Lili Marlene: the Biography of a Song

Rosa Sala Rose Lili Marlene: The Biography of a Song Translated from Spanish by Paul Hammond CONTENTS: Introduction A narrative of origins A song of love and death The identity of Lili Marleen Freud’s niece and the “real” Lili Marleen The true conspirators The metamorphosis of Lale Andersen An abortive Lili Marleen The “non-elect”: Norbert Schultze The sentry with a woman’s voice The race for success A Nazi song? The North African front Lili Marleen on the Russian front The dark side of Lili Marleen Lili Marlene as the spoils of war Lale Andersen, a political animal The fall from grace A timely suicide attempt The “indirect propaganda” of Marlene Dietrich Marlene Dietrich at the front Lili Marlene in Las Vegas Lili Marleen: faithful or flighty? From Lili to Barbie Lili Marleen and the street lamp Fassbinder, or the swansong Bibliography Introduction The once popular chanteuse Mistinguett said that a song “has always been the finest echo of a moment, of an era.”1 Were this to be true, Lili Marlene, “the only song worth mentioning that the Second World War has contributed to the world repertoire,”2 would have the dubious honor of being the finest of echoes of the grimmest of eras. The disturbing thing is that it was precisely a German song that became the unofficial hymn of the soldiers of all fronts during the century’s major conflict, streets ahead of any other English, French or American number of the period. According to this criterion, it could be said that Lili Marlene represents an unexpected cultural victory for Nazism. John Steinbeck even asked if it wouldn’t “be amusing if, after all the fuss and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the Nazis was ‘Lilli [sic] Marlene’.”3 Even today this ambivalent legacy bedevils its reception. For some Germans Lili Marleen—this being its German spelling—was a justification, tangible proof that not everything that had come out of the Third Reich was bad. For others, its ethereal presence helped to conceal, beneath a nostalgic and sentimental mantle, the horrors of Nazism. But for those who experienced its success in the front line, namely at the front, Lili Marlene was merely a way for them to reconnect with their individuality and their feelings in a brutally dehumanized mass environment. To determine where the innocence of a song like Lili Marlene begins and ends is one of the aims of this book. 1 Mistinguett, Memorias, p. 83. 2 J. Frank Dobie, “When Work’s All Done This Fall”, p. 323. 3 John Steinbeck, “Lilli Marlene”, in Once There was a War, p. 48. Steinbeck’s essay was first published in July 1943. No truly interesting phenomenon—and Lili Marlene is undoubtedly one such—lacks a kind of mystery that defies all analysis. When asked why her song was so successful, Lale Andersen, the German singer who it made famous, merely replied, “Can the wind explain why it turns into a storm?” Even today nobody can say for certain why it was this tune and not some other that became the great song of the war. The trite explanation that it was the magical combination of the right place, the right time and the right melody becomes particularly complex in the case of Lili Marlene: the lyrics were born during the First World War from the pen of Hans Leip, and the music during the first years of the Third Reich thanks to Norbert Schultze; the first recording, made by Lale Andersen, was released the year Hitler invaded Poland, and its success, the work of the military broadcaster Radio Belgrade, came about when for the Germans the war was beginning to turn into a succession of defeats. Be that as it may, Lili Marlene is just a humble, banal ditty. Even so, we feel confident that the life of a song appearing within a handful of years that marked the destiny of millions of people is sound enough to sustain a good story, at least. A narrative of origins In every origin there is a myth, they say. In the same way as the gods of mythology, Lili Marlene also boasts a story about the exact circumstances of its miraculous birth. It is a story that stems from a single, unverifiable and vague source—Hans Leip’s memory—and it calls for something of an act of faith on our part. The historical reality of the episode this now largely forgotten writer from Hamburg recounts resists any attempt at verification. But Lili Marlene is now a myth, so let us let it be born as such. All the same, before becoming a myth it was a song, and before that, a humble poem. Its infancy, then, is genuinely literary. The progenitor of the lyrics, Hans Leip, was born on an avenue that bore the name of another poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath, one of many nineteenth-century German authors in whose work the yearning for democracy went hand in hand with vehement nationalism. “Black is the powder, / red the blood / and the flame flares in gold!” go the once famous lines he devoted to the colors of the German flag. Leip recounts that his mother, of humble birth, considered the fact that little Hans had been born on the street of a great German poet to be a portent; and also a protection against the greatest of her fears: that the boy, attracted by the muffled bellowing of the ocean liners that was heard through the window, would decide to follow in his father’s footsteps of and go off to sea. “You were born on Freiligrath Avenue,” she told him. “It’s called that in honor of a great poet. It’s best to become one of them!”4 Leip’s mother was not to know that at the time the real danger threatening her son resided not so much in the sea as in the warlike patriotism that poems like Freiligrath’s instilled in thousands of young minds. 4 Hans Leip, Das Tanzrad, p. 14. Little Hans’s godfather, an incurable old salt, had done all he could to counteract Freiligrath’s supposedly positive influence. And so he’d resorted to an old sailors’ dodge, which involved pouring salt water into the baptismal font so that the child thus baptized would succumb to the call of the sea. And the method must have worked, for behind his parents’ backs Leip, with the habitual attraction the forbidden exerts, would end up signing on as a cabin boy. A few weeks on a fishing boat peeling potatoes and gutting fish were enough to break the spell and to turn him forever into a landlubber. The sea and its influence would continue to haunt Leip’s thoughts, however, albeit tamed and sublimated in the more than a hundred literary works by this prolific author, who turned the imagery of the port, the adventures of pirates, and the sentimentality of seafarers into his aesthetic banner: a genuine surge of ink in which only Lili Marlene has managed to drop anchor in the collective memory. When the famous German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicky put together his own personal anthology of German poetry in 2003, Lili Marleen was the only Hans Leip poem he considered worthy of inclusion in it.5 Leip recounts that Lili Marleen was the progeny of the First World War, not of the Second as many people think. It was this contest— ingenuously called the “Great War,” since it was thought impossible that a greater one could ever come along—which provided the set of circumstances that gave rise to the poem. The child’s delivery took place in Berlin, a city the incipient author went to when called up after some shortlived studies in art history and a few unhappy years as a teacher. Perhaps the opportune distance from any seaport of the grand capital of the Second Empire protected Lili Marleen from the seafaring stuff and nonsense of its creator and turned it into a song fit for the infantry. After 5 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Meine Gedichte. Von Walther von der Vogelweide bis heute. all, Leip—probably thanks to his considerable stature—managed to end up in the Regiment of Fusiliers of the Imperial Guard, an institution as antiquated as it was decidedly terrestrial, the barracks of which were situated in the middle of the city. Hans Leip around the time he wrote the poem Lili Marleen, wearing the imposing blue uniform of Prussia. In the 1920s children liked to don these uniforms at carnival time. (Courtesy Staat- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg) Much of the military training involved practicing the presenting of arms and parading, all this with a view to showing off the skills of the troops during the triumphal march the German Second Reich, emboldened by its military successes of 1871, was hoping to execute in the near future, and this with few casualties. A “stroll to Paris” is how Kaiser Wilhelm II had dubbed the impending fight. However, the “stroll” turned into the first major catastrophe of the twentieth century, and many of those young lads who were being foolishly trained in victory would have occasion to experience the bitterness and incoherence of the war at first hand. A stroke of luck saved Leip from having to prematurely swap his splendid full-dress uniform for the mouse-gray battledress his comrades were massacred in at the front, since he was unexpectedly selected for an officers’ training course. Judging from Leip’s own declarations,6 that stroke 6 Hans Leip, Das Tanzrad, p.

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