noble German people’ [15]. If indeed The
Sound of Music can be seen as an American interpretation of a HeimatŽ lm, it can also
be seen as lacking the same kind of daring, sexually charged stars of its contemporary
Hollywood Ž lms. However, if younger, often male viewers were a less likely potential
audience, the Ž lm might still have appealed to older people, women and children, the
66 R. A. Starkman

FIG. 2. Die Trapp Familie (1956). Ruth Leuwerik as Maria in Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s highly-successful
German version of the Trapp family’s story. Publicity photo. Kranich Photo Berlin.

largest 1950s HeimatŽ lm audience, even as the genre began to falter amid the German
Ž lm establishment upheavals of the early and mid-1960s [16]. These audiences,
however, already had two beloved HeimatŽ lme on the same topic.
A decade before the Hollywood musical arrived in West Germany and Austria,
Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s versions of the Trapp family story, Die Trapp Familie (1956)
and its sequel Die Trapp Familie in Amerika (1958), had been two of the most popular
German Ž lms of the 1950s [17]. Die Trapp Familie was no less vague about historical
places and situations than The Sound of Music, nor was it exactly authentic in its
style—the children wear playclothes that look like 1950s Hawaiian resort wear. In fact,
it grandly displayed a 1950s local landscape in uenced by American consumerism.
Yet, Die Trapp Familie also balanced its American elements with the ethos of Ruth
Leuwerik, a popular post-war German actress who had remained in Germany [18] and,
most importantly, a historical narrative with national appeal. Watching these Ž lms
alleviated Germans and Austrian from the need to repress the national socialist past.
Instead, they could relive it in a revised, sanitized fashion, identifying with the Ž lm’s
plucky Leuwerik, who had resisted the call of Hollywood and with the Trapp family,
who had opposed the Nazis. Because of the kind of conciliatory memory they pro-
moted, Liebeneiner’s Ž lms succeeded in binding the public’s emotions on a large scale.
To be sure, German and Austrian attachment to these Trapp family Ž lms remained so
intense that it would endure well beyond the 1960s—long enough to afford Die Trapp
Familie a fair revival in 1985.
Thus, The Sound of Music’s failure to compete with Liebeneiner’s Ž lms suggests
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 67

divergent attitudes toward Americanization, on the one hand and Hollywood treat-
ments of Germany’s past, on the other. Depending on the age and gender of the
audience as well as the nationality of the Ž lmmaker, Americanization offered both a
chance at rebellion from Germany’s older generation and a vision of resplendent,
homey material abundance of the sort depicted in Die Trapp Familie. However, The
Sound of Music proved one particular American vision which evoked a response of
cultural protectionism because it competed both with a local product and with local
understandings of history. Whatever complaints about the musical comedy’s inauthen-
ticity or its culturally imperial Hollywood vision, these arose under the circumstance of
the Ž lm’s intervention in processes of public memory [19].
As a Hollywood Ž lm with the historical backdrop of the Second World War, The
Sound of Music raised issues which continue to vex Germans and Austrians today. Who
and what should be the purveyors of German historical consciousness? How should
German-speaking audiences respond to American depictions of the Nazi past? To what
extent do Germans and Austrians have a right to shape their own national self-under-
standing? Amid the struggle of German–American cultural relations, Ž lm has increas-
ingly become the vehicle of public memory [20]. Remarkably, the situation remains as
confusing in the 1990s as it was 30 years ago, particularly in situations where Holly-
wood ends up reinforcing revisionist views of German history. The overwhelmingly
popular reception of Schindler’s List is one such recent example. Although Schindler’s
List was an unapologetic product of the Hollywood Ž lm industry and, thus, an obvious
target for criticism of American imperialism, the audience most upset about the
blockbuster’s cultural appropriation consisted of European Ž lmmakers like Claude
Lanzmann [21]. Meanwhile, the German public, by and large, saw in the Ž lm a chance
to identify with ‘one good German’ who had acted virtuously during the war [22]. On
the one hand, the popular reception of Spielberg’s Ž lm demonstrates the younger
generation’s greater willingness to debate its Nazi past; on the other, it also reveals the
extent to which memory and public efforts to construct memory remain opportunistic
and interested in securing a positive national self-image. Where enormous ticket sales
and public discussions characterized the arrival of Schindler’s List in Germany, The
Sound of Music met the exact opposite response, despite the fact that it presented no less
of an opportunity for Germans to identify with the ‘good’ Trapp family over and against
the Nazis. Not until the NBC television series Holocaust arrived in 1979 would there be
another Hollywood media event that could provoke debates about German history and
its cinematic representation [23].
In 1966, on the eve of the Munich premiere of The Sound of Music, German theater
ofŽ cials seemed to have anticipated the reaction of the local audiences. Wolfgang Wolf,
the German manager of Twentieth Century Fox theaters cut the Ž lm after the wedding
sequence and removed the last third which depicted the family’s escape from the Nazis.
Hollywood staggered in surprise. Rumors circulated in the American trade press that
the German theater managers had made the cuts because they were under pressure
from neo-Nazi groups [24]. Director Robert Wise insisted the ending be restored
and that the German head of theater sales be punished [25] In an article entitled,
‘Cutting of 20th Sound of Music to appease neo-Nazis costs Wolf his job’, Variety
reported that

