“Bloom and Grow Forever”: Language, Identity, and Transcultural Life Stories

“Here I Am Facing Adventure”: Introductory Musings

My exposure to The Sound of Music came late. I grew up in Austria, blissfully unaware of how my homeland was portrayed by Hollywood. I didn’t blame Robert Wise for romanticizing Salzburg—it was, after all, a musical. On the contrary, I was happy to see that Austria and Austrians were portrayed in a positive, pre-Nazi light, with Austrians fighting against the annexation of Austria in 1938. I was surprised, however, how The Sound of Music had shaped how an entire country imagined Austria, and how an enthusiastic American viewership seemed to associate British English with the language used by Austrians. During my college years in the U.S., I only needed to mention that I was from Austria, and I would hear: “I love Austria. It’s so beautiful. ‘The hills are alive…’”

It only took a few months before I realized that not too many Americans had been to Austria, that some didn’t know where Austria was located, and that few knew that Austrian German, with varying dialects, is the official language of Austria. Everybody, on the other hand, knew that Maria went from being a nun to being a governess to being the wife of Captain von Trapp. And, after many trials and tribulations, the family escaped across the mountains from the impending annexation and the beginning of the Second World War. Austria, in the eyes of my Sound of Music watching friends, could only be praised as a country that defied Hitler, and as a place that they would hopefully one day visit so that they could see all The Sound of Music places.

Austria, in the eyes of my friends, was the place to one day visit because of a Hollywood musical portraying pre-World War II Austria. It did not matter that time had moved on, that Austrians are part of a long and complex history that includes the Celtic Hallstatt culture from 1200 BCE, the Habsburg empire from 1273 AD, many wars along the way, and many musical talents such as Wolfgang Amadeus and Maria Anna Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Martines, Strauss, von Paradis, Mahler, and Falco. Austria’s multiple and sometimes contradictory stories, however, have been replaced by the single story of TheSound of Music for Americans who grew up with a yearly Thanksgiving and/or Christmas edition of the musical, with its exclusive attention to one family’s romanticized pre-World War II adventures.

I am well aware that many Americans know of Mozart, the Wiener Sängerknaben, the Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker, and the Lippizaner. Americans have visited Austria for other reasons than TheSound of Music tour in Salzburg. My intent in this chapter is to use The Sound of Music as a reference point for my experiences working, studying, and teaching in the U.S. because this 1964 musical has remained most constant over the years of interacting with my American friends and colleagues. I could focus on the moments in time when a fellow student told me that I was best suited to go back to Austria and teach there, or when a colleague told me that I was taking a job from an American, or when a library patron told me that foreigners are not welcome in America. Addressing these moments in time could achieve similar results for the purpose of my narrative but would miss the nuances of how supposedly positive portrayals can have long-lasting impacts on how we see and identify the Other.

In this chapter, I use The Sound of Music and how we perceive others and are perceived by others when we move to different countries and continents as a starting point to discuss how my experiences growing up in Austria influenced my early experiences as an English language learner in the U.S. and later as a faculty member in a U.S. university setting. I use Stuart Hall (1997) to show how our perspectives of the languages we speak and our understanding of our own multiple and shifting identities, and the identities of those we come in contact with, greatly influence our subsequent interactions with cultures and languages that are different from our own. I adapt the concept of Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) “contact zones” to show that our languages and our identities, and with it our ideologies, determine whether we understand ourselves and those we come in contact with—even in a post-colonialist space—as perpetuating “interactive, improvisational … colonial encounters” (p. 7), or whether we can understand contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” without ending up “in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (p. 4).