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?
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. 77.
of luck was a poisoned chalice: at the time the custom was still extant of officers setting an example by being the first to brandish the saber at the head of their troops, thus becoming privileged targets for the enemy or, in extreme cases, for their own soldiers, who could shoot them in the back. Obviously, this led to the massacre of highly trained military men, and so in the First World War an end was put to this practice as well as to other chivalrous habits inherited from the warlike customs of yore: a further step towards the wars of the twentieth century becoming the graceless, unmitigated horror we all know. In any event, for the moment his training as an officer would enable Leip to quit his inhospitable barracks and to rent, along with a comrade in arms, a room in a private house, although that didn’t exempt him from the blowing of Taps (or Last Post) that, as for other soldiers, sounded at 10 pm, the hour after which no serviceman was to be abroad. This would be the hour at which, a few decades later, the song of Lil Marlene was listened to by millions of people on the radio. It was in that rented room that Hans Leip had met “Lili.” Or rather Betty, the daughter of the greengrocers who had their shop on the ground floor of the house, whom he saw for the first time from the window as she was feeding the chickens. Years later the nickname Leip gave her, “Lili,” would have a resonance as remote as his own grenadier’s uniform, seeing as after the Great War almost nobody would have spontaneously given a girl such a nickname for the same reasons Leip did: Lili—Lili Schöneman—was the name of the first formal sweetheart the German author par excellence, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, had in Frankfurt. In Leip the scene of the young Betty attracting the hens with chickenfeed would have given rise to an association with a somewhat famous poem by Goethe, Lily’s Menagerie.
Goethe had composed the poem in 1775, while ill at ease with the power of fascination radiated by his exquisite fiancée, which made him feel, to his regret, like a bear tamed by the magic of love and irremediably trapped in the private zoo formed by the young woman’s suitors. (In fact Goethe would end up breaking these thankless ties with a clumsiness worthy of a bear: by escaping to Weimar and leaving the girl behind without a word). Of the long Goethe poem it was probably lines like these that Leip related mentally to that young woman and her hens: Oh what a cackling, what a shrieking,
When near the door she takes her stand,
With her food-basket in her hand!
Oh what a croaking, what a squeaking!
Alive all the trees
And the bushes appear,
While to her feet whole troops draw near;
The very fish within, the water clear
Splash with impatience and their heads protrude;
And then she throws around the food
With such a look!—the very gods delighting
(To say nought of beasts).
7
The spontaneous association of these classical verses with the unknown girl of the poultry yard shows the extent to which German high culture was still present in the daily lives of the men of that time. The caesura of the First World War, which opened the floodgates to the tide of modernity and the avant-gardes, and particularly the rupture of 1945, 7
“Lilis Park” (fragment), in Heinz Nicolai (ed.), Goethe, Sämtliche Gedichte in zeitlicher Folge, pp. 185-189. Translated
by Edgar Alfred Bowring as Lily’s Menagerie, available at: http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Goethe/goethe_lilys_menagerie.htm
would be quick to turn this bourgeois culture into an object of interest for philologists, into part of that “world of yesterday” Stefan Zweig dramatically evoked in his autobiography. But for German youngsters of Leip’s generation that world inhabited on a daily basis by the verses of Goethe and Schiller continued to form part of the present. It just so happened that the beautiful Betty-Lili, whom Leip describes cavorting in the greengrocer’s amid potatoes, bottles of beer, and jars of sauerkraut, had also strongly attracted the attention of his roommate, Klaas Deterts, such that, in an excess of courtesy, the poet granted him first rights in seducing her. And while Deterts put all his efforts into this enterprise, Leip tried to use his spare time to visit museums and to go on preparing his artistic studies. It was in the Berlin Nationalgalerie that he met Marleen, who—always according to Leip’s story—appeared in the gallery wearing an elegant feather boa. Unlike the coarse Betty-Lili, this sophisticated, liberal nurse, daughter of a military physician, became Leip’s lover, and