So I saw the Sound of Music on stage yesterday, for the first time in any format, and before this descends into a commentary about how I have given up all rights to be a man, I'd like to point out that the Sound of Music has Nazis in it. Surprising amounts of Nazis too. With guns and threats. I thought they hung around in the background a bit, but actually they're quite a threatening presence during the entire thing. Which brings me too my point, outside the theatre there is a bunch of signage, including one which has a wonderful quote upon it saying something like "restores my faith in human nature". I wonder if the reviewer quoted left the theatre before the closing scenes, where, in case you don't know, Nazi's take over Austria and try to kidnap or kill the family and where friends of theirs almost betray them. I'd like to draw your attention to something Mark Meynell quoted on Tuesday (and it's worth reading the whole thing as well as the quote because it's all a good read).
In 1939, W H Auden emigrated to the US. In November, 2 months after the outbreak of the 2WW, he went to a cinema in the Yorkville district of Manhattan. The area was largely German speaking, and the film he saw was a Nazi account of their conquest of Poland. When Poles appeared on the screen, he was startled to hear people in the audience shout, ‘Kill Them! Kill Them!’Auden was stunned. Amid all the changes of heart and mind he had passed through in his life, one thing had remained constant: he believed in the essential goodness of humanity. Now suddenly, in a flash, he realised two things with the force of an epiphany. On the one hand, he knew beyond any argument that ‘human nature was not and never could be good’; the reaction of the audience was a ‘denial of every humanistic value’. On the other hand, he realised that if … such things were absolutely evil, he had to have some absolute standard by which he could judge them.
Here Auden realized, was the fatal flaw of his liberalism: ‘The whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute.’ Or as he remarked to a friend, ‘The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to.'
Time for Truth, Os Guinness.
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