From: Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Date: Tue May 25 1999 - 10:27:04 PDT
Reading through accumulated mail, I noticed the discussion
about Lili Marleen which took place during the week after
April 11th. The various somewhat erroneous informations
were corrected in the translation of a Swedish magazine
article which Christer Gustafson published on April 17th.
I want to to add two very minor comments.
I doubt that the singer's "real name" was Lale Andersen;
from all I know this was her artist's name, and the real
name most likely was Liselotte Wilke which she used in 1935 .
The name "Lale Andersen" is fraught with pretension, with
"Lale" particularly apt for a singer. The person Andersen was
not of Swedish but of German nationality, and in those years
(not Greta Garbo but) a truly Swedish screen actress-plus-singer,
using the mysterious sounding name of Zarah Leander, had
acquired immense popularity in Germany. If I am not mistaken,
I remember another 78' record sung by Andersen, "Der rote
Rudolf kann tanzen ..." to have been in our family's possession
sometime during the war.
Norbert Schulze, who wrote the tune, was a prolific composer
of military marching tunes to texts usually quite aggressive.
It is a sort of irony that this melancholy tune is what survived.
As for the radio station located at Belgrad which made the
song popular, it was not a Yugoslav station in the capital
of that country, but a German armed forces radio station
named "Soldatensender Belgrad" and broadcasting to the
occupation army in German. It was the only German station
where the song was played, and regularly so after the news
at 10 pm ; it was not played on the normal German stations
destined for civilian consumption. But located on the
higher frequencies of the medium wave band, the station
could be received within Germany after dark, sometimes
clear, sometimes crackling.
Also, the broadcasting of the song from that station was
cancelled for about half a year, in 1942 or 1943, and
resumed only upon thousands of complaints from soldiers at
the Eastern front. It would be new to me if, as the magazine
article writes, Lale Andersen then was permitted to sing the
song in concert halls.
Finally, it would be interesting to know whether the English
version was permitted to be broadcasted over British or
American stations before the war had ended in May 1945 .
PS: "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" was not known during the
war; it appears to be from the later fifties and had
a certain popularity among the anti-atom protesters.
W.F.