did so with an alacrity unusual for the period. On one occasion they were discovered in flagrante by her landlady, who immediately starting giving them a moral lecture, but Marleen interrupted her by saying in a determined voice, “My good woman, just imagine what might happen tomorrow…” In 1915 the meaning of that phrase was clear enough without needing to fill in the dots. The hospital and streets of Berlin were already beginning to fill up with mutilated or blind young men returning from the trenches. Marleen, a nurse on night duty in a field hospital, knew better than anyone the practical meaning of that “stroll to Paris” Germany had set off on with nonsensical patriotic arrogance, and which, converted into an interminable and extraordinarily brutal war of stalemate, would end up sealing the fate of the Second Reich. The landlady understood. She said no
more, turned on her heel and left them alone. Nobody had the moral authority to deny a soldier his illicit lovemaking on the day before dying. The incident of the landlady, although trivial, is a revealing indication of the huge change in outlook the experience of the First World War was going to bring to Germany and the rest of Europe. The rigid values of the Wilhelminian era were unable to support the fact that, in the name of the Kaiser, a whole generation of young Germans was being decimated in the trenches. The probability of a premature death was breaking pre-established schemas and opening a moral breach in earlier generations, a breach whose most immediate consequence, at least in the big cities, was to be the hedonism typical of the “Golden Twenties.” It was as if the war had broken the cultural world of the period into two opposite halves. A more or less resigned fatalism was mixed with a fervent desire to live that encountered its most explosive manifestation in eroticism. Expressionism was not the only phenomenon to register this extreme polarization—the verses Hans Leip devoted to his imagined Lili Marleen picked up on it, too. Two women provided the title of the famous song, then. Leip recounts that the magical linking of the two names and their crystallization in the form of a poem occurred on the night of 3-4 April 1915 while he was on guard duty at a side entrance to the barracks. It was his last night in Berlin: the next morning he was due to leave for the front in the Carpathians. He was in a melancholy frame of mind, “it was raining slightly and the sweet breath of spring was already approaching from Invalidenpark.”8 Just before going to his guard post he had had to fend off an amorous attack from Betty-Lili who, it seems, was incapable of 8
Pascher, Fridhardt (ed.), Heimat deine Sterne. Lili Marleen und der Soldatensender
Belgrad (CD).
accepting Leip’s surrendering of her to his friend. Once safe from all erotic temptation in his post by the barracks gate, as the raindrops glistened in the halo of light cast by a streetlamp, Leip felt a deep yearning. “And I was saying ‘Marleen,’ but thinking of Lili, and saying ‘Lili,’ but thinking of Marleen.”9 Self-absorbed, he forgot to stand to attention before a superior who was walking in front of him at that same moment, and while being reprimanded he saw Marleen pass beneath the halo of light on the way to her nocturnal round of duty. She looked at him and whispered a few words he didn’t catch, for he had to go on standing to attention, pretending to listen to the crass comments the officer kept on making. It was to be the last time he would see her. When he was alone again, all that remained of Marleen was the imprint of her high heels on the wet ground, reflected in the yellow light of the streetlamp, while a vague presentiment of death suddenly formed a lump in his throat. [The presentiment] soothed me, transformed, as it was, into a hum that kept to the rhythm of the steps I was taking as I went back and forth between the jambs of the doorway. Familiar to me since childhood, the drone conjoined the two names that had been whispered to me here, in the city of Berlin so strange to me, as if in them there resided my sustenance and my talisman. They blended into one and, all but amorphous, turned into a single desire and a single feeling of oppression, amorously reborn in a single expression that wasn’t Lili and wasn’t Marleen, but Lili Marleen. Then, all the accumulated fear and anxiety left me [...]. Suddenly I was sure I was going to return, even if only as a specter, a figure we from the coast are familiar with. As if by magic, line by line, there gradually came into being a 10
poem noted musically in the sparkling reflection of the asphalt.
This,
9
according
to
Hans Leip, Das Tanzrad, p. 78.
10
Ibid., p. 79.
Leip,
was
the
genesis
of
Lili
Marleen.
