Lili Marleen (sometimes spelled Lili Marlen or Lilli Marleen) is the title of a song that became Germany's first million-seller and a German and international classic soldier's song in 1939 by Lale Andersen in the version by Norbert Schultze. The song focuses on the suffering of a couple separated by war.
Genesis :
The writer and poet Hans Leip wrote the first three stanzas of the lyrics - along with a melody that was largely forgotten thereafter - during World War I, before his departure for the Russian front on the night of April 3 (Holy Saturday) to April 4 (Easter Sunday) 1915, while on guard duty in front of the Garde-Füsilier barracks on Chausseestraße in Berlin. He later added two more stanzas for publication under the title Lied eines jungen Wachpostens in the poetry collection Die kleine Hafenorgel (1937).
The origin of the title Lili Marleen, as well as many details of its later distribution, are disputed. In 1948, a Margrit Freud wrote in the NZZ that Lilly Freud-Marlé - a niece of Sigmund Freud and wife of the actor Arnold Marlé - as a diseuse in pre-war Hamburg, had inspired Leip to write the song, but the latter immediately denied this. The Swiss Germanist Charles Linsmayer, however, continues to hold to this version.Leip also commented on the supposed financial success of his composition: "Unfortunately, I didn't earn millions from the song either, because the military broadcasters didn't use to pay anything."
According to the local photographer Johann Holzem, the title is composed of two different first names; Lili is said to be the pet name of the girlfriend of a friend of the poet Leip, while Marleen was the first name of an auxiliary nurse from a reserve hospital.
In the fall of 1937, the singer Jan Behrens asked the then already successful composer Norbert Schultze, with whom he was friends, to write him a few shanties for a radio broadcast. Norbert Schultze then composed a melody to the poem Lili Marleen from the volume Die kleine Hafenorgel by Hans Leip, published by Christian Wegner in Hamburg in 1937. At that time, however, there already existed a chanson with a melody by Hindemith's student Rudolf Zink from 1937. This version was also already known to Lale Andersen, since she performed in the Munich cabaret "Simpl," where she met Zink. At the End of 1938, Lale Andersen became aware of the version with the melody by Schultze.
Lale Andersen had been singing the song in Rudolf Zink's more melancholy version in her stage programs for some time when Norbert Schultze offered her his version for recording. Although Andersen herself could warm little to the then new version throughout her life, Schultze was taken with the new recording. Andersen could not really enjoy the melody, which was unfamiliar to her and, in her opinion, inappropriate, while Schultze was never really satisfied with its accents, the march-like rhythm, and the male choir in the background, which, in his opinion, sounded "like a castrato choir." Despite these inconsistencies, for which throughout his life no
consensus could be found, this version, which had been recorded in 1938 at the Electrola studios in Berlin, was finally released on record.
The first recording of Lili Marleen with an orchestra conducted by Bruno Seidler-Winkler lasted all night on August 1, 1939, and was mixed the following day at the Electrola studio. The record was to begin with a Prussian taps, in the background a soldiers' choir and "discreet march rhythm". It became a "symbol for homesickness, separation and longing, but above all for hope for reunion. The time - the war, which is becoming more and more terrible, the circumstances have caused this."
Another Leip setting with a melody by Schultze (both titles under the pseudonym "Frank Norbert"), Drei rote Rosen (Gedenken), served as the B-side. Just 700 copies of the record, released in August 1939 under Electrola EG 6993/ORA 4198-2, were sold. It initially fell into oblivion. The melancholy soldier song about farewell, separation and uncertain homecoming can be classified between soldier song and Schlager.
Content:
The song is about a soldier remembering earlier when he was standing with his girlfriend Lili Marleen at the lantern in front of the barracks, and asks her to meet there again.
Historical setting:
Lale Andersen - Lili Marleen (here: Lili Marlen). The picture is an excerpt from the record shown above.
The song was recorded exactly one day after Glenn Miller's In the Mood, in a time of wartime mood, because on September 1, 1939, World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. On April 6, 1941, the war against Yugoslavia and Greece began, and already on April 12, 1941, Belgrade was taken by the German 12th Army. Yugoslavia's surrender followed on April 17. Even before that, the medium-wave radio station Radio Belgrade (Serbian: ????? ???????/Radio Beograd) was occupied by German troops and henceforth broadcast as "Occupation Radio Belgrade". Its broadcasting power was so high that it reached all frontline sections in Europe and North Africa between Narvik and Cairo, which corresponded to a broadcasting area of six million listeners.
