Since yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, for today’s earworm we’re having something that soldiers on both sides would have been listening to.
The song we know as “Lili Marlene” originated
as a poem in the First World War (the one that was supposed to end all wars),
written by a Hamburg schoolteacher conscripted into the German army, Hans Leip.
It was set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and recorded by a German
singer, Lale Andersen, in 1939.
The gist of the piece is a lonely soldier on
watch, missing his girlfriend. Pretty universal—I expect there was some Greek
song around 520 BCE that expresses the same thoughts.
The song pretty much went nowhere until in 1941
German troops occupied Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, and needed recordings to
broadcast over Radio Belgrade. Andersen’s “Lili Marlene” was one of the few
discs the station had, so it got played a lot. And soldiers loved it.
But Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels
loathed it. It wasn’t sufficiently martial—no proper German soldiers had time
to miss their girlfriends or be anything but aggressively victorious. Besides,
Andersen hung around with Jewish artists, which was not the done thing.
Still—soldiers within range of Radio Belgrade
demanded more “Lili Marlene”. It expanded coverage to North Africa, where the
British Eighth Army took it up. By the time Allied forces landed on the
Normandy beaches in 1944, it was on everyone’s playlist, and a standard for
Marlene Dietrich’s USO performances. Vera Lynn also covered it.
(It's kind of interesting that a song with a male soldier's narrative seems only to have been covered by female singers.)
Today we’re going to go back to Lale Andersen’s
version, the one that etched itself into the hearts of millions of men in all
kinds of uniforms 80 years ago.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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