'Lili Marleen' and the devil's ass

PalmNorbert Schultze died in 2002 at the age of ninety-one in a discreet Bavarian town. Following the trend of other Germans, he too had chosen Mallorca to spend the last ten years of his life. In Portals (Calvià) he enjoyed a comfortable pension thanks to the substantial profits from the twenty patriotic songs he had composed for Nazism, including Lili Marleen, one of the most listened-to melodies in the history of the 20th century. In his golden Balearic retirement, he met Arpad Bondy, a musician and filmmaker who in 1993 decided to make him an interview-based documentary titled You kissed the devil's ass. All of this would be thoroughly documented in 2008 by Rosa Sala Rose in the book Lili Marleen: Song of Love and Death.

At no point in the film did Schultze show any remorse for his close relationship with the Nazis. He claimed he knew nothing of the genocide and that he was forced to collaborate with the Third Reich. In an act of honesty, however, he admitted that if he became the musical reference for Germany, it was thanks to the exile or extermination of many more talented Jewish musicians. The title of the documentary comes from an anecdote narrated by the protagonist himself. Just after the Second World War, seeing that his side had lost, Schultze tried to leave the country. He then asked for refuge from an uncle who had left Germany before the war. The relative dismissed him with a blunt phrase: “You kissed the devil's ass. You will never be able to wash your mouth again”.

After the premiere, which he attended, the elderly composer distanced himself from the documentary and unsuccessfully filed several lawsuits to try to prevent its public exhibition. This is how the stigma of Nazism accompanied him to the grave. Without a doubt, Schultze knew how to be in the right place at the right time to become the musician of the Nazi regime. As a reward, he was saved from going to fight. "Others - he admitted - were dedicated to shooting. I, on the other hand, composed songs. I composed everything that was requested of me, including some terrible things. The only thing that mattered to me was not having to go to the front". Lili Marleen, however, Schultze's professional talisman, was born long before Hitler's rise to power. Later, the Führer himself could not resist its magnetism. "This song - he confessed to one of his generals - will not only enthuse the German soldier, but will surely outlive us all".

An immortal song On a rainy night in 1915, during World War I, the German Hans Leip was in a Berlin barracks, ready to march to the front lines. Nostalgia and fear led him to write a poem evoking his farewell to his fiancée. More than twenty years later, in 1937, that soldier published his writing in a poetry collection. Upon reading it, Schultze, then a composer with a rather modest career, made it his own with a melody he supposedly took from a toothpaste advertisement. He thus dispensed with the tune that Rudolf Zink, a young musician with a promising future, had already set to it.

Unexpectedly, that song would become the soundtrack of World War II. Curiously, despite being a declaration of love for a woman, it was always performed by female voices, not male ones. Its birth as a myth came with the title Song of a Young Sentinel from the mouth of a cabaret singer, the German Lale Andersen. From 1941 onwards, the record with her sensual and mysterious voice played every night for the Nazi troops from Radio Belgrade, the German military station. Its power of seduction, however, made it cross trenches. Legend has it that minutes before the song was broadcast, the two opposing sides would observe a brief truce to listen to that melody that touched their hearts. Indeed, it speaks of a soldier who knows he will die in the war. In the poignant final stanza, he assures that, when he dies, the love of his Lili will be able to raise him from the grