MARIA VON TRAPP, watching the final scene of The Sound of Music for the first time as her screen family escaped into Switzerland, allegedly exclaimed, “Don't they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!” Had she thought about the beginning of the film, which transports viewers to “Salzburg, Austria, in the last Golden Days of the Thirties,” when the country was in fact suffering from extreme political and social unrest, von Trapp might have wondered, “Don't they know history either?” In The Sound of Music as well as in Hollywood's many other Austria films, the projections on the screen resemble reflections in a funhouse mirror. Elements of a “real” place with a “real” history inhabited by “real” people can be found in the fractured distortions that have both been drawn from and contributed to the general public's perceptions of the country and its citizens. Many Americans who have seen The Sound of Music, for example, are convinced that “Edelweiss” is the Austrian national anthem and that Austrians were overwhelmingly anti-Nazi.

Hollywood studios have produced over fifty Austria films since 1923, when Erich von Stroheim introduced Vienna to movie-goers with Merry- Go-Round. This diverse group consists of examples from almost every imaginable fictional genre: dramas, melodramas, farces, comedies, costume dramas, biographical pictures, and musicals, as well as operettas. The sources are just as varied: short stories, novels and novellas, plays, musicals, and operettas have all been turned into Hollywood's Austria. Hollywood studios have also recycled Austrian stories in remakes of foreign and domestic films. Both major and minor studios have set films in Austria and produced extravagant A-productions and obvious B-fillers. Critical and financial successes as well as flops and financial disasters number among the films. Despite the variety, these films easily fall into two categories: (1) films that take place in an Austria or Austria-Hungary identifiable through landmarks, historical personalities, or events; and (2) films where the Austrian locale is merely signified by a label or signaled through dialogue or stock footage, and which could easily have been set elsewhere without impacting on the story.