Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp was born in Zara, Dalmatia, then a Crown Land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Zadar, Croatia). Maria von Trapp's 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers was adapted into the West German film The Trapp Family (1956), which served as the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (1959) and the film adaptation directed by Robert Wise (1965). After his death in 1947, the family home in Stowe, Vermont, became a ski lodge, the Trapp Family Lodge. Trapp's accomplishments during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the Military Order of Maria Theresa.
Trapp declined a commission in the German Navy after the Anschluss and settled in the United States.
When he lost most of his wealth in the Great Depression, the family turned to singing as a way of earning a livelihood. Trapp hired Maria Augusta Kutschera to tutor one of his daughters and married Maria in 1927. His first wife Agathe Whitehead died of scarlet fever in 1922, leaving behind seven children. Trapp was the most successful Austro-Hungarian submarine commander of World War I, sinking 11 Allied merchant ships totaling 47,653 GRT and two Allied warships displacing a total of 12,641 tons. They kept going into Italy, at the time not firmly allied with Germany, and wound up in the U.S.Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – ) was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy who later became the patriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. In fact they made the excuse that they were going mountain climbing in the Alps, about 100km south.
CAPTAIN GEORGE VON TRAPP MOVIE
In the movie it looks like the Trapps escape by sneaking out their back yard and over the mountains into what on the map is obviously Germany. But he did have combat experience, knowledge of the local waters, and guts. The captain was in his mid-50s at the time, and his World War I sub had been only 40 feet long with a crew of five. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 he was offered command of a new submarine that was eventually to be based in the Adriatic. Trapp’s wartime exploits, which made him a national hero and earned him a baronetcy, hadn’t eluded the notice of Berlin, however. Having lost the war, A-H lost the port and the rest of its coastline as well. He wreaked havoc on allied shipping but in vain. During World War I Georg Trapp commanded a submarine launched from the Adriatic port of Fiume, then held by Austria-Hungary. Dear Cecil: The recent network showing of The Sound of Music called to mind the musical’s two howling bloopers: how can Captain von Trapp be a captain in the Austrian navy if Austria is a landlocked country, and why do the von Trapps, refugees from the Nazis, “climb every mountain” into what on the map looks like Berchtesgaden’s back yard? What about the real von Trapps? How did they actually escape Austria, and what navy was the captain in? (I know that before 1918 Austria held the coast of Yugoslavia, but then why would Hitler be hot to get his hands on somebody who hadn’t smelled salt water in twenty years?) David Drewer, Baltimore
0 kommentar(er)