Wolfgang Wolf is out as German sales director for [Twentieth Century] Fox.
It was via his okay that the anti-Nazi segment had been spliced off of The
Sound of Music. The repercussions from this knuckling under to lingering
68 R. A. Starkman

local. Hitlerian tendencies cause 20th [Twentieth Century Fox] technicians to

work through the night to get the expurgated footage back into the Ž ve local
cinemas in its original unabridged version [26].
Hollywood seems only to have been able to imagine the Ž lm’s supposed political force
as a source of its failure. A year later, an article entitled ‘Anti-Nazi ‘Sound hit all over
but not in Germany’, attempts to account for this lack of popularity and propose a new
marketing strategy.
Although the principal reason for apathy toward the Ž lm has not been
pinpointed, it is widely felt that the anti-Nazi aspects of the Ž lm have militated
against its German acceptance … The Ž lm in some countries is into its second
year in which it opened, but in such German cities as Berlin and Munich, it
was pulled after four weeks, three in other cities … Whether the Ž lm will be
given another chance in Germany later has not been determined but 20th
[Twentieth Century Fox] evidently is hoping that the news of its success in
other countries will eventually work back into Germany, creating a ‘want-to-
see’ feeling [27].
Articulating its understanding of Germany’s post-war audience in the same breath at its
concern about generating markets, Hollywood imagines a sort of international con-
sumer peer pressure exerted by other audiences it reached with greater success.
International enthusiasm never moved the German-speaking audience. In the end,
Hollywood settled for implanting Sound of Music attractions for tourists in Salzburg.
But even as it was snubbed by locals, The Sound of Music became one of the West’s cold
war endiŽ ces in remembering Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria to the Third
Reich. In fact, the Hollywood musical offered a chance to remember that differed little
from that of its German precursors, the two Liebeneiner Ž lms.
It is not that The Sound of Music was such a ‘war Ž lm’. There is no war to be seen,
no gunŽ re, no archival footage, no Kristallnacht, no cheering crowds in Salzburg’s
public spaces. Nor is it that Austrians just wanted ‘to forget’. Indeed, the reception of
The Sound of Music had more to do with the way in which German-speaking audiences
wanted to remember and the fact that they already had their own versions of the Trapp
family story which would help them do so.
Remarkably enough, however, The Sound of Music offered a chance to remember
which differed little from that of its German precursors. Both the American and
German versions of the Trapp family story mobilized one of the most tenacious myths
of the Cold War era—the myth that Austria was Hitler’s Ž rst foreign conquest on the
eve of the Second World War. Popularly remembered as ‘the rape of Austria’, this
image of Austria as the supine female to Nazi aggression was no simple local lore.
Rather, it was considered a historical truth ofŽ cially endorsed by the four Allied
governments in the Moscow Declaration [28]. Signed in early November 1943 by
France, the UK, the USA and the USSR, the Moscow Declaration named Austria as ‘the
Ž rst free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression’ [29] Substantiating the myth of
Austria’s victimization, this decree enabled the West to excise the memory of the
cheering crowds of 1938 and helped lay the foundations for post-war attitudes towards
Austria which remained largely unchallenged until the Waldheim Affair in 1986.
Employing the myth of Austria’s victimization, Die Trapp Familie rendered Austria a
symbolic Germanic Heimat where the inhabitants rejected Nazism. This fantasmatic
‘Großdeutschland’ image enabled Germans as well as Austrians to identify with the
Trapp family, as ‘resistors’ of national socialism and to view themselves as ‘victims’ of
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 69

