Bernadette Wegenstein

The Salzkammergut as film set can be categorised into two principal kinds of stories: romantic love stories and, more recently, crime stories. Since the 1950s the theme of romantic love has been developed predominantly in comedies and soap operas, while the crime story has more recently developed into the thriller genre, mostly for television.

I want to start by classifying both themes as classic "repression themes" set against the stunning beauty of this region and especially the mystery of its lakes. In other words, love and crime serve as popular ingredients in a form of escapism that allows the audience to project themselves into a world of happy endings and impossible real-life outcomes. For instance, in the heimatfilm ("homeland film") genre we encounter the overcoming of class barriers, when the Emperor of Austria gets his way and marries a rambunctious teenager from a noble family in Bavaria (Sissi,1 1955); or when an Austrian baron marries a nun (The Trapp Family, 1956 and The Sound of Music, 1965); or when a charming waiter gets promoted to owning a luxury lake hotel (The White Horse Inn, 1960). As far as the thriller and horror genres are concerned, overcoming barriers is of a different nature: for instance, a police investigation of many years is resolved when a serial killer is caught and drowned by a teenager half her size on a shaky rowing boat in the middle of the Traunsee (Dead in Three Days, 2006); or, in a recent episode of the TV crime series Tatort (True Lies, 2019), when a dead body is found inside a car in the Lake Wolfgangsee and the police investigation mysteriously leads into the world of illegal weapons trafficking.

I want to start with what I believe is one of the origins of the heimatfilm melodrama, this one set within the Salzkammergut scenery and represented in the first film in the classic Sissi-trilogy (1955), in a chapter called "To Ischl." In this fairytale plot, none other than the Emperor of Austria proposes to a young princess, in fact demands of her to become his wife, which his mother, the Archduchess Sophie, contests because she does not deem Sissi worthy of being an empress. The scene opens with Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, played by Magda Schneider, Romy Schneider's mother in real life, getting her daughters Helene (Nene) and Elisabeth (Sissi) ready to travel to Bad Ischl to celebrate young Emperor Franz Joseph's birthday. The fact that one of the ladies-inwaiting is playing the romantic Chopin waltz No. 1 in A-Flat Major, called "Valse de l'adieu", gives us a hint that this might be the "adieu" to Sissi's childhood.

After sixteen-year-old Sissi and her entourage arrive in Bad Ischl, the teenager secretly leaves her residency and goes looking for the right place to fish, when she accidentally "fishes" the Emperor himself, as she puts it, with her fishing line that gets caught in his jacket (images 1-2). When the Emperor realises that the rod belongs to the beautiful young Sissi, he gets out of his horse wagon and suggests going on a detour with her on his own and without his entourage, to "show her the beautiful natural environment of Bad Ischl"2 (image 3). For comic effect, the police officer Major Bockl, played by Josef Meinrad, follows his Emperor in secret as he suspects Sissi to be a potential terrorist. In this scene, the beauty of the Salzkammergut landscape functions as a backdrop to both the romantic storyline, as Franz Joseph makes a point of showing the stunning nature to his new love interest, and of course also as a visual backdrop itself. But the beauty of Bad Ischl's nature always remains connected to the characters, as we get to see very few e

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