There are various versions of the story of the broadcast of Lili Marleen by the Belgrade soldier station, some of which contradict each other. Johann Holzem adds to the episode of the "discovery" of Lili Marleen the person of First Lieutenant Maximilian Fabich, chief of the 3rd Company of the Infantry Division of Greater Germany, which was stationed on the outskirts of Belgrade. Fabich had received an order to fetch records for the Belgrade radio station, and on April 22, 1941, he traveled to Radio-Verkehrs-AG in Vienna (ORF since 1957). He was handed a few boxes of records that were gathering dust in the Vienna archives as "uncommon" and arrived in Belgrade on April 26. While looking through this assortment, Max Fabich also saw the record of Lili Marleen by Electrola. He remembered immediately remembered his Koblenz days when he first heard this melancholy song, and spontaneously said, "This one has to go on the air!" Fabich had become acquainted with this version in the bar of a small Mosel village in 1940, where he was stationed with his company in preparation for the French campaign. Being an avid pianist himself, he had added the tune to his repertoire and performed it among his soldiers. Fabich had included the song in a 45-minute program he had put together himself for the opening, and finally presented it on April 26, 1941, with a choir of soldiers formed from his company. Other sources, however, assume that the 60 records discarded by the Reichssender Wien were played, among which was Lili Marleen.
According to other sources, the station had started operating in April 1941 and had only 54 records, which had to be repeated often with a broadcasting time of 21 hours per day. Therefore, a man named Richard Kistenmacher was sent to Vienna by the station manager, Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Reintgen, to provide supplies. Kistenmacher brought material from Reichssender Wien that was said to have consisted of politically suspect records and designated flops, including the song of a young sentry, which, according to Reintgen's account, was first broadcast at his instigation on August 18, 1941. Reintgen, the station manager appointed by the German military, had known the record since 1940.
It was Reintgen who briefly took the record off the air at the end of July 1941. This was followed by such an overwhelming protest that from August 18, 1941, the song was broadcast every evening at 9:57 p.m. before the last news of the day at 10 p.m. and before the End of the broadcast. Different titles have survived for this new broadcast: Wir grüßen unsere Hörer, Wir aufschlagen das Wachtbuch or Brücke zwischen Front und Heimat. According to other sources, Lili Marleen was first broadcast on August 18, so either the abandonment of the broadcast, the subsequent protest of the listeners and the inclusion in the permanent program may have taken place later, or the recording of the song at the fixed broadcasting slot was mistakenly taken as the date of the first broadcast.
Introduced by the military signal "Zapfenstreich" ("Taps") and performed in marching time, the sentimental lyrics about farewell, compulsory orders and homesickness struck a chord with the inner mood of millions of soldiers of all armies fighting at the time on both sides of the fronts and became a worldwide cultural "leitmotif" of the Second World War. In 1941, Anita Spada, accompanied by the orchestra of Heinz Munsonius, recorded a cover version under the title Lied eines jungen Wachtpostens. From January 1942, the Reichsrundfunk also distributed an English-language version, for whose text the Briton Norman Baillie-Stewart (Lord Haw-Haw), who worked for the German foreign broadcasting service, was responsible. The British Anne Shelton presented the song with English lyrics on her own radio show starting in the fall of 1942. In May 1943, the lyrics version was published in the USA by the music publisher Chappell under the title My Lilli of the Lamplight. From 1944 there were already various English-language recordings, among others by Great Britain's "sweetheart of the forces" Vera Lynn and the star of the American troops Marlene Dietrich.
An RCA recording by Perry Como put "Lilli Marlene (My Lilli of the Lamplight)" at #13 on the American hit parade in June 1944.
