(in Atlanta) My family watched The Sound of Music over the winter break. I am not a big fan of musicals, but the music, lyrics, and cinematography of this movie are famously good. I had always thought the politics of the story were problematic, in a naive sort of way. Thanks to an impressively researched essay by Robert von Dassanowsky, I now believe that the politics are quite sophisticated and perhaps a bit less problematic.

The von Trapp family is threatened by Nazis. The hero of the film, Captain von Trapp, explicitly opposes Nazism. But he doesn’t object to the obvious problems: Antisemitism, militarism, or authoritarianism. His concern is the threat that Nazi Germany poses to Austrian independence. That stance had always struck me as implausible as well as offensive. Austria, after all, was the accidental product of defeat in World War I. It was only a few years old at the time the movie is set (“The Last Golden Years of the Thirties”): a rump, landlocked, German-speaking, Tyrolean republic created very much against the wishes of people like Captain van Trapp, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Navy. Veterans with  authoritarian, hyper-conservative, nationalistic sentiments would be drawn to Germany and to Nazism. Hitler himself was Austrian, and Austria was a crucible of his movement. So I always thought that The Sound of Music was a Hollywood confection, a fantasy of a Germanic nationalist who could be anti-Nazi without having to mention Jews, democracy, or war. You could even suspect that Uncle Max (the money-grubbing urbanite) is meant to be Jewish. That would be a kind of soft Antisemitism, since Max does save the von Trapps at the end, but he is clearly their inferior.

But von Dassanowsky shows that the movie is very carefully contrived (down to the smallest detail) to evoke the specific ideology of the “the anti-Nazi authoritarian state, the 1934-38 Austrofascist Ständestaat of the Chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss (1892-1934) and Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897-1977).” This regime replaced the first Austrian Republic. It was authoritarian; the government jailed political opponents and even executed people accused of “rioting.” But it was also explicitly anti-Nazi; in fact, it imprisoned Austrian Nazis. It was not aggressive, militaristic, or Antisemitic. Numerous prominent Austrian Jews supported the regime. Its natural ally was Mussolini’s Italy, and once Mussolini withdrew his protection, the Ständestaat collapsed.

Von Dassanowsky traces the rather learned evocations of the Ständestaat in the film. For instance: “Captain von Trapp is defined by a white Austrian decoration in the shape of a crusader’s cross or Kruckenkreuz around his neck, and displays the Austrian flag in his entry hall during the ball. … The Austrofascist Chancellor Dollfuss believed the Kruckenkreuz to be a Christian symbol that would show Austria to be a ‘better’ Germany in contrast to the Third Reich, which found representation in the pagan symbol of the swastika.” The invented nationalism of the Ständestaat combined several distinctive elements: the Austro-Hungarian military aristocracy, the Catholic church,  Tyrolean peasant culture and folk music, patriarchal families, a peaceable and friendly foreign policy, and the Baroque heritage. Once Maria and Georg are married, and the former naval officer is the leader of a large family folk music ensemble from Baroque Salzburg, the Ständestaat ideal is complete.

I find it very surprising that Hollywood producers in post-War America would know or care enough about this episode from Austrian interwar history to evoke it so carefully, especially since Austrofascism was not remembered fondly in post-War Austria. The ideological motivation, however, is understandable. In the midst of the Cold War, it would comforting to view a highly conservative and authoritarian cultural movement as an ally in the fight against Nazism.

Tracery in Gloucester Cathedral Choir (ca. 1350)

In many buildings constructed before 1950, the ceiling is the aesthetic focus. Even when the walls are plain or are devoted to practical purposes, the ceilings are available for decoration. Our eyes are drawn upward.

My two examples (quickly selected from a multitude of possibilities) date four hundred years apart and differ in materials, style, color, and most other respects. But both exemplify the ceiling as an opportunity for free play.

Pilgrimage Church Wies, Bavaria (ca. 1750)

My contemporary example (below) is unfair: just a typical drop ceiling from an office. But I have noticed that even when an architect designs a contemporary space and the walls and floors are meant to be enjoyed, the ceiling is often an afterthought–an array of panels bearing a random assortment of sprinklers, lights, and audio speakers. It’s as if, by convention, one does not look at the ceiling when assessing a room aesthetically. In fact, it’s hard to find photographs online of fine contemporary rooms that even show the ceilings: photographers choose angles that conceal the upper plane.

This seems like a waste to me.

Drop Ceiling (ca. now)

Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which I finished yesterday, was written four years before I was born. I can almost recall its time–or at least relive it vicariously through my parents, who were, like the characters in the novel, a Jewish historian of European ideas and his wife, living in an old house a few hundred miles from Manhattan. It was a decade when Freud and Marx still reigned, when readers wrestled with metaphysical issues by constructing grand accounts of cultural history, stories that had Christianity, Romanticism, idealism, and nihilism as their protagonists. Like Herzog, you might buy paperback Schopenhauers and Spenglers in the bargain bin at Walgreens and try to put them into some kind of order. You didn’t worry much about jobs, tenure, or publication, but intellectual work seemed consequential when the old mores were collapsing, East and West were divided by ideology, and the Shoah was still a memory, even for the young.

It was the end of the Modern period, post-modernism just beginning to stir in France. Bellow has the Modernist’s disdain for novelistic conventions. Quite a bit happens in Herzog–two divorces, a rape, a car crash, an arrest–but Bellow refuses to tell it in a linear way that might build suspense. To withhold information about the conclusion until the end of the story would be like using the sonata form in music: old-fashioned. Instead, Bellow’s narrator strives for pure description, voice, character, and ideas.

The novel is also a period piece in its problematic attitudes toward women, Blacks, and Puerto-Ricans. Of course, we don’t know if those are Bellow’s views or the narrator’s. In fact, my biggest question about Herzog is whether we are dealing with an unreliable narrative voice. The back cover of my copy tells me that Herzog is “truly an Everyman for our time.” Everyman is a sympathetic figure, and one might like the cuckolded, naive, high-strung and sensitive Moses E. Herzog. Or one might doubt his self-presentation. Consider this rather typical passage:

Then he ran the water in the sink. The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fngertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is ….

As he was doing this, it occurred to him that this going into the bathroom to pull himself together was one of his habits. He seemed to feel that he was more effective, more master of himself. In fact, he remembered, for a few weeks in Ludeyville he required Madeleine to make love on the bathroom floor. She complied, but he could see when he lay down on the old tiles that she was in a rage. Much good could come of that. This is how the all-powerful human intellect employs itself when it has no real occupation. And now he pictured the November rain dropping from the sky on the half-painted house in Ludeyville. The sumacs spilled the red Chinese paper of their leaves ….

I draw attention to the sentence about the bathroom floor, almost hidden near the beginning of a long paragraph of nostalgia and reverie. Madeleine is the ex-wife whom Herzog hates and fears. Here is a hint that he abused her cruelly in the rustic house to which he had dragged her. By the end of the novel, I found myself caring about Herzog and hoping that he would not harm himself. But if we view him as neither good nor reliable, the text becomes considerably more interesting. (By the way, I know a little about Saul Bellow the man and do not particularly like what I know; but that ought to be irrelevant to our judgment of Moses Herzog.)