Can the wind explain why it becomes a storm?
(Norbert Schultze, composer of Lili Marlene)
I am sure most people have these days that they can hardly bear to even read the headlines of all the news stories that bombard us, day after day after day. This Sunday, I was having one of those ‘Please, why don’t you just go away?’ arguments with the clamouring world of online news, when I came upon the following story.
It’s about one of my favourite songs – and it also mentions one of my most beloved dead performers, Marlene Dietrich. During her life, Dietrich was probably more famous for her movies than for her songs but most people who remember her today will probably do so because of two songs.
The first one is ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ – a song I will give a link to, directly below this paragraph. It’s one of the first anti-war songs I ever heard and I found it absolutely devastating in its singular beauty and simplicity – and I still can’t listen to it without feeling the urge to cry. The other song she made famous was, of course, Lili Marlene, and the following quote is from a lovely article about the history of that song. Please go and read the whole story, after you finish listening to both these songs.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, was reported as hating the song ‘Lily Marlene’ for not being “military” enough. To loyal Nazis, the song seemed to be anti-war, even close to treason, and singer Lale Andersen was believed to be sympathetic towards Jews, so the song was banned. By 1941, the Germans were broadcasting to their troops in North Africa from a radio station in Belgrade. When the station was shelled, most of its records were smashed and the station was desperately short of music to play. One day the station’s military director, Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Reintgen, came across a dusty box in which a few records had survived – and right at the bottom was Lili Marlene. Officially the recording had been banned, but Reintgen knew that a buddy of his in the Afrika Korps had liked the song, and they had precious little else to play, so Lili Marlene was broadcast.
It was a turning point. The German troops asked for the recording over and over again, and non-military people also requested it. Field Marshal Rommel didn’t agree with Goebbels and asked Radio Belgrade to play the song every night. Goebbels was forced to retract, and to pretend that the Nazis welcomed the song. The song survived the Second World War, was translated into 48 languages (including Hebrew and Latin) and featured on hit parades in countries as diverse as the US and Japan. When the original recording artist, Lale Andersen, was asked in 1972 if she could explain the popularity of Lili Marlene, she replied, “Can the wind explain why it became a storm?”
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