Rare Austrian Production of 'The Sound of Music' Reflects Nation's Schizophrenic Nazi Past

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - The Nazis are back in Vienna - at least on stage. But this time there's no doubt that they're the bad guys. The latest look at the country's relationship to Hitler is through the melodic looking glass of "The Sound of Music" - the first full staging in Austria of a musical beloved the world over but virtually unknown in the nation it portrays.

After years of denial, official Austria has turned in the past two decades from depicting itself as a victim of Adolf Hitler to acknowledging its key role in the Holocaust.

But some Austrians remain sensitive to the country's Nazi past, and Saturday's premiere - in German, with actors dressed as Nazi storm troopers standing guard in the audience, a theater box filled with mock Nazi dignitaries, and a huge swastika banner draped onstage - dredged up painful memories.

"It's too much, too much," said one elderly woman who refused to give her name as she waited at the coat check Saturday night. "I was 12 the last time I saw such things in any theater."

The melodic adventures of Baron von Trapp, his children and Maria, the governess who becomes von Trapp's wife and mother to the Austrian family before they flee the Nazis, are familiar to untold millions the world over, made famous by the 1965 film version that won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

South Koreans learn the songs as part of their English lessons. Some Dutch newspapers organize readers' tours to show places such as the Bavarian alpine meadow where Julie Andrews sang, "The hills are alive with the sound of music."

Some foreigners think "Edelweiss" - composed for the musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and never sung by the real-life von Trapps - is Austria's national anthem.

Also, Austrian tourism surveys show that three out of four Americans come to Salzburg, the former home of the real-life von Trapp family, because of the musical.

Once there, many of them ignore Mozart, the city's most famous native son, to take part in "The Sound of Music" tour, complete with singalongs and more information about the musical and its history than most non-fans would want to know.

Despite its world success, the musical's combination of kitsch and its focus on a dark part of Austrian history had kept it away from local stages, except for a brief run of a small theater's parody more than a decade ago.

"I worked in America in the 1960s and was asked constantly about 'Edelweiss' and 'The Sound of Music,' and had no clue what it was about,'" said former Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, one of those at the premiere at the Volksoper, Vienna's second opera house. "Now I've made up for it."

Vranitzky was chancellor in 1986-1997, a time that saw the first official attempts to come to terms with the country's Nazi past.

The government since has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation claims to Nazi victims or their offspring, and political and church leaders routinely speak out against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance that fed the rise of Hitler in this country and Germany.

Still, Joerg Haider powered his rightist Freedom Party into the government in 2001 with populist rhetoric sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism. Though he has toned down his comments in recent years and his Freedom Party has lost much of its support, it still has an extreme right-wing element known to admire Hitler.

Last year, a poll showed that more than a third of Austrians believe the Nazi era was in some ways positive.

On Saturday, Vranitzky called the Volksoper staging of the Nazi-era musical "a courageous attempt ... both musically and historically."

And though some in the audience were overheard complaining of triteness in a city more attuned to opera than lighter fare, most appeared comfortable with the musical reminder that Austrians were not only victims but perpetrators of Nazi atrocities.

"That's the way it was," said Sieglinde Fabigan, a woman in her 60s. "I think it's a very good piece for children and teenagers who did not live through that era."

And there is a second opinion. From the web:

History of the Bagel: The Hole Story

While it's widely agreed that bagels came to the United States from the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, experts can't pinpoint the exact origin of the humble bread with the hole in the middle.

One legend has it that the first bagel was born in 1683 when a Viennese baker wanted to pay tribute Polish King Jan III Sobieski for saving the people of Austria from Turkish invaders. Since the king was known to have a passion for riding, the baker made rolls in the shape of a stirrup, known in German as beugel.

In "The Joys of Yiddish," however, Leo Rosten notes that the first printed mention of bagels came even earlier, in 1610, in the Community Regulations of Krakow, Poland. These stated that "bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." The ring shape may have been seen as a symbol of life.

Whatever its ancestry, the doughnut-shaped roll quickly caught on, becoming a staple among Eastern Europeans. In Yiddish, they were called beygel; in Russian, boobliki; in Polish, obazanki.

Bagels came to New York in the 1880s, with the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews. Vendors used to thread the hole-shaped bread onto dowels and hawk them on street corners.

The pronunciation of the word never changed, but the spelling was Americanized to bagel.

In 1907, the International Bagel Bakers Union was founded in New York City. Members of the elite group, which was only open to sons of union members, fiercely safeguarded the recipe for bagels, which were usually boiled or "kettled" in vats of boiling hot water before baking. Bagel makers traditionally worked in teams of four,
with two men making the dough and shaping the bagels, one boiling them, and the fourth baking them.

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