The Sound of Music, one of the most popular films ever around the world, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The musical tells the story of the von Trapp family and how they get a new lease on life by gaining a new mother in the form of Maria, the would-be nun who joins the family and teaches them to love music—and love generally. It also takes place against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover of Austria in the 1930s.
What was the real story of the von Trapp family? Why did the film never quite catch on in Austria or Germany? And how did the movie impact the Austrian city of Salzburg, where large parts were filmed?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: This is one of the most widely seen movies around the world, so why is it not known in Germany, in Austria, aside from those catering to tourists?
Adam Tooze: It’s a Hollywood, anachronistic story about Austria in the 1930s, in which a plucky group of Austrians have to rescue themselves from Nazism by fleeing across the Alps in a largely imaginary adventure. Everything about it is wrong for both a German and an Austrian audience, I think. The politics is wrong, the history is wrong, even the sentiment is wrong. The story of the Trapp family was very well known in the German-language world. The autobiography by Maria had been published. In fact, there were two German-language films about the von Trapps in the 1950s, which stick much more closely to the actual version of events. But when the American film came out in the mid-60s, Germany just wasn’t in the mood.
You can actually look up what the top-grossing films were in Germany in ’65 and compare them with America. And it turns out that Sound of Music totally dominated the American viewing figures in ’65. Seventy-two million dollars that were brought in. In Germany, it’s not in sight. It’s not even in the top 10. So, all of the German cinema is dominated, believe it or not, by the James Bond franchise. So, it’s Thunderball and Goldfinger, which entirely top the German earnings. Then there’s Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Then there is Winnetou, the German Karl May, I don’t know, film adaptation of Germany’s favorite Western author. Mary Poppins, but no Sound of Music. So, it just didn’t impact. And I think the politics of this are transparent. Why would West Germans in the ’60s be flocking to a sentimental, weird American rendition of a flight from the Anschluss? It’s not an obvious box office hit.
CA: Part of the plot centers on the character Georg von Trapp, the father of the family. He’s a proud Austrian nationalist, and as such an anti-Nazi, and that makes him a heroic figure in the context of the film. But how should we historically contextualize his nationalism? What would have the government been that he was supporting, prior to the arrival of the Nazis?
AT: Yeah, I mean, I’m no Sound of Music specialist, and I’ve dug as hard as I was able to, to actually try and figure out something about von Trapp’s personal politics. Not easy to pinpoint his party or political alignment. But two things do seem pretty clear, which is that the family was, if not anti-Nazi, then fully unwilling to compromise their Catholic conservative Austrian principles with the new regime. So, von Trapp turns down what no doubt was a tempting offer of a commission in the German navy, where he could have commanded modern, up-to-date German U-boats, which would no doubt have been thrilling for a man of his age and his experience in the war. He turned down an invitation for the family singers to appear at Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And one of his sons turned down the offer of a position as a doctor at a university that had been purged of Jewish doctors.
Now these, at least in the lore of the von Trapp family, are taken as the indicators of the moment when they realized you can turn down a dictator like Hitler three times, but you can’t do it four times; it might be a good idea for us to look for an exit. They famously don’t flee across the mountains; you can’t even flee across mountains. They’re suggested they flee across. They took a train to Italy where the Trapps actually had nationality because Trapp was born in what became later Italian territory. They passed by way of Italy to the U.S. quite smoothly. But they do seem to have been uncompromising conservative Catholics.
There is a rather good investigative piece on this by somebody called von Dassanowsky, who looked into the political symbolism in the film and locates it very squarely against the backdrop of what’s known as the Austrofascist episode under Chancellor Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg, who were opposed to Nazism, because they saw Nazism as secular, as corrosive of Austrian independence, as the film represents it, but they were themselves profoundly anti-democratic, anti-socialist. In fact, they were involved in the violent repression of Austrian socialism. And his reading of the film suggests that, in fact, the Hollywood producers went to considerable lengths to clearly indicate and to locate von Trapp squarely in this group. Apparently, at one point in the film, I don’t remember it closely, but he wears a particular cross around his neck and that cross was one of the symbols of this Austrofascist or Austro-authoritarian vision of the merging of a new authoritarian politics with the Catholic religion. It’s the so-called Kruckenkreuz. And so, this is a particular kind of, almost, like the clerico-fascist alternative to the swastika.