Censorship:
When Lale Andersen's contacts with Swiss Jews became known, Goebbels had the song banned in April 1942. The printing of Andersen's photos was censored from the end of May 1942, her name gradually disappeared from the press, a trip to Belgrade on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the Soldatensender in April 1942 was denied. From October 1942, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda imposed a ban on the singer's performances. With the exception of the original of the "Lantern Song," her records were to be "put on hold for the time being" on the radio, and direct broadcasts were to be "avoided at present." The British BBC noticed the disappearance of Lale Andersen and Lili Marleen and suspected that Andersen was in a concentration camp. From May 1943 - to refute enemy propaganda - Lale Andersen was again allowed to perform on a restricted basis, but Lili Marleen was no longer allowed to sing.
Success story:
The Wehrmacht station Belgrade received more than 12,000 soldiers' letters a day during the peak period, mostly concerning the song Lili Marleen. Soon the song spread to all other Wehrmacht stations. Thus, although the Nazi regime temporarily banned the song because of its "morbid and depressive" lyrics, Lili Marleen became a "song of destiny" of World War II.
Lili Marleen was also sung among Allied soldiers. As early as 1941, it was sung along so often by British troops in North Africa that the generals had to intervene. It is reported that the British soldiers often shouted "Louder please, comrades" over to the German trenches as soon as they heard the song over the radio there, which regularly led to a lull in the fighting during this period. "All over the desert," a British war correspondent recorded, "English soldiers were whistling the song." When Marlene Dietrich sang the song to American soldiers beginning in 1943, making it really popular with Allied troops, no one was bothered by the fact that the same composer had written the music for propaganda marches like Bombs on England or the U-boat Song.
In August 1944, a film called The True Story of Lilli Marlene was released in Great Britain - the song went around the world in at least 50 translations. Furthermore, there are several parodies and propaganda versions by mostly unknown authors. The most famous persiflage was sung by Lucie Mannheim for the BBC. Four years after the war, Winston Churchill requested the song from a dance band on the Riviera. And General Eisenhower said that Leip was the only German who had brought joy to the whole world during the war. In the years following its release, the German version of Lili Marleen alone sold two million copies, advancing to the first million-seller in German record history. Stern confirmed that Lili Marleen had been the first purely German record to sell over the million mark. Will Glahé's mood song Rosamunde had appeared earlier, but only developed into a million-seller by 1943.
It was not until 1946 that Norbert Schultze learned how popular his song was with the enemy. When he played the composition at the American military club in Berlin, he was celebrated like a hero. Schultze did not receive about 150,000 marks a year until 1962, as his royalties remained confiscated as "enemy assets" until 1962. The continuing popularity can be seen in the accruing GEMA fees: In the 1980s, for example, the widow of lyricist Hans Leip received about 60,000 Swiss francs in royalties per year from this source.
Although the song is written from the point of view of a soldier, it is mostly performed by female singers, including Greta Garbo, Mimi Thoma, Connie Francis, Angela Smith, Danuta Bastek, as well as Suzy Solidor and Marie Laforêt who sang it in a French version.
January 16, 1981 was the premiere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name, in which he tells the fictional story of cabaret singer Willie and her Jewish lover, who popularize the song Lili Marleen during World War II. In 1981, Der Spiegel magazine wrote: "Whenever war broke out in the world after 1945, in Indochina, Korea, Israel, Vietnam, the song's royalty curve rose steeply; Lili marched along." Today, the song, broadcast by the soldier station Radio Andernach, resounds daily around 22:56. Even today, the song is played every year at the End of the Bergkirchweih in Erlangen. Traditionally, the last barrel of beer is buried in Front of thousands of attendees to the sounds of Lili Marleen.
Modern versions of the song exist, among others, by Atrocity from 2000, by the Italian group Camerata Mediolanese and by the Thuringian metal band Eisregen, which covered it on the EP-Hexenhaus in 2005. Berlin-based U.S. musician Daniel Kahn translated the song into Yiddish and sings it with his band The Painted Bird on the 2010 German Record Critics' Award-winning album Lost Causes as Lili Marleyn, Fartaytsht. The Grenzgänger recorded Lili Marleen in 2014 as part of their World War Song program Maikäfer flieg - Verschollene Lieder 1914-1918 with the almost forgotten original melody by Hans Leip from April 1915. It was released on the album Maikäfer Flieg, which won the German Record Critics' Award.
