As far-right rises again, the political message of Sound of Music is no longer a joke

The choices faced by the real-life people behind the Sound of Music are facing a new generation in Europe and AmericaThe choices faced by the real-life people behind the Sound of Music are facing a new generation in Europe and America
The choices faced by the real-life people behind the Sound of Music are facing a new generation in Europe and America | contributed
In today’s world, we can see the same cast of characters as depicted in the Sound of Music – those who embrace fascism, who appease it and the minority who take a stand against it

The Sound of Music, eh? Wonderful old Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, adapted into a huge global film hit in 1965, and now revived in a fine Christmas production at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, marking the last farewell of its brilliant outgoing artistic director Elizabeth Newman.

When we think of it, we think of singing nuns, of happy children zipping around scenic Salzburg, and of the tender love affair between the young would-be nun Maria – the children’s governess – and their father, the widowed naval hero Captain von Trapp. And oh yes, there’s that scary bit at the end where the bad guys come – Nazis, of course – and they all have to hide in the abbey cloisters for their very lives, before marching away over the mountain to freedom.

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The film version of The Sound Of Music is a product of its time, of course; as was the real-life Maria von Trapp’s 1949 book, on which it was loosely based. Both belonged to that long postwar period when Nazism seemed like an evil that had been vanquished for good, in a war that had convulsed the world; and, as in dozens of films produced after 1945, it was easy to frame the Nazis as obvious villains, and opposition to Nazism as the only possible option, for decent people everywhere.

1,000 days of war in Ukraine

Now, though, the political wheel has turned again; and history seems bent on offering us a crash course on just how over-simplified those Second World War narratives often were, and how very much more complex, confusing, difficult and frightening the politics of the 1930s must have seemed at the time.

This week marks 1,000 days of war in Ukraine, since Russian president Vladimir Putin began his brutal invasion of a peaceful neighbouring county, recognised as independent a generation ago; and three years on, the similarities between that seismic 2022 breach of the peace in northern Europe, and Hitler’s annexation of Austria in the 1938 “Anschluss” (the backdrop to The Sound of Music story), remain too striking to ignore – including the old imperialistic fantasies that underpin the aggression.

And just as striking are the entirely recognisable patterns of response to aggression, across the rest of Europe and the world. Now as then, for example, there are those who flatly refuse to recognise a culture of national expansion and aggression that has gone beyond the point of rational negotiation. These are the ones – in some European governments, on the American right, and in the unreconstructed left – who imagine that the war in Ukraine can still be resolved through some kind of “reasonable agreement”; in terms of 1930s’ history, Neville Chamberlain is the British politician most closely associated with this kind of position, returning from Munich in 1938 clutching his little piece of white paper signed by “Herr Hitler”, which Hitler then completely ignored, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland within a year.

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Putin’s nuclear threats

Then there are the pacifists, the ones who simply believe that nothing could be worse than another all-consuming war, including a massive sacrifice of young lives of the kind Ukraine has already seen. This argument is strengthened by Putin’s strategic use of nuclear threats to frighten the western powers into relative inaction; my mother recalled similar terror in Europe, and a craving for peace, after rumours emerged of fascist gas attacks and fire-bombing in the Spanish Civil War.

And then there is the minority who simply recognise a fascist dictatorship when they see one, and who argue for the strongest possible resistance from the outset. In the 2020s, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has become the world’s leading spokesman for this view, as Winston Churchill became the chief advocate against appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s.

Yet although most Western politicians formally subscribe to Zelensky’s view, the tides of support for and scepticism about his position still rage and surge through Western social media and political debate. America’s incoming President Donald Trump – a long-time admirer of Putin – clearly believes that Ukraine should be forced to negotiate an end to the war. And this week’s fraught debates about President Joe Biden’s belated decision – immediately echoed by the UK – to allow Ukraine to use long-range Western missiles against targets in Russia only emphasises the strong conflicting currents of feeling, as we in the West struggle to come to terms with a new world in which peace in our part of the globe can no longer be taken for granted.

Swept up in rising tide of fascism

So the characters are all there on stage now, as they were in the 1930s, and as they are – if we look closely – in the screenplay of The Sound of Music. There are those who sing and pray for peace, like the nuns in the story. There are those – like Captain von Trapp’s glamorous lady-friend Frau Schrader – whose instinct is for appeasement, and for doing deals with power wherever they find it. There are those enthusiastically drawn in to the rising tide of fascism, like the boyfriend of von Trapp’s daughter Liesl.

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And finally, there is the party of stubborn resistance represented by Captain von Trapp, who puts himself and his whole family in danger by refusing to accept the Nazi takeover of his country. In 2020s’ popular culture, von Trapp’s resistance is jokily represented by a much-shared online ‘gif’ of Christopher Plummer, who played him in the 1965 film, boldly ripping up a swastika banner.

With the far-right once again on the march, though, through American and European politics, we are about to learn that in the real world, the resistance to a bullying and violent authoritarianism glimpsed in that brief image is anything but a joke. We will learn, once more, how lonely that resistance can feel, and how huge its cost in human lives and treasure may be; and how many of us, once again, will avoid facing up to the choices involved, until it is almost – or absolutely – too late.

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