The White Horse Inn

In a way similar to The Sound of Music and the three Sissi movies, the play and its film versions have contributed to the popular image of Austria as an alpine idyll—the kind of idyll tourists have been seeking for almost a century now.

In the last decade of the 19th century, Oscar Blumenthal, a theatre director from Berlin, Germany, was on holiday in Lauffen (now part of Bad Ischl), a small town in the vicinity of St. Wolfgang.

At the same time the play promoted tourism in Austria, especially in and around St. Wolfgang, with a contemporary edition of the Baedeker praising the natural beauty of the region and describing the White Horse Inn as nicely situated at the lakefront next to where the steamboat can be taken for a romantic trip across the Wolfgangsee.

[1] Just as the play was about to be forgotten—a silent film The White Horse Inn directed by Richard Oswald and starring Liane Haid had been made in Germany in 1926—it was revived, again in Berlin, and this time as a musical comedy.

During the Third Reich the comedy was marginalized and not performed (Goebbels called it "eine Revue, die uns heute zum Hals heraushängt"—"the kind of entertainment we find boring and superfluous today"), whereas people in the 1950s, keen on harmony and shallow pleasures,[peacock prose] eagerly greeted revivals of the show.

While appreciating his aptness for the job, she mistrusts all men as potential gold-diggers, rejects Leopold's advances and longingly waits for the arrival of Dr Siedler, a lawyer who has been one of her regular guests for many years.

Angry at first about Siedler's presence at the same inn, Giesecke soon has the idea of marrying off his daughter to Sigismund Sülzheimer, thus turning a pending lawsuit into an advantageous business merger.

In addition, the musical triggered a number of spin-offs such as the 1961 Austrian comedy film Im schwarzen Rößl [de] (The Black Horse Inn), directed by Franz Antel, about a young woman (surprisingly, it was Karin Dor again, who had just played Giesecke's daughter in the 1960 version) who inherits a dilapidated hotel on the shores of the Wolfgangsee.