a regime which ‘invaded’ their private lives. Meanwhile, The Sound of Music projected
onto Austria an American Cold War longing for a wholesome nation steeped in
authentic traditions and endowed with special powers of resistance against invaders.
Imagining Austria as a safe, uncorrupted tourist playland for American post-war
culture, the Hollywood musical displaced both Jews and Austrians (the would-be
victims) from its own fantasmatic image of a national ‘home’.
While these two nationally self-interested narratives about the Anschluß appealed to
their respective local audiences, both the German and American Ž lm versions occlude
the Transatlantic element of Maria von Trapp’s original memoirs. Entitled The Story of
the Trapp Family Singers (1949) in English [30] and Die Trapp Familie. Vom Kloster zum
Welterfolg (Frick 1952) in German, Maria von Trapp’s autobiography is Ž rst and
foremost an emigrant’s tale that views the events of 1938–1945 from the lens of the
American culture of the immediate post-war period. Most signiŽ cantly, the story, in
contrast to the German and American Ž lms it spawned, focuses less on the Anschluß
than on the question of assimilation to a new culture and new times. Indeed, its greatest
energy lies in retracing the steps from refugee life to the American dream. When Maria
von Trapp wrote her memoirs the Trapp family was still ascending to the height of its
popularity as an American institution that included a roadshow, radio music concerts,
books of recorder music, Christmas carols and family recipes and a summer camp and
ski lodge.
Maria von Trapp describes her family’s early struggle for success in the USA as a
con ict between their native and adoptive cultural aesthetics. As she sought perform-
ance outlets for her musical troupe, an American producer conŽ ded that American
companies were reluctant to sign such a dowdy, foreign-looking group singing long and
heavy religious pieces. Apparently, the Baroness lacked ‘sex appeal’ (p. 180). Writing
in 1949, from the perspective of an already seasoned and ofŽ cially naturalized Ameri-
can citizen, Maria attempts to reconstruct her initial Austrian naiveté: ‘So back I walked
to Steinway Hall. On the way I mused to myself whether “sex appeal” was something
you put on your head, whether it is part of your appearance, whether you buy it by the
ounce or the inch (p. 181).Once in the music producer’s ofŽ ce at Columbia Concerts,
she is told
It has nothing to do with your musicianship, I want you to understand … Still
it’s the worst program I’ve ever heard … That piece by Bach is forty-Ž ve
minutes! That’s for music enthusiasts, but do you think people across the
country want to listen by the hour to quaint ancient tunes? … But by far the
worst thing is your appearance … No charming smile, and no good looks
either … those long skirts, high necks, hair parted in the middle, braids in the
back, shoes like boys, cotton stockings! Can’t you get decent store clothes so
one can see your legs in nylon stockings, get pretty high-heeled shoes and put
a little red on your face and lips? (p. 181).
So much for the Austrian look and sound. But the industry’s vision of totally American
homogeneous looks also proved naive. For Maria’s efforts to reinvent and preserve the
general Austrian aura of the group—with a few concessions about rouge and smiles for
the children, extra yodeling and little down-home humor—sold better than their
contractors ever imagined. This hybrid image lent a little showbiz magic to their
Austrian fairy tale and launched the Trapp Family Singers on stage. In 1949, Maria had
no idea what further transformations were to come with the Ž lm versions. But she
would later regret having sold the rights to her story to another emigrant, Wolfgang
70 R. A. Starkman

Reinhardt, the son of Weimar and Salzburg impressario, Max Reinhardt, for a mere
$6000 without the possibility of royalties [31].
In contrast to Maria von Trapp’s text, Die Trapp Familie’s central narrative interest
remains the Anschluß itself. Likewise, Die Trapp Familie in Amerika, although it
continues the family’s life story in the USA, is more of an epilogue to the events of the
Anschluß that depicts a happy end for a family who rejected Nazism. Such thematics
must be considered in the context of the Ž lm’s director and his connection to the
former Nazi establishment. Wolfgang Liebeneiner was an actor/director, who beneŽ ted
from the exodus of Germany’s entertainment personalities in the 1930s and continued
to work in Ž lm and theater after the war into the 1980s. In 1938, Joseph Goebbels
described Liebeneiner in his dairies: ‘he is young, modern, eager and fanatical. I am
looking for such people’ [32]. Goebbels later named Liebeneiner an honorary doctor in
1942 and made him UFA production chief in 1943. Post-war critics have called
Liebeneiner ‘a symbol of the continuity in German Ž lm’, a master of ‘the cult of the
unpolitical [33] and a ‘technician of perfect mediocrity, who made neither especially
bad nor especially good Ž lms’ [34]. These descriptions also correspond well with his
biggest post-war commercial successes, the Trapp family Ž lms. Filled with sentiment,
heroism and nostalgia for a functioning private sphere, Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp
Familie in Amerika are by no means ‘fanatical’ in the values they attempt to reinforce.
Nor are they overt apologies for the erstwhile Nazi director and his audience.
Rather, the Ž lms display a strange combination of Nazi and post-war aesthetics. Like
many Nazi Ž lms of the 1930s and 1940s, the post-war Trapp family Ž lms remain
tenaciously, almost pedantically faithful to the original literary text, but articulate their
politics with visual prologues and formal techniques that comment on the action [35].
For example, Liebeneiner places two socially critical scenes, one of female competition
for the Baron’s heart and another, a discussion of the Austrian bank failure of 1931, in
a claustrophobic study Ž lled with bored, frivolous-looking wealthy people. These
people both look and act impotent in such a manner that it implicates them in the
failure of interwar society. Here, the Ž lm’s critique recalls the romantic anti-capitalism
and social reaction of Veit Harlan’s scenes of the French-in uenced court in Der grosse
König (1942). However, these aesthetics, which are reminiscent of Nazi Ž lm, contradict
Die Trapp Familie’s post-war quality, its otherwise indulgently voyeuristic fantasy of
material plenitude. Consisting of long takes of the villa’s historic architecture, baroque
furniture and resplendent Christmas festivities Die Trapp Familie appears for the most
part an opportunity for post-war consumers to identify with the wealthy. Seemingly
even more contradictory given the Ž lm’s conservative critique, the scenes which appear
most covetous of the family’s means are those which purvey the Ž lm’s revisionist
message. During the children’s production of a Christmas shadow play of Sleeping
Beauty, the action comes to a halt for nearly 10 minutes. This lavish sequence, which
shows how these happy, tuneful nobles possess enough resources to organize an
elaborate dramatic production, tells the story of a fairy tale heroine who provides an
allegory for Austria. Sleeping Beauty recalls the Baron’s response to the Anschluß,
‘Austria … you are not dead. You will live in our hearts. This is only sleep. We promise
we will do all we can to help you wake up again’ [36].
In addition to this image of Austria as Sleeping Beauty, the Ž lm offers a second
allegory for the Anschluß. Die Trapp Familie opens with a perspective from Nonnenberg
Abbey. A group of nuns walk past on the way from morning vespers and then the star
Ruth Leuwerik appears. When the abbess tells her she must leave to become a
governess to the Trapp family children, the camera provides a long shot of the chapel
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 71

