Bless my homeland forever
Frank Spotnitz's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's classic alternate-history dystopia The Man in the High Castle is alternately ballsy and flawed, but does get this much right: it opens with Jeanette Olsson's tender rendition of "Edelweiss," the song's thick longing turned sour by off-kilter music, the recording apparently defective as it skips forward a few times. This is nostalgia curdling gradually into nightmare: we see images of American monuments, maps of the country, flags, war footage. Eventually (like a creeping pestilence) we see swastikas here, there--hints of the state of the world as it exists in the series.
"Edelweiss" of course was written by Oscar Hammerstein with music by Richard Rogers for the 1959 musical The Sound of Music. It's about as Austrian as french fries are French.
