I’ve been to all three military cemeteries in the vicinity of the D-Day landings (81 years ago today): German, British, American. What struck me about them was the commonality of death—the death of youth.
As I walked among the headstones at
Colleville-sur-Mer (American), Bayeux (German) and La Cambe (German), it seemed
like the preponderance of the men lying there didn’t make it past age 25, both
the attackers and the defenders. The way of the world is that old men start
wars and young men fight them.
But here’s something that all these guys,
blokes and Jungs might have been listening to, a song that pierced all their hearts
wherever they were and whatever uniform they wore: “Lili Marlene”.
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.)
We’ll go today with Lale Andersen’s version, the one that etched itself into the hearts of millions of men in all kinds of uniforms 81 years ago.
©2025 Bas Bleu