A song of love and death
Following the changing of the guard, Leip, prone on his camp bed, hastily jotted down the first three strophes of the poem in a notebook. These are the lines, translated almost literally:
Vor der Kaserne vor dem großen Tor stand eine Laterne, und steht sie noch davor, So wolln wir uns dort wiedersehn, bei der Laterne wolln wir stehn, wie einst, Lili Marleen. Unsere beiden Schatten sahn wie einer aus. Daß wir so lieb uns hatten, das sah man gleich daraus. Und alle Leute solln es sehn wenn wir bei der Laterne stehn, wie einst, Lili Marleen. Schon rief der Posten, sie blasen Zapfenstreich, es kann drei Tage kosten, Kamerad, ich komm ja gleich! Da sagten wir auf Wiedersehn, wie gerne wollt ich mit dir gehn, mit dir, Lili Marleen In front of the barracks, Before the main gate,
Stood a lamppost, If it still stands there, That’s where we shall meet again, By the lamppost we’ll stand, Like we used to, Lili Marleen. Our two shadows Were as one. We were so in love, As anyone could see at a glance. All the world should know, When they see us standing there, Like we used to, Lili Marleen. The guard called out, They’re blowing Taps! That could cost you three days. Comrade, I’ll be right there! Then we said farewell, How I’d have liked to go with you, With you, Lili Marleen.
So, the poem composed on that rainy night in Berlin concludes with the loved one’s parting. Curiously, Leip, a versatile artist, conceived these verses from the first as a song and had even set them to music, as he would later do with many other of his poems, but that musical version never became popular. Its first performance took place the following day in Leip’s apartment, where he and his companions still had an unexpected free night before leaving for the front, a night they made use of to sing drunkenly, at the top of their voices, as a form of send-off. The beer had been brought by Betty the greengrocer, the selfsame “Lili” of the song. Decades later, Hans Leip would tell his fourth wife Kathrin that the group
intoning of the intimate song he’d composed the night before seemed like an intolerable display of his feelings, so that he told his cronies that it was an old popular song and that any rapport of the lyrics with the emotional situation he was going through at the time was pure coincidence. 11 After that memorable night of singing and drinking, the front awaited them. Of the quartet who sang Lili Marleen for the first time, only two survived: Klaas Deterts—Betty-Lili’s admirer—who would become a schoolteacher, and Hans Leip, who was able to abandon the front thanks to an injury to his spine caused by an accident during the transportation of some prisoners. Decades later, in 1945, Leip would get a letter from Deterts. In it his old companion tells him: “In July 1945 I was fired from my job for being too Nazi. Like a Parsifal who diligently searches for a Grail, without being aware of doing anything bad, I have ended up in this situation.” Deterts, encouraged by the fame his old friend Leip has found thanks precisely to Lili Marleen, asks him for an affidavit of good conduct in order to get his denazification hearing off to a good start. In Germany such testimonials were nicknamed Persilschein, “Persil certificates”: the brand of detergent alludes to its magical ability to “wash whiter” those who had been bespattered by the brown mud of Nazism. So as to help Leip in his labors, Deterts even indicates the phrases that ought to appear in the longed-for piece of paper:
I’ll give you a few clues which you, a master of the German language, will know how to give shape to better than I: that you’ve known me for thirty years, that I ended up in National Socialism due to my credulity and my good faith, that in no way do I have a political personality, that dictatorial ambitions are foreign to my 11
See Johann Holzem, Lili Marleen und Belgrad 1941, p. 17.
nature, but rather, given my character, I have democratic tendencies, that in no way would you think me capable of having benefited from the Party [...] At the end, also point out that you have never been a member of the Nazi Party. Can you send me the report as soon as possible?
In the Hans Leip Archive there is a copy of the ensuing recommendation:
I have known Klaas Deterts since 1914 [...]. Never have I had a more sincere comrade. He was of impeccable character, frank, decent, and he had a simple loyalty that would never dare resist official or legal orders, that he is ever ready to recognize any form of state and government as the outcome of a will superior to his own, and that he will always feel attracted by all that is important, grand and forward-looking in such orders. This is how, in good faith, Klaas Deterle came to join the NSDAP [the Nazi Party] in his day.
