DAVID IRVING AND THE SOUND OF MUSIC

Over the Christmas period, BBC television carried a documentary about the background to and making of the film The Sound of Music. This told its audience, something that I did in fact already know, that the film has always been disliked in Austria, particularly in fact where it is set, in Salzburg.
The documentary affected to be perplexed by this hostility, some ventured that it was due to considerable inaccuracies in the detail of a film, what was after all based upon a ‘true’ story.[1] There was not so much ‘an elephant in the room,’ as a pantomime villain strutting across the stage begging you to scream at the screen ‘he’s behind you!’
The reality, of course, is that the film exposes the lie that kept the Austrians warm in the cold years after the Second World War, the narrative that sought to portray Austria as Hitler’s first victim; buried were the cheering crowds greeting the fait accompli of the Anschluss, the flowers strewn across the path of the advancing German army, the weeping women and assembled masses cheering themselves hoarse.  The Sound of Music presented the inconvenient truth.
I thought of this when remembering the jailing of the British Historian in Austria, not for anything that he did on Austrian soil, but for something he had written previously. For in one of his books he was held by the Austrian authorities to have denied the fact of the Holocaust, a crime in Austria.
Now Mr Irving is a truly appalling human being, not the kind of man you should really invite around for dinner. To imprison him, however, in of all places Austria for the crime of ‘denial’ struck me as being so disgustingly ironic that it was funny.


[1] Completely unheard of this!

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