and altar where Maria goes for one last prayer, then she leaves through the gate and
looks over the city of Salzburg. This is the Ž rst and one of the few outdoor shots. The
camera pans right over the skyline and holds for a moment with a shot of the actress
from the back looking contemplatively at the city. Reminiscent of Nazi Ž lm’s romantic
images of heroes depicted from the back, this shot both establishes the uniqueness of
its historic setting and also universalizes the situation of the young novice. The Ž lm’s
1950s public is encouraged to forget its particular post-war situation and identify with
an innocent pausing to look at a city where a new life adventure awaits. A vision of
indisputable chastity, Leuwerik presents a second, alternative allegorical embodiment
of Austria. In this case, her role is not the passive slumbering one of Sleeping Beauty, but
rather an active, afŽ rmative one. She both recalls the image of Austria as the woman
violated by ‘Hitlerite aggression’ and reinvents Austria as the plucky heroine who resists
a brutish force: Austria as virgin.
When the Anschluß comes, it literally arrives knocking on the door. Here, Die Trapp
Familie duplicates the setting of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, when the family
is sitting in the living room listening to the radio when it hears the announcement of the
Anschluß. The butler, Franz, who is depicted in the Ž lm as a kindly old man, steps
forward and makes what seems to be an unlikely pronouncement that he has been a
member of the Nazi Party for 3 years. Franz says to the Captain ‘You mustn’t forget
to hang the  ag’, while the Captain, still stunned from the news, responds ‘What  ag?’.
Franz then gently and conŽ dently says ‘the Nazi  ag’. Although he is a party member
his presence in the house is depicted as a lesser intrusion than the rude knock at the
door from the local Nazi leader, Vogler, who demands to know why the family is not
 ying a Nazi  ag. This crude individual stands in the doorway and looks sinister with
the evil gap-toothed smile of a cartoon villain. His presence leaves no question as to
what the Nazi movement is about: these are brutish authoritarian individuals who
threaten the peace of the private sphere. The exchange between the Captain and Vogler
presents the positions for and against Nazism as a battle of propriety: Vogler salutes and
shouts ‘Heil Hitler! Well … you are in charge here? Why didn’t you put a  ag up
outside?’. Von Trapp responds, ‘I want you out of my house!’. Vogler, momentarily
frustrated in his attempt at accessing the Trapp family home, resorts to more crudity:
‘We’re aware of all’, he says and suggests that the Baroness has been known to pay a
little too much attention to ‘a certain clergy man’. Insinuating an implausible inŽ delity
in the family’s home, this cartoon Ž gure at once demonizes and ridicules Nazism for the
audience.
In addition to creating an image of national socialism as completely alien to the
happy lives of these Austrians, Die Trapp Familie also endeavors to palliate the image of
former Nazi Party members. Where Vogler embodies an invasive, authoritarian Third
Reich, Franz conjures a different set of associations. Although Franz is a party member,
he helps the family escape and lies to Vogler when the latter returns to recruit the
Captain. Representing the kind of individual whose heart was never really in his
political activities during the war and who, in moments of crisis, chose the family over
and against the regime, Franz allows a 1950s audience to account for the seeming
contradictions of their memories of themselves.
IdentiŽ cation with the Trapp family and its household not only extends imaginary
absolution to an audience of Germans and Austrians alike, it transforms them into
exiles and transports them to a fantasmatic place—New York City. In the sequel, Die
Trapp Familie in Amerika, Liebeneiner makes a few subtle changes in Maria von
Trapp’s story for the sake of this audience. In the sequence where the Baroness hears
72 R. A. Starkman

