Educating Americans: The REAL Lili Marleen
I
love "Lili Marleen"! It is archetypically German, artless, yet deep
and full of heavy melancholy. A young German soldier, Hans Leip, wrote the
words in WWI.
But to be honest, I do heartily despise Marlene Dietrich, the Americans'
"Leelee Mar-lay-nee", that effing dyke! Was there really any NEED
baring her legs to American GIs while her brothers were killed in Russia
(metaphorically speaking)?
No
doubt whatsoever it was right to support the American war effort, but it
wouldn't have been exactly... detrimental to the latter had she stayed at home
in Hollywood or at least kept her legs covered and or would it? She was a war
profiteer, an opportunist and she 
would have jumped on any bandwagon that would have furthered her career.
So many Jews, who, different from her, HAD suffered, came back to Germany after
the war, either to live there or for other reasons! What effect did that
pompous "...never on German soil again!" have, but some brownie
points with the Americans? Germany had become a seventh-rate-entity when it
came to arts and entertainment (and many other things as well) anyway after the
war, gosh, her anti-Germanism was such a cheap shot — during the war and even
more so later.
"Marlene showing her loyalty to the 3rd
Division". I've never seen a
more absurd euphemism. Loyalties indeed, my behind! When I walk my dogs in bad
weather I hide my loyalties in green gumboots.
Moreover, I think she's a much overrated as an artist. She was never unpretentious
or unselfconscious, always studiously into some "effect", which I
always found, and still find, extremely irritating. Just do a "Google" search for her
pictures and be taken aback by the all the zombie-mugs that stare at you!
If you happen to like that song, please listen to the original
version, recorded in 1939,
and find out how the REAL "Lili Marleen" sounded. Melancholic, yet
totally artless and therefore so sincere — the antithesis of dyke-drama-queen
Marlene's version! And, as some might say, a voice of normality and humanness in
the ferocity of war and thus so appealing to every soldier on both sides.
Here's the history: In 1940, a song appeared which, at first, nobody wanted to
hear. It was called "Lili Marleen". Lale Andersen was the singer. Her
feminine voice seemed somewhat incongrous for words, supposedly those of a
soldier recalling the farewell from his girl in front of the barracks gate.
After its launch, the record remained on the sales shelves. No one wanted to
hear it.
By sheer chance, in 1941, "Lili Marleen" became the hallmark of the
German armed forces radio station "Soldatensender Belgrad",
broadcasting to the German occupation army in Yugoslavia.
The rest of the story is history. The slow, melancholic song became addictive
to all who listened to it, first the Germans from Spitzbergen to El Alamein.
Later, people, soldiers, all over the world hummed the melody to themselves or
sang out loud "Vor der Kaserne, vor dem großen Tor…" ("Outside
the barracks, at the great big gate…").
Unknown until then, the singer, Lale Andersen (Lieselotte Helene Berta
Bunnenberg) born on March 23, 1905 in Bremerhaven, Bremen's seaport, 
became a star. A woman as unpretentious as the song, that led her into a
legendary personal drama, when the borders between song and singer disappeared
as it happens often if an artist is strongly identified with one performance
only. For millions of listeners, Lale Andersen became Lili Marleen and the song
for her both, her lucky charm and curse. However, at the height of her fame,
Goebbels banned the singer from performing and from leaving the country because
of her correspondence with Jewish emigrants in Switzerland. But in the
meantime, the song had become so popular and the soldiers' demand for
"their" Lili Marleen so high, that Lale Andersen was allowed to
perform again after nine months.
Lale
Andersen had considerable talents, one of them was the performance of folksongs
in the 
Low German tongue of her native North Germany, but she continued after the war to
sing Lili Marleen at every concert, and up unto her death, as if it were her
only tune and her only talent. She sang it in other languages as well and it
always made me smile. How can anybody sing as little as: "Outside the barracks…"
and it is clear ALREADY that she is from Bremerhaven?
Lale
Andersen died on a promotional tour on August 29, 1972 in Vienna
Norbert Schulze, who wrote "Lili Marleen", was (before the end of
WWII, that is) a prolific composer of military marching tunes, usually to
aggressive and chauvinist texts. It is a sort of historical irony that this
soft, un-martial song would be what mainly survived from his work. After the
war he composed quite a few popular, though, somehow not surprisingly,
unmilitary, tunes again (among them "Nimm
mich mit Kapitän auf die Reise", which I LOVED as a child) and used to
be, for many years, President of the GEMA, the only too-important German
society for the protection of performing rights for composers, arrangers,
authors and publishers. He died on October 14, 2002 in Bad Tölz at the age of
91.
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