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.

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.

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)

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

poem noted musically in the sparkling reflection of the asphalt.10

This, according to Leip, was the genesis of Lili Marleen.

9 Hans Leip, Das Tanzrad, p. 78.

10 Ibid., p. 79.

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

spectral return among the living.14

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.