At home where we are: Salzberg, The Sound of Music and the value of ‘here’

En route to a recent trip to Israel I visited Salzburg, home to The Sound of Music. There are no Jews in this tale about the von Trapp family, whose performance at the Salzburg Festival was a ruse to escape Nazis. But the Jewish presence lies just below the surface - and the attitude of Salzburg’s Jews to Austrian culture has a remarkable new relevance for Diaspora Jews today.

The von Trapp family home in the movie, Leopoldskron, was home to the renowned Jewish theatre director and co-founder of the Salzberg Feastival Max Reinhardt.

Reinhardt’s vision was to build “a triumphal arch celebrating Austrian art, with Mozart as its crowning glory, in order to weave a new social fabric based on our shared European heritage”. He believed one could "find redemption in art".  Reinhardt, like writer Stefan Zweig and other Jews devoted to European music and culture, embraced life in the country where they lived.

Zweig had been close to Herzl when he was young, but rejected Zionism. He wrote to Mar­tin Buber that he ​“nev­er want­ed Jews to become a nation again and thus low­er itself to tak­ing part with oth­ers in the rival­ry of nations. I love the dias­po­ra and affirm it as the mean­ing of Jew­ish ide­al­ism, as Jewry’s cos­mopoli­tan human mis­sion.”

Zweig believed the Jews’ ​“sacred mis­sion” was to serve as ​“the gad­fly which plagues the mangy beast of nation­al­ism,” and to work for the ​“dis­so­lu­tion of nation­al­ist ten­den­cies”. “These Jews with­out a coun­try are the best assis­tants of the good Euro­peans of the future.”

There is no English word for this world view but there is a word in Yiddish: doikayt, literally “hereness”.