12
However, Leip’s manuscript page suddenly breaks off a few lines further on. Did he actually send the report or did he realize in time that it had been precisely the “simple loyalty that would never dare resist official or legal orders” which he detected in his old friend that had enabled Adolf Hitler to take power and to hold on to it? But let us return to 1915. In the notebook he’d scrawled Lili Marleen in, Leip also hinted at a fourth verse he did not develop. Although he’d already had an inkling of them that same night, both this and the fifth and final verse would not be committed to paper until 1937, when his publisher demanded a poetry anthology that Leip entitled Die kleine Hafenorgel [The Little Squeezebox]. As he would declare in an interview many years later, to begin with he resisted incorporating Lili Marleen in this anthology since to him the magical instant reflected in the poem still seemed to be “albeit 12
Both texts are in the Hans Leip Archive, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg [NLp: B 39: 1-4].
marvelous, too private a memory,”13 and he only agreed to do so at the insistence of his publisher. Thus, as he recalls in his autobiography, he made use of the occasion to add the two last verses:
It wasn’t until twenty years later, when I was determined to publish some of my poems, that I added the final verses as a categorical expression of everything I’d felt at the moment of gestation, without having had the nerve to be fully aware of it: the feeling of a final farewell, of an infinite nostalgia beyond death and of a 14
spectral return among the living.
These are the two verses he added in that second phase:
Deine Schritte kennt sie, deinen zieren Gang, alle Abend brennt sie, mich vergaß sie lang. Und sollte mir ein Leids geschehn, wer wird bei der Laterne stehn mit dir, Lili Marleen? Aus dem stillen Raume, aus der Erde Grund hebt mich wie im Traume dein verliebter Mund. Wenn sich die späten Nebel drehn werd ich bei der Laterne stehn wie einst, Lili Marleen.
13
Pascher, Fridhardt (ed.), Heimat deine Sterne. Lili Marleen und der Soldatensender Belgrad (CD)
14
Hans Leip in a 1950s newspaper article, cited in Bettina Hindemith and Sabine Milewski, Lili Andersen – Lale
Marleen. Die Geschichte einer Legende, CD 1.
It knows your footfall, Your delicate stride. It burns each evening, Me it forgot long ago. And if a mishap should befall me, Who will be by the lamppost With you, Lili Marleen? From out of silent space, From the depths of the earth, Your loving lips Elevate me as in a dream. When the night mists swirl, I’ll be by the lamppost As before, Lili Marleen
By then Leip had every reason to feel safe in terms of the gloomy premonition he’d avoided putting in writing years before. By 1937 he was already too old to be called up and although military uniforms were increasingly present in the daily lives of the German people, hardly anyone believed in another war. Instead, on that rainy Berlin night in 1915, when he was on the point of going off to battle, Leip didn’t want to give visible form to the two ominous verses that had appeared ghostlike in his imagination. Decades later, Leip would recognize that he hadn’t written them down out of pure superstition: he hadn’t wanted to record “the intuition of death and the vision of the specter, typical of coastal dwellers, for fear of the effect they might have by being physically evoked through writing.” 15 After all, these verses no longer simply speak of a farewell—an ultra-conventional motif in the genre of sentimental lyric poetry—but of the definitive goodbye of 15
Cited in Leonhardt, “Das Lied von der Lili und der anderen”, in Die Zeit (22 September 1978), no. 39.
death. The line “And if a mishap should befall me” is tantamount to a reflection of the unfinished sentence Marleen had fired in due course at the landlady who had surprised them making love. In it the possibility is discreetly expressed of dying at the front by hinting via a subjunctive and an ambiguous “mishap” that suggests death without actually naming it. The fifth and final verse confirms the portent of the fourth: through it we know that the lyrical self has indeed died, since its ghost has made a “spectral return among the living” and roams around wrapped in swirls of nocturnal mist in order to approach a loved one who is still waiting for him beneath the streetlamp. In a TV recording Leip would say that it is “the vision of a return from the tomb: from a common grave, naturally.” 16 Linked in this instance to common graves and trenches, we have here a romantic arsenal of superstitions and fantasies very common in northern climes, especially among seafaring folk like Leip. Who is Lili Marleen still waiting for “When the night mists swirl”? For the soldier who has died without her knowing it? Or perhaps for a new love who will also end up dying in a tragic cycle? The song, in any event, is somber. There is a change in attitude of the person who hears it for the first time when he or she twigs that those beautiful verses spring in fact from the mouth of a dead soldier. For Hans Leip, this “seemingly inoffensive” song is no more than “a macabre, extremely frightening dance,”17 although elsewhere he also calls it “a simple love song.” Both things are true: Lili Marleen, probably the best-known poem of the twentieth century in German, is a song of love, but also of death. Eros and Thanatos, the two great antagonistic divinities who sport with the human species, contrive to meet in it. A certainly singular circumstance for 16
In Guido Knopp, Mitos Lili Marleen, documentary made for ZDF (2008).