I think probably the key to the authentic clash is religion, because what’s overplayed in the film version, apparently, compared to the German films of the ’50s and the original text, is just the Catholicism, unsurprisingly, of the music that was being sung. It’s much more like gospel or, you know, various types of evangelical American music. If you think of the ex-family singers, right, you think of Appalachia or something like that, where people are coming out of a church singing tradition. It’s not music hall, it’s not Broadway. And that, I think, is really fundamental to the cultural opposition, that and the aristocratic thing. But the aristocratic thing shouldn’t be overplayed because von Trapp’s heritage in that respect is not actually that deep. But the Catholicism is quite significant, I think.
CA: Near the conclusion of the film, von Trapp is commissioned to a naval base in Nazi Germany, but Austria doesn’t even have a navy at that point, after losing territory after World War I. So, what was von Trapp doing in the years after World War I if Austria didn’t have a navy anymore? And what kind of naval fighting was von Trapp involved in while fighting for Austria, say, in World War I?
AT: So, it’s a fascinating question, but, I mean, before the war, Austria-Hungary’s maritime influence extended on the one hand down the Danube to the Black Sea, on the other hand, through Dalmatia and its possessions in what then became Yugoslavia and is now Croatia to the Adriatic. And it was a maritime power like other European powers. Von Trapp’s father had been a decorated naval officer and was ennobled on the basis of his superior performance, not during a military action, but during a devastating storm where he rescued his—I think he was on a destroyer. But von Trapp is then commissioned following his father. They’re not a deeply aristocratic family, both all the way back, they’re basically ennobled officials, ennobled military officers. So going three generations back, ennobled officials from Hesse, from West Germany.
Von Trapp’s father was an ennobled officer on the basis of his distinguished service, so distinguished that it became a hereditary status. The young von Trapp joins the Austrian navy in his father’s footsteps. He’s deployed with the Eight-Nation Force to China as part of the repression of the Boxer Rebellion. So you could get around as an Austrian naval officer. And then he shifts into the really trendy bit of naval militarism in the early 20th century, which is torpedoes. So not big guns, the big battleships, the dreadnoughts, but the small ships, which were going to flit around between the big ships and sink them with very, very high-powered torpedoes. So the torpedoes are fired from either torpedo boats, which are very fast-moving, like two or three times faster than battleships—they’re kind of speed boats and they zoom around—or ultimately through submarines. And von Trapp serves in both the above-surface and below-surface force with real distinction. His submarine sinks a French battle cruiser and another submarine. He’s then promoted to the commander of the Austrian submarine forces at the base of Cattaro, which is one of the major naval bases in the Adriatic. So, this is really for real a military career. And in the aftermath, he goes into business on Danube shipping. And Danube is a huge river, right, so it’s like being on the Mississippi or something like that from a European point of view.
But the money in the family actually also comes from torpedoes. So, von Trapp’s first wife was a Whitehead, who were the family of engineers, obviously originally of British background, that were pioneers in the development of torpedoes. They established a factory in the Habsburg Empire, and he married one of the heirs to the Whitehead fortune. And there was dynastic title and so on coming from the German side, but the 20th-century money comes from the torpedo fortune. And it’s all lost in ’35, when he, in a kind of rather patriotic act, brings his safe bank accounts in Britain back to Austria, puts them into an Austrian bank in Vienna, and it goes broke in ’35. And that’s what triggers them into taking up the singing career, is that they need funds. But there’s a little villa here, a castle there, you know, there’s a lot of ruin in this particular family’s wealth. There’s quite a lot of money knocking around.
CA: Salzburg is a city with plenty of history. It’s the place where Mozart was born and raised, for example. And yet Sound of Music seems to be very central to what makes the city operate today. Is there a way of quantifying that—the degree to which Salzburg is dependent on Sound of Music tourism to get by?
AT: So, Salzburg has a population of 157,000 people, and they have unusually prosperous Europeans with an average per-capita income of 64,000 euros. So these Austrians are doing just fine. And it is a city absolutely chock-a-block with tourists. Apparently, there are 1.7 million visitors every year to a population of 170,000. So, 10-to-1 ratio of natives to visitors, 3.2 million overnight stays. So, I guess on average every visitor is staying over for a night or maybe even two nights, so that gives you that ratio. We can do the econ on this, and we think tourism contributes 16 percent to Salzburg’s GDP, and we think it’s responsible for 12.4 percent of Salzburg’s employment. So, I don’t know. What are we going to say? If Sound of Music is a quarter of, I don’t know, half the Mozart factor, it’s like a NATO-sized contribution to Salzburg’s GDP. This is all getting slightly delirious, but it’s like 5 percent of Salzburg’s GDP. I wouldn’t say that Salzburg is dependent on it, but it makes a dent.
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