from the American music industry executive that she lacks ‘sex appeal’, Ruth Leuw-
erik’s character, in contrast to the real Maria von Trapp, who eventually accommodates
some of the demands of the industry, indignantly tells the executive he is idle compared
to her who ‘has to face all of America’. He responds by saying, ‘darn it, I’ve never seen
such a woman! I’ll manage you.’ This small refusal and subsequent triumph provides
a German-speaking audience with a little tale of resistance against the American culture
industry. It shows how a European heroine can win over an American businessman
even in an era of the USA’s massive cultural intervention in Germany and Austria. Yet,
this culture industry tale proved less compelling than the Anschluß drama of the
previous Die Trapp Familie. Despite its bigger budget and ample footage of New York
City and Vermont, Die Trapp Familie in Amerika did not fair as well at the German box
ofŽ ces [37].
In 1960, Twentieth Century-Fox was planning to make a Ž lm version of the Rogers
and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, which starred Mary Martin and had
been running on Broadway since 1959. After purchasing the rights to the show, the
studio also bought up the rights to Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika
in order to protect its investment. The two German Ž lms were combined, dubbed into
English, retitled The Trapp Family and then released in the USA in March 1961.
Americans who had seen the Rogers and Hammerstein musical and expected show
tunes were a bit put off by the sacred music and Volkslieder. Hollywood expressed little
enthusiasm as well.
Robert Wise, the director Twentieth Century-Fox ultimately hired, devoted his chief
efforts to making a visually exciting, escapist narrative about a picturesque country.
Where Die Trapp Familie studiously describes the Austrian bank failure of 1928 and
suggests some of the turmoil of the interwar period, The Sound of Music reconstitutes
interwar Austria as a historic and tourist-attracting place. This shift in cultural atmos-
phere is best characterized by the substitution of the puppet play The Lonely Goatherd
for Sleeping Beauty. Instead of staging an allegory of a slumbering Austrian people, the
musical invokes and reinvents Austria’s folk culture in the form of a kitschy puppet play
with wooden marionettes dressed up in traditional clothing. This commodiŽ cation of
Austria’s local culture also extends to the landscape, which, like the puppet play, seems
to have appealed to a public longing for authentic landscapes and traditional ways of life
(at least outside of the actual place the Ž lm represents). A critic who remarked on the
artiŽ ciality of the Broadway musical’s setting, extolled the enormous impact of the
establishing landscape shot in the Hollywood Ž lm:
… the stage show, for all its Franz and Brigitta, could have taken place in the
West Bronx … [in the Ž lm] … one shot of Andrews whirling alone in the
green hills as the camera swoops down and the title song whips in having
passed into the nation’s memory [38].
Conveying Austria’s authenticity, the Ž lm’s landscape serves a nation-building function
for American viewers whose collective memory beholds a vision of a mythically
wholesome land. If Americans lack the HeimatŽ lm genre, then this musical, as viewed
by Americans, Ž ts the fairy tale genre [39]. Like all fairy tales, which express a kind of
Utopian longing, The Sound of Music invents Salzburg’s landscape as a place of mythic,
serene beauty uncomplicated by social questions. In screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s Ž rst
full version of the opening sequence, he describes his vision of Salzburg as seen from
the air—mountains, lakes and castles are enveloped in ‘utter’ reverent silence and the
absence of human life and commerce is conspicuous. Lehman commented: ‘no people,
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 73

they would be foreign to this  oating shot’ [40]. Beginning high in the snowy Bavarian
Alps ‘alive with music for a thousand years’, this establishing shot recalls the German
BergŽ lm, mountain Ž lms of the 1920s, which also marveled at the monumental eternity
of nature. The helicopter swoops down on an inŽ nitesimally small Ž gure on the ground
and Julie Andrews’ introductory number begins.
Once this sequence is over, the credits follow in a sequence of stills showing various
historic vistas in Salzburg. The last of these is a shot of Salzburg with the Mönchsburg
in the background, with golden script that announces the setting: ‘Salzburg in the last
golden days of the nineteen thirties’. Just as in Die Trapp Familie, Nazism is presented
as an external invading force, which, also in keeping with American Cold War
paranoiac fantasies, has inŽ ltrated the household. In The Sound of Music the butler
Franz appears as a sinister, stony-faced character from the moment he opens the door
to Julie Andrews. Sure enough, he turns out to be an un inching collaborator [41].
Likewise, Rolf is such an ardent Nazi that he even rejects his sweetheart Liesl in public
and tells her he has more important things to do now that the Anschluß has come. In
the Broadway musical, Rolf takes one last look at Liesl and does not betray the family
as they try to escape. The Hollywood Ž lm, in contrast, makes a gesture more similar to
that of Die Trapp Familie, which demonizes Nazism as thoroughly other—only here
Nazism appears not as a gap-toothed villain, but rather a disease that singing telegram
boys can also catch.
Hiding in the graveyard at the abbey, the family escapes the searching rays of the
Nazi  ashlights, but when Liesl sees Rolf among them she gasps, he stops, turns, takes
another look and the family comes out of hiding. In a tense stand-off moment, the
Captain motions his family out of the graveyard and takes Rolf on himself.