17
Hans Leip to E. Lüth (16 November 1946), in Rüdiger Schütt, Dichter gibt es nur im Himmel, p. 434.
a song that thousands of German soldiers would end up adoring, soldiers who overlooked Leip’s precautionary superstitions and died in combat with it on their lips, and which led Norbert Schultze Junior, son of the composer who set it to music, to say that “even in all its innocuousness” he “cannot declare [the song] innocent” since “it has sentimentally sublimated death.”18 No twentieth-century song has been translated into as many languages as Lili Marleen. Many of these translations were made during the war, during the years of maximum popularity of the German version sung by Lale Andersen. Some were adaptations created by the Axis powers for the countries they were occupying; others, usurpations by the Allies. But none of them incorporate the fantasmagoric final verse which, significantly, would only be retained in the original version that German soldiers sang. For example, the English version that professional songwriter Tommie Connor composed in 1944 for the Maurice Music Company unhesitatingly omitted Leip’s “metaphysical verses.” The ending is that of a classic love song featuring a soldier and his girl: Resting in a billet Just behind the line Even tho’ we’re parted Your lips are close to mine You wait where the lantern softly gleams Your sweet face seems to haunt my dreams My Lili of the lamplight My own Lili Marlene.
The French version that Henri Lemarchand wrote in 1940 expresses nostalgia for a better past, a perspective that is perhaps not lacking a certain 18
Cited in “Frühling für Hitler und Lili Marleen”, en Der Spiegel (19-I-1981), p. 174.
allegorical dimension, bearing in mind that the lyrics were composed in a France recently occupied by the Germans. Seemingly, a merely amorous nostalgia is involved, of course: Cette tendre histoire De nos chers vingt ans Chante en ma mémoire Malgré les jours, les ans Il me semble entendre ton pas Et je te serre entre mes bras Lily, Lily Marlène This tender story Of our dear twenties Sings in my memory Despite the days, the years I hear your footfall, it seems And I take you in my arms Lili, Lili Marlene.
The acceptance Leip’s final verses met with in the official German version is all the more shocking if we compare them to the versions that were written in other countries of Fascist affiliation. The Italian version Nino Rastelli composed in 1942, for instance, does not forsake the canons of the conventional love song and restricts itself to expressing the desire to meet the beloved once again (tutte le notti sogno allor / di ritornar, di riposar / a te Lili Marleen). The Spanish version sung by the División Azul, on the other hand, with its traditional, enthusiastic air, is all but the perfect antithesis to the mournful spirit Leip’s final verses exude. In no way is the possibility of death presaged in final verses like these: Cuando vuelva a España con mi división llenará de flores
mi niña su balcón. Yo seré entonces tan feliz que no sabré más que decir: mi amor, Lili Marlen, mi amor es para ti. When I return to Spain With my division, My girl will fill Her balcony with flowers. Then I’ll be so happy I won’t know what more to say: My love, Lili Marlene, My love’s for you.
Albeit from very different premises, obviously, the North American version that Marlene Dietrich herself wrote 1945, less lyrical than its English predecessor and of simple effectiveness, inverts Leip’s original fatefulness, replacing it with an optimism more in keeping with the wholly justified expectations of victory the United States had at the time. There is no feeling of hesitation, but rather confidence in this desire to create a better world: “a world for two”: Outside the barracks By the corner light I’ll always stand And wait for you at night We will create a world for two I’ll wait for you the whole night through For you, Lili Marlene.
