Lili Marleen | German Song (1938) | Cover | English Subs

English and German subtitles available

"Lili Marleen" was a worldwide success during World War 2 and the first German song to have been sold over one million times.

The story begins in 1915, in World War 1, when German soldier Hans Leip wrote a poem the night before he was deployed to the eastern front. He survived and became a writer. His poem was set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and sung by Lale Andersen in 1939, shortly before the Third Reich invaded Poland.

The Nazi leadership was ambivalent towards the song and Lale Andersen. "Lili Marleen" contains no propaganda and the lyrics were deemed morbid and depressing. When it was revealed that Lale Andersen had contact to a Jewish composer, the Nazis banned her from performing it. I reckon it was her fame, which saved her life.

The song was intensely popular with the German soldiers but also overcame frontlines: During quiet moments in North Africa in 1941, when the song came on on the German radio in the evening, German soldiers in their trenches would hear calls of "comrades, louder, please!" from their British enemies from the other side. Marlene Dietrich, a German-American actress and singer, began performing the English version of the song in front of American soldiers in 1943.

Source for the picture in the background:
https://pixabay.com/de/photos/weg-pfa...

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