Captain: Wait a minute … Maria … children … run.

Captain: Put that down.
Rolf (frightened): It’s you we want, not them. Don’t make another move or I’ll
I’ll shoot.
Captain: You’re only a boy. You’re not one of them (he moves forward
slowly).
Rolf (desperately): Stay where you are!
Captain: There’s still time for you to be saved. Come away with us before it’s
too late …
Rolf (panicking): Not another step I’ll kill you!
Captain (reaching for the pistol): Give it to me, Rolf …
Rolf (sobbing): Didn’t you hear me? I’ll kill you!
Captain (gently taking the gun away): You’ll never be one of them …
Rolf (cries out): Lieutenant! (he dashes inside the Abbey crying)* They’re
here Lieutenant. They’re here!!
*An earlier version adds ‘desperate to disprove what he’s afraid is true’ but
this is dropped to make his commitment to Nazism appear less ambiguous.

Although the screenplay describes the Captain as ‘gently taking the gun away’, in the
Ž lm sequence, the Captain steps close to Rolf and abruptly grabs the gun from him.
This display of masculinity suggests the Captain retains his power and potency despite
the fact that he has lost his country to the likes of Rolf. Austrian collaboration,
meanwhile, is represented as unmasculine; Rolf is ‘only a boy’. Surrounded by doubt
and cowardice, Rolf appears incapable of responsibility for his political afŽ liation.
74 R. A. Starkman

FIG. 3. Confronting Nazism. The Austrian Nazi Captain Confronts Rolf von Trapp in the graveyard.
The Sound of Music. Publicity photo, 20th Century-Fox.

The Captain, meanwhile, transforms his identity from an authoritarian military man
into an emotional patriot and this transformation ultimately enables him to bond him
with his fellow Austrians. Lit up by a spotlight during a nighttime Ž lming shot, Captain
von Trapp tells the audience he will sing ‘a love song’ and begins a refrain of ‘Edelweiss’
which he had Ž rst sung at home with his family. This is the same song that wins Julie
Andrews’ heart when she watches him singing to his children [43]. Here, ‘Edelweiss’
goads the Nazi villains as they sit disgruntled looking in the foreground while faceless
extras in traditional Austrian attire begin to join in and sing ‘Edelweiss’ with the
Captain. The Captain’s audience forms an until-now unseen and unheard ‘silent
majority’ who, led by this one man, stand up for their country. This is the last image
of Austrians seen as a collective in the Ž lm. They, along with the nuns who strip the
Nazi cars of their spark plugs, are the resistors of the Anschluß.
Captain von Trapp then leads his family over the Alps to a refrain of ‘Climb Ev’ry
Mountain’—the very same song which inspires Maria to pursue her ambivalent noble
suitor. With this doubled image of exodus and gold-digging marital ambition suggested
by the refrain of ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain,’ the camera zooms out and leaves the audience
with an image of individuals who left home and country in order to climb the mountain
of prosperity. However, the shot makes little sense regarding the geography of the
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 75

FIG. 4. Climb every Mountain. The doubled image of exodus and Maria’s gold-digging marital
ambition. The Sound of Music. Publicity Photo, 20th Century-Fox.

region. The mountains above Salzburg border on Germany, not Switzerland and, thus,
the family climbs toward ‘freedom’ in the direction of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s eagle’s
nest. Such a blatant disregard for the landscape suggests that the Hollywood studio
imagined an audience who would either not know its geography or would be so
transported by the narrative that it would not register the fact that the Trapp family was
marching off to Nazi Germany. Perhaps The Sound of Music fans were indeed trans-
ported enough not to worry about the direction in which the Trapp family marched to
freedom.
German audiences, meanwhile, ignored and rejected Hollywood’s musical comedy
out of loyalty to their own cinematic versions of the Trapp family story, Die Trapp
Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika. Yet, these home-grown ‘German’ products
also bespoke the style of the most Hollywood identiŽ ed of all former Nazi directors.
Liebeneiner’s Ž lms, which differed little formally from the Ž lms of the 1930s and
1940s, enabled German-speaking audiences to see themselves both as prosperous
post-war citizens and as heroic actors who resisted the evil forces of their nation’s
history. Although The Sound of Music conveyed similar thematics, it remained a story
told by the conquering power. Audience attachment to the two Liebeneiner Ž lms thus
demonstrated the importance of a domestic population’s sense of ownership over its
own history; anything else became an outside appropriation that offended the local
sense of proprietary and autonomy. American trade journals were correct then in their
76 R. A. Starkman