It was also Marlene Dietrich who, in the American film Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961) and in a highly significant context,
drew our attention to the curious difference between the somber drive of the original poem and its dozens of imitations. In the role of the widow of a German general who has been executed for war crimes, the actress tours the ghostly landscape of ruins that the city of Nuremberg has become with an American judge (played by Spencer Tracy). From a tavern they are suddenly confronted with the melancholy notes of Lili Marleen. “I wish you understood German,” Dietrich then says, in an English that her accent renders all the more seductive. “The words are very beautiful, very sad, much sadder than in the English version. The German soldier knows he’s going to lose his girl.” 19 In effect, among all the combatants in the Second World War only the German soldier knows he’s going to die and he accepts it: he loses his girl, but he loses because, along with her, he also loses his life. This singular docility in the face of sacrifice comes from way back. The sociologist Norbert Elias rightly claimed that there are few people who “in their national mysticism, in their poetry and in their songs have so many references to death and sacrifice as the Germans.”20 The plethora of monuments to the fallen in the First World War, more plentiful in Germany that in any other contending nation, highlights a kind of death drive that had remained more or less latent in the German collective unconscious since the poetry of Klopstock (1724-1803). All the same, it is significant that in the context of the First World War Hans Leip would avoid the verses evoking death, while the Nazified soldiers of the Second would not hesitate to sing them in unison. In Germany there was a radical change of mentality in relation to the war and the role the native soldier would play in it, a change that is seen in this 19
Cited in Christian Peters, Lili Marleen. Ein Schlager macht Geschichte, p. 31.
20
Norbert Elias, Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen, pp. 429-430.
eloquent detail in the history of the song. According to the official discourse of the radical Right, the Germans had not fought in the First World War until the very end, but withdrew prematurely due to the legendary “stab in the back” that an unlikely coalition of Social Democrats, pacifists, revolutionaries and Bolsheviks had dealt to an army that was unbeaten at the front, thus obliging the high command to ask for the armistice that put an end to the fighting in October 1918. War propaganda had predicted victory until the very last minute, so that news of the armistice came as a shock to much of the country, a shock that the tough conditions imposed by the victors in the Treaty of Versailles, thought to be humiliating by the Germans, did nothing other than ratify. Thus, many Germans of the interwar period, urged on by economic difficulties and violent social change, felt profoundly guilty about not having supported the fight to the death of their soldiers with sufficient tenacity. When Hitler got the Second World War under way with the invasion of Poland many saw the conflict as the true finalization of the 1914 war and hence as an opportunity to lead the army to the victory it had supposedly deserved twenty years earlier. And they did so with an ambivalent conscience: on the one hand, the memory persisted of the horrors of the earlier war, which were still very present to the German people; on the other, they sheltered behind the conviction that, this time, they could not do things by halves. In August 1914 the Germans went to war swelled with jubilation; in September 1939, on the contrary, they received the news of a fresh struggle with anguish. The German soldiers of the First World War had not gone off to fight to die, but to win. Deep down, the soldier in 1939, on the other hand, had replaced that foolish optimism by the equally foolish acceptance that the price to pay for the final victory could indeed be that of his own death. Whence the fact that, unlike Leip, the German soldier of the Second World War had no qualms about being the only Western soldier who would
second with his singing the message of the two “metaphysical” verses of Lili Marleen. So it is that even an innocent love song ends up subtly reflecting the idea of a superior race of men, disciplined and prepared for combat and the death Hitler dreamed of, and which had gradually been hatching at the expense of humiliation and defeat during the turbulent and complex Weimar Republic. On the Eastern Front some Russian combatants familiar with the song took pleasure in turning the prophecy of death it contained into reality. A German soldier recounts that there was a period when, with lugubrious sarcasm, the Russians chose the precise moment the radio played the fantasmagoric finale of the fifth verse (“When the night mists swirl”) to fire one of their most fearsome weapons: the cannon the Germans had baptized with the onomatopoeia Ratsch-Bum due to the extraordinary speed with which the warning sound of the blast—ratsch— was followed by the deadly impact of the projectile—boom—thus preventing the victims from having enough time to take shelter. 21 Impelled by nostalgia, more than one German soldier must have died while listening to the daily radio broadcasting of Lili Marleen, swathed in his fantasy about those imaginary mists, before the final note of the song faded away in the night air.
21
See Wilhelm Schepping, “Zeitgeschichte im Spiegel eines Liedes. Der Fall Lili Marleen – Versuch einer Summierung”, in Günther Noll and Marianne Bröcker (eds.), Festschrift für Ernst Klusen, p. 442.
