“Austrian German” is a dialect, not a separate language. What’s more, Captain Von Trapp was born a citizen of the multiethnic mess that was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, in a region now part of Croatia. He went to the Naval Academy in Rijeka (aka Fiume, where my Nonna was born in 1906*). He lived and had kids born all over the map during the Empire and after the Great War. He didn’t buy the estate near Salzburg until 1924. Meanwhile, the place he was born, in the postwar redrawing of Europe, was now Italian, so he suddenly had Italian citizenship. That’s how he and his family left Austria, showing Italian papers and buying train tickets to Trieste. This lacks the dramatic flair of climbing the Alps while singing.
Laura, who owns Georg’s memoirs (his accounts of life on a WWI sub make DAS BOOT look like a picnic, with a poorly educated, multiethnic crew that did all not speak German, and such terrible ventilation that people passed out all the time and sometimes died)
*Nonna’s family were typical of the A-H Empire: Italian, Croatian, Slovene. They spoke Italian at home, but had to learn GERMAN and Magyar in school. She remembered when the Archduke was shot, not too far away in Sarajevo. |
