The London
Independent reports, in
Hills
are alive with sound of guilty silence, that for the first
time,
The Sound of Music, the musical set in Salzburg and
about the
Anschluss (when Austria entered the Third Reich in
1938), is being produced on stage there. Austrian film houses have
never shown the movie. State-run television showed it only once.
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."
Those who didn't flee, most of the country, of course, had to deal
with the Nazis, and that meant a spectrum of positions. When
everyday you had to live a double life, saying one thing in public
and another in private, you learned not to believe in anything, to
ignore others, to care only about oneself. And de-Nazification was
aborted early on, like lustration in many Communist European
satellites:
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."
But in many cases it is far too late to do anything. Take the
restitution of stolen property. Large swaths of Vienna were owned
by Jews. After the Anschluss they were expropriated, but no
compensation was paid. "Jews were not accepted as victims," Tina
Walzer, the historian, said. "After the war, Austria described
itself as 'the first victim' of the Nazis, so the Jews could not be
victims, too. The real victims were the Austrian soldiers who died
fighting for the Nazis, not the Jews who survived." ...
"In the Austrian view, the real enemy was the Allies who conquered
and occupied the country from 1945 to 1955. For Austria, the war
ends, not in 1945 but in 1955, when the last foreign soldier left
Austrian soil. The day that happened, 26 October, is marked as
Austria's National Day. That's when Austria regained its
serenity."
In his first
New
Year's Address to the Nation, delivered on January 1, 1990,
weeks after becoming president of a new, independent, democratic,
and self-governing Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel said"
It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad
legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some
distant relative bequeathed us. On the contrary, we have to accept
this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept
it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to
us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous
rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also
because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today,
namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably,
and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the
world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve
much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general
remedy from them only. Freedom and democracy include participation
and therefore responsibility from us all.
Among the peoples under Communism, the Czechs and Slovaks were
'meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical', and Havel
asked 'Where did the young people who never knew another system get
their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political
ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen
that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered
lost -- joined them? How is it that so many people immediately knew
what to do and none needed any advice or instruction?' He answered:
I think there are two main reasons for the hopeful face
of our present situation. First of all, people are never just a
product of the external world; they are also able to relate
themselves to something superior, however systematically the
external world tries to kill that ability in them. Secondly, the
humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so
much idle talk, did after all slumber in the unconsciousness of our
nations and ethnic minorities, and were inconspicuously passed from
one generation to another, so that each of us could discover them
at the right time and transform them into deeds.
The Czech Republic has gone probably farther than the other former
Communist satellites in lustration, seizing the opportunity early
on and with greater determination and persistence than the others.
Failing to follow through, failing to act with justice towards the
victims (and understanding that '[n]one of us is just its victim.
We are all also its co-creators'), warps society, producing the
same humiliation, meekness, blindness and cynicism which flourished
under the Communists). That
The sound of Music has been
absent from the Austrian stage until now, illustrates its failure
to grasp and understand its and each of its citizens'
responsibility for the totalitarian regime.
HT to
The
hills are just coming alive, by Nick at
a fistful of euros.