When I had the chance to work in Vienna a few months ago, I could not believe my luck. This was the city where the ghosts of Mahler, Freud and Loos wandered the cobbled streets, a place that had come to be a muse for Mozart, Klimt, Billy Joel, and Richard Linklater. The Opera House lay to my right, Café Sperl to my left. This was my chance to take it all in. I had arrived at the cultural epicentre of Europe. And yet, it was not The Marriage of Figaro or The Ninth Symphony that had brought me to Austria, but the dulcet tones of Julie Andrews as she swirled in a luscious meadow.

I am not alone in my absurd love for this film and the fascination with Austria that it has inspired. When it was released in 1965, The Sound of Music remained at Number 1 in Britain for 69 weeks, and sold almost twice as many copies as Abbey Road. At the height of the Cold War, the soundtrack was so firmly entrenched in British cultural consciousness that the BBC reportedly held it in reserve to broadcast if the four-minute warning for a nuclear strike was ever issued.

Sixty years on, the film has also profoundly shaped people’s perceptions of Austria’s role in the Second World War – as a reluctant partner to Nazi Germany. The film does not suggest Austria was entirely innocent; notably, Liesl’s love interest Rolf is the clearest representative of Austrians who did have Nazi sympathies. By and large, however, the film chooses to focus on those opposed to the Anschluss; when Captain von Trapp sings Edelweiss at the end of the film, he does so before an audience that joins in in patriotic unison.

Intriguingly, when the film first came out in Austria, its audience did not give it such a warm welcome. Just as Mary Poppins had shown a romanticised and somewhat fantastical version of London, The Sound of Music presented an Austria that would have been alien to those who lived there. Salzburg did not in fact border on Switzerland. Edelweiss, contrary to the belief of Ronald Reagan, who once arranged for it to be played at the White House as a tribute to the Austrian President, was not in fact Austria’s national anthem. Nor was schnitzel really served with noodles.

A more significant problem, perhaps, was the subject matter. A mere twenty years had passed since the end of the Second World War, and this period saw Austria focusing on reconstruction rather than coming to terms with its recent past. The Moscow Declaration of 1943, composed by the UK, the Soviet Union and the USA, had characterised Austria as a victim of Hitler’s aggression – and it seems that, for the most part, the country embraced this narrative in the decades following the end of the Second World War.

The reality, though, was much darker. During the war, an enormous number of Austrians had been involved with the Nazi regime and had contributed significantly to the execution of the Final Solution. Indeed, the historian Evan Burr Bukey notes that Austrian enthusiasm for Nazi ideology and antisemitism was often more intense than in Germany, particularly when it came to antisemitism and authoritarian nationalism.

The reappraisal of the country’s involvement in the war only came in 1986, almost 20 years after the release of The Sound of Music. Following the revelation that Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s president, had been involved in Nazi Germany’s war effort, international condemnation forced the country into intense soul-searching. Prior to this, the reality had been too hard to bear, as the Wien Museum in Vienna explores.

It makes sense, then, that a film touching on the Anschluss released so soon after the war’s end was unlikely to be well received. Indeed, Austrian officials, sensitive to the implications of wartime collaboration, initially objected to the use of swastika banners in Salzburg to depict the Anschluss, and relented only when filmmakers proposed using archival footage of Hitler being welcomed by cheering crowds in the city. ‘They insisted that we take down the banners as soon as the shot was over’, stated the film’s sketch artist, Maurice Zuberano in Julia Antopol Hirsch’s The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. ‘The only thing we still weren’t allowed to do was use a crowd cheering, but I think we made our point without it.’

Interestingly, the 1965 version was not the first time Maria von Trapp’s story had been dramatised. The Trapp Family (1956) and The Trapp Family in America (1958) had become the most successful films produced in Germany since the Second World War.

What really set The Sound of Music apart, and ultimately consigned it to the margins of Austrian memory, was who made it. The film’s opening panoramic shots of the Austrian hills (literally) screamed Hollywood. Yet Austria in 1965 was still totally humiliated by its defeat in the war. Here was a remake of the von Trapp films, so beloved in Germany and Austria, but now with a focus on the Anschluss told through the eyes of the victors; the whole film must have felt to audiences there like a reminder that they had been on the wrong side of history.

Indeed, the huge success of another film, Sissi, suggests that Austrians wanted to mythologise their past in a different way. Released in 1955, Sissi is an historical romance starring Romy Schneider following the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Set in the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film allowed Austrians in the 1950s to mythologise their past by focusing on a time when the country had been an epicentre of culture and extravagance. Whereas memories of recent history brought all sorts of complicated feelings, it was perhaps easier in the 1960s to focus instead on a romanticised and idyllic world.

In any case, I’ve learned my lesson – don’t try to talk to Austrians about The Sound of Music.