Shane D. Peterson and Dr. James K. Lyon, Germanic & Slavic Languages
Approximately one-third of Austrian cinema during the mid-1950s was composed of the genre of Heimatfilme (Homeland films) which depicted country landscapes, especially the alpine terrain, in a mythical and nostalgic light. Though often dismissed as trivial and therefore largely unexamined on their own visual terms, these films depict “an intact, guiltless, eternal Austria” through the prolific imagery of natural settings. Indeed, so significant is the role of the Austrian landscape that it is listed alongside the actors in the credits of the 1954 film Echo der Berge (Echo of the Mountains) , a film whose lead actor, Rudolf Lenz, said that a return to nature was perhaps the only way for his nation to once again find “inner peace and harmony” after World War II.
Though many nations had to re-establish their national identities after the world wars, Austria provides a unique case, for after 1945 it not only had to deal with its Nazi past, but also with its thousand year history as the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had collapsed at the end of the First World War. In the wake of lost identification with both massive empires, the Austrians found themselves as a very small nation of 6 million. After great destruction and political instability, the postwar Heimatfilme presented imagery of an ideologically pure and stable space with which Austrians could associate in order to reestablish a national identity based on a conception of innocence and the declaration that Austria was the first “victim” of Hitler when annexed in 1938. Such identification with a pure and neutral space was significant not only in the minds of Austrians but also in the minds of the Allied occupiers who allowed Austria to regain independence and establish political “neutrality” beginning in 1955.
Exactly fifty years later, it is no less salient to examine how Austrian national identity was reestablished in the post-war years especially since the Austrians once again find themselves as part of a greater whole, namely the European Union. Even today identity is largely associated with the glory of the past and the natural beauty of the Austrian homeland which provide for abundant travel revenues every year. Yet Heimatfilme were not created for the purely economic purposes of luring tourists to Austria. Indeed, when a photography collection documenting the “beauty of the (Austrian) homeland” appeared in 1948, the cultural counsel to the city of Vienna, Viktor Matejka, wrote the following preface: “This book is not meant to court tourists, but Austrians themselves.” But to what were these images meant to court Austrians? I believe that these homeland visuals were aimed at encouraging Austrians to associate their nation with innocence and purity symbolized by the Alps. Indeed, another important cultural artifact, namely the new Austrian National Hymn written in 1946, reinforced this tendency. Thus, the new hymn, which replaced one laden with Nazi connotations, began with the phrase, “Land of the mountains,” in another effort to associate the new Austrian nation with the purity of the Alps.
Yet embracement of this specific ideological space as a key to reconstructing Austrian identity meant largely overlooking the more immediate Nazi past. Indeed, Heimatfilme say little or nothing about post-war difficulties or the Nazi years. In fact, one of the few films to reference those problems was the 1947 film Der Hofrat Geiger (The Court Counselor Geiger) which begins with this preface: “This film is set in contemporary Austria which is poor and laden with worries. Yet, do not fear, for we will show you but little of that. The film does not overlook the current time, but rather tells how many things can have a more jovial side when one so desires.” In the context of the abundant natural landscapes in the Heimatfilme, one can begin to see that it was not so much the current time but rather the current space that was being overlooked. In so doing, these images provided Austrians with “optical comfort” by overlooking the partially-destroyed urban space which bore reminders of the war. 6
Indeed, this film’s overt preface is quite the exception in this genre as is the film’s quick glimpse of urban rubble. In the Heimatfilme between 1945 and 1955, the presence of country or alpine imagery was predominant. Such a focus on the country geography at the sake of the urban was similarly manifest in another Austrian cultural artifact, namely the 1952 photo collection titled Österreich – Landschaft, Mensch und Kultur (Austria – Countryside, People and Culture). In that collection “rural subjects dominated and the contemporary urban was omitted,”6 an inclination that is also echoed in a 1954 newspaper critique of the most popular of the Heimatfilme, Echo der Berge, which describes the feeling of the viewer as such: “…in short, one feels almost moved to proclaim: The mountains live as well and not just the desert!” Indeed, these films and a multitude of other visual imagery between 1945 and 1955 proclaimed the return to a more pure and vibrant space – and therefore, to a new national identity.
I am grateful to the generous donors who funded this ORCA grant as well as to Dr. James K. Lyon and Dr. Robert B. McFarland for their invaluable assistance in this project. In March of 2005, I will be presenting a paper on this topic at the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery’s annual conference. In addition, I am currently preparing further findings for a conference at the University of Vienna in June of 2005 as part of an international network of scholars and students from Berkeley, Tübingen (Germany), Vienna (Austria), and Harvard.