Die Deutschmeister (4½ Stars)

Before I sat down to watch this German musical comedy I had no idea what "Deutschmeister" means. I had to look it up. It's the name of an Austrian military regiment that existed from 1696 to 1918. As a proper name it can't be translated and has to be left in its original form. The film itself was released in English with the title "A March for the Emperor".

The film takes place in 1893, and it uses the fictional character Stanzi Hübner (played by 16-year-old Romy Schneider) to tell the story of the Austrian composer Willi Jurek, who lived from 1870 to 1934.

The film opens with pretty girls running down the mountains of Austria singing happy songs. If you think this sounds like "The Sound of Music", you're dead right. "The Sound of Music" was based on "Die Deutschmeister" and similar German Heimatfilme of the 1950's.

Stanzi (in the middle) is a farmer's daughter who lives in a mountain pasture near Salzburg. All the young people go to a yearly fair in the city, waving flower garlands and singing happy songs as they go. A fortune teller predicts that Stanzi will meet two men in Vienna, one of them a nobleman, the other an artist, and she'll bring happiness to a relative. That's a very precise prediction. She asks her mother for permission to visit her aunt in Vienna.

On arrival in Vienna she sees a woman drop a handkerchief, so she follows her into a building to give it back. It's a costume ball for the city's social elite. She's praised for her realistic looking peasant dress. She dances first with a prince, then with a baron. The handkerchief she's carrying identifies her as a countess. Baron Zorndorff falls head over heels in love with her. The next day he visits the countess's aunt and asks for permission to marry her. This is the funniest part of the film. It's the wrong woman, but the countess's aunt persuades him to go ahead with the marriage – "you can always get divorced three years from now" – and he persuades the countess that she met him at the ball while she was sleepwalking.

That's the nobleman. Now what about the artist? Stanzi's aunt owns a bakery in the middle of Vienna that sells bread rolls to palace of Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria. The military band of the Deutschmeister marches past, and she wins the attention of the drummer, Willi Jurek. He says he can only compose music when he's in love, and Stanzi inspires him. Using the connections of her mother's bakery she persuades the emperor to let the band play Willi's new song, which was later called the Deutschmeister Regimentsmarsch. Click here to listen to it.

Finally, Stanzi encourages her widowed aunt to consider marriage with one of the emperor's officials.

There's a lot of political propaganda in the film. Sometimes it's presented in the form of jokes, other times it's direct. It has to do with the relationship between Germany and Austria. The picture above shows Germany's leader (Wilhelm II, on the left) visiting Austria's leader (Franz-Josef, on the right). In January 1871 Otto Bismarck united the various independent kingdoms of central Europe into a new country called Germany. It might surprise some people to know that although Germany had existed as a geographical area for 2000 years, it had never been a country. Bismarck changed this. Austria was the only German kingdom that refused to join the new country, mostly because of its enmity with Prussia. Bismarck offered to make Vienna the capital of Germany, but Austria still refused. It wasn't until 1938 that the Austrian government voted to join Germany.

The second world war took place, and Austria left Germany again in 1945. The reason was the Austrian attitude towards the war, which is incomprehensible in retrospect. They said that the war was nothing to do with Austria, Germany forced Austria to take part. They seem to have forgotten Hitler's nationality.

The film was made in 1955. A lot of German patriots, especially in the South of Germany, thought it was wrong for Germany and Austria to be separate nations. "The war's over, let's be friends again". The ordinary people in the film express the wish for unity repeatedly. For instance, men say that they don't mind if they drink wine from the Danube (Austria) or the Rhine (Germany). The bread rolls are the same in Berlin and Vienna, they just have different names.

Will Germany and Austria ever be united again? I hope so. The separation is artificial. Everyone knows that the Austrians are Germans, except for the Austrians themselves.