"LILI MARLEEN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 211, 9 July 1943, Page 4

"LILI MARLEEN"

Sweetheart OF Both Sides In This War

NE of the first great songs of this () war ("Roll out the Barrel") came from Czechoslovakia. Now another one, perhaps the "Tipperary" of the Second World War, has come out of Germany. Like "Roll out the Barrel" the new "Lili Marleen" is simple and catchy, and last April the soldiers of both sides were singing it from Smolensk to Tunis. German troops were singing it, and the British soldiers were listening to it on enemy broadcasts and inventing English words. The German words run something like this: In front of the barracks, before the heavy gate There stood a lamp-post, and if it’s standing yet Then we shall meet there once again, Beside the lamp-post in the rain, As once Lili Marleen, as once Lili Marleen. The lamp-post knows your footsteps, so lovely and so free, For you it burns unceasing but it’s forgotten me, And if I don’t return again, who’ll stand beside you in the rain? with’, you Lili Marleen, with you, Lili Marleen. The rhythm of "Lili Marleen" is martial, but its tune has already been found adaptable to different moods: As one magazine said recently: "With an um-pah accompaniment it is a march. Changed to um-da-dum-dump it becomes a tango. In either case the strains are of a kind which easily attach themselves to romantic memories and the pathos of separation." It was written in 1938 by a Nazi songwriter, Norbert Schultze. Its words were by Hans Leip, a minor poet who had a small reputation during the Weimar Republic. After about 30 music publishers had rejected it, "Lili Marleen" finally found its way on to a gramophone record, and thence to German audiences by a curious trick of circumstance. In August, 1941, when the Nazis were taking over the Belgrade radio station they discovered that only three records remained in ‘the place, and one was "Lili Marleen." By January of this year, they had played it twice nightly for 500 nights, and fan mail, which even came from German submarines off the Atlantic coast of the U.S.A., had mounted to hundreds of thousands of letters. In the meantime the actress Emmy Sonnemann (Herman Goering’s wife) sang it for the Nazi chiefs in a concert a

given in the kroll Opera House in Berlin, and the Swedish singer Lala Andersen had made "Lili Marleen" the rage of Berlin cabarets. Soon the Nazis in Belgrade began to feel the tune was perhaps being overplayed, and decided to try a new and more hopeful. theme song, £s geht Alles vorueber, es geht Alles verbei ("Everything will be over, everything will be past"). But subversive parodies of this song soon caused the Propaganda Ministry to put "Lili Marleen" back on the air.

Outside the Third Reich "Lili Marleen" has appeared in variegated forms. The Danes and Norwegians made up verses in which Marleen’s Lamppost was a gallows for Hitler. Now the U.S. Office of War Information has provided verses in German for possible future use in propaganda broadcasts.