assumption that German-speaking audiences were hostile to American cultural imperi-

alism. But this animosity arose not because American cinema had proven so completely
triumphant over the German product and certainly not because The Sound of Music
imparted any politically critical message. But, rather, because the musical comedy
threatened local historical self-understanding. In the end, The Sound of Music’s fate in
Germany and Austria becomes a strange tale of a local effort to preserve its sense of
cultural sovereignty against Hollywood, the unlikely, unintended and unsuccessful
cosmopolitan bearer of enlightenment, whose equally specious historical vision failed to
compete with a domestic product.

Correspondence: Ruth A. Starkman, San Francisco, CA, USA. E-mail:

rstark@cinemaspace.berkeley.edu

NOTES

[1] For a discussion of this publicity photo and other memorabilia see Julia Antopol Hirsch,
‘The Sound of Music’: the making of America’s favorite movie (foreword by Robert Wise) (Chicago,
1993).
[2] Robert Sklar, Movie-made America: a cultural history of American movies, revised edn (New York,
1994), p. 327. Grease surpassed its earnings as a musical in 1978.
[3] Whitney Williams, ‘Salzburg snubs The Sound of Music but basks in the bonanza of tourist booty
leasing of 20th-Fox brought to the town,’ Variety; 20 June (1969).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1994.)
[6] Joseph Garncarz, ‘Hollywood in Germany: the role of American Ž lms in Germany,’ in David W.
Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds, Hollywood in Europe: experiences of a cultural hegemony (Amsterdam,
1994), pp. 94–138.
[7] On Nazi attitudes, see Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi feature Ž lms and their afterlife
(Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 103–112.
[8] Ibid; Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German cinema 1933–1945 (London, 1979); Peter Reichel,
Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich, 1991),
pp. 180–207; Karsten Witte, ‘Nationalsozialismus,’ Geschichte des deutschen Films, pp. 119–170.
[9] Hans-Peter Kochenrath, ‘Kontinuität im deutschen Film,’ Film und Gesellschaft in Deutschland.
Dokumente und Materialien, Wilfred von Bredow and Rolf Zurek, eds (Hamburg 1975),
pp. 286–292. For a polemic about US imperialist interests in maintaining status quo in Germany’s
Ž lm industry after the war see Klaus Kreimeier, Kino und Filmindustrie in der BRD: Ideologieproduk-
tion und Klassenwirklichkeit nach 1945 (Krönberg, 1973). For a discussion of the situation in
Austria, where US cultural intervention dealt local entertainment industries, particularly Ž lm, a
lethal blow, see Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: the cultural mission of
the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans., Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill, 1994).
[10] Heide Fehrenbach shows Hollywood’s role in American occupying efforts to have been highly
contested especially where the Heimat Ž lm was concerned. See her Cinema in Democratizing
Germany: reconstructing national identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1995), p. 164.
[11] Kaspar Masse, Erkundungen zur Jugendkultu r der Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren (Hamburg
1992), pp. 113–115.
[12] Ibid., pp. 166–168.
[13] Gerhard Bliersbach, So grün war die Heide … Der deutsche NachkriegsŽ lm in neuer Sicht (Weinheim,
1985), p. 19. Bliersbach suggests that American cinema was a kind of liberation from the parental
ethos, see pp. 38–40. Fehrenbach, ibid., pp. 166–168. See also Kaspar Maase, Bravo Amerika,
ibid., pp. 95–103.
[14] Ibid., p. 169.
[15] Bliersbach, ibid.
[16] In 1961 Joe Hembus attacked German cinema for its calculated historical oblivion. Der deutsche
Film kann gar nicht besser sein (Bremen, 1961). On German Ž lm in the 1960s see Norbert Grob,
‘Film der schziger Jahre. Abschied von den Eltern,’ Geschichte des deutschen Films, ibid.,
 American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? 77

pp. 211–248. West German Ž lmmakers on Film: visions and voices, Eric Rentschler, ed. (New York,
1988), p. 2.
[17] Geschichte des deutschen Films, Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds
(Berlin, Stuttgart, 1993), p. 538.
[18] Walter Grieder, Ruth Leuwerik. Grosse Karriere mit kleinen Hindernissen (Liestal, Switzerland,
1962), pp. 109–110.
[19] In his analysis of the famous Historikerstreit, the historians’ con ict of 1986, Charles Maier has
shown the importance of memory and acts of commemoration in Germany’s efforts at national
self-understanding. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: history, Holocaust and German national
identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988). See also James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
memorials and meaning (New Haven, 1993).
[20] Kaes, ibid. See also Robert A. Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Ž lm and the construction of a new
past (Princeton, 1995).
[21] Interview with Claude Lanzmann by Daniel Heiman of Le Monde, published in Hebrew in the
Israeli Weekly Zeman Tel Aviv 3 March (1994), pp. 48–50. Also, Claude Lanzmann, interview on
Moving Pictures, BBC 2 television 4 December 1993. ‘… typical of American Jews, wanting to
appropriate the Holocaust’.
[22] Lilliane Weissberg, ‘The tale of a good German,’ in Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s Holocaust:
critical perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington, 1997), pp. 171–192.
[23] On the reception of the NBC mini-series, see Kaes, ibid., pp. 107–108. Also Thomas Elsaesser,
‘Subject positions, speaking positions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler and Heimat to Shoah and
Schindler’s List,’ The Persistence of History: cinema television, and the modern event Vivian Sobchack,
(New York, 1996), pp. 145–183.
[24] ‘Wise shocked by Munich’s Nazi cuts,’ Variety, 7 June (1966).
[25] Wise hits high-handed 20th staffer who slashed Nazi footage from The Sound of Music,’ Variety,
2 June (1966).
[26] ‘Cutting of 20th Sound of Music to appease Neo-Nazis costs Wolf his job,’ Variety 22 June 1966,
p. 15.
[27] ‘Anti-Nazi ‘Sound’ hit all over but not in Germany’, Variety, 12 April 1967, p. 4.
[28] ‘A design for a charter of the general international organization envisaged in the Moscow
Declaration of October 30, 1943 and in the resolution adopted by the Senate of the United States
on November 5, 1943’ (New York, Reprinted for the Commission to Study the Organization of
Peace, 1944).
[29] For an article on the Moscow Declaration and its recent anniversary see ‘Towards a “General
International organization,” ’ (UN commemorates 50th anniversary of the Declaration of the Four
Nations on General Security, October 30, 1943, Moscow, Soviet Union) UN Chronicle 30 (4)
(1993), p. 71.
[30] Maria Augusta Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (Philadelphia, 1949).
[31] ‘Even before The Sound of Music became a $200 million box ofŽ ce smash, the Baroness von Trapp
regretting having sold the movie rights to her life story for a paltry $6,000,’ Hollywood Reporter 12
June (1987).
[32] Karsten Witte, ‘Nationalsozialismus,’ Geschichte des deutschen Films, ibid., p. 121.
[33] Das UFA-Buch: Kunst und Krisen, Stars und Regisseure, Wirtschaft und Politik: die internationale
Geschichte von Deutschlands gröb ten Film-Konzern, Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg, eds
(Frankfurt am Maint 1992), p. 446.
[34] Karsten Witte, ‘Die Wirkgewalt der Bilder,’ ibid., p. 24.
[35] See, for example, Marc Silberman, ‘The ideology of representing the classics: Ž lming Der
zerbrochene Krug in the Third Reich, German Quarterly 57 (4) (1984), pp. 590–602.
[36] Maria August Trapp, ibid., p. 113.
[37] Variety reports ‘This is the sequel to “Trapp Family’, one of the biggest German postwar grossers.
It falls considerably short of the original’ in Die Trapp Familie in Amerika, Variety 8 April (1959).
[38] Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Musical, ibid., p. 203.
[39] Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, 1987), 371ff.
[40] First full draft which was ultimately discarded on 19 June 1963. The Ernest Lehman Papers,
University of Southern California Film Archive; ‘I will not describe speciŽ c locations. I will tell
you the mood, the feeling, the effect I would like to see. We are  oating in utter silence over a
scene of unearthly beauty. Majestic mountain peaks, lush green meadows, deep blue lakes, the
silver ribbon of a winding river … As we glide in over the countryside we see an occasional farm,
animals grazing in the meadows, houses nestling into the mountainside, a castle besides the lake,
78 R. A. Starkman

the steeples of churches, but no people, they would be foreign to this  oating shot and now
something is happening to us as we gaze down at the enchanted world. FAINT SOUNDS are
beginning to drift up and penetrate our awareness? (p. 1)
[41] Although some versions suggest Lehman thought about making him perhaps appear ‘like his heart
wasn’t really in it’, the Ž nal version gives the impression of Nazis as an insidious inŽ ltrating force.
[42] This is also the same moment Ernest Lehman promises William Wyler would make the Ž lm a
box-ofŽ ce hit. The Sound of Music, Fox Video 30th Anniversary Laser Disk, 1993.

Ruth A. Starkman received her PhD in comparative literature in 1992 and taught in the departments of
rhetoric and Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley, 1993–1997, before becoming visiting
assistant professor of German at the University of Utah. She has published articles on Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi
cinema and recent German cinema and is the co-editor and contributor to a forthcoming volume of essays on
German culture after uniŽ cation. She is currently Ž nishing a book on representations of the Holocaust in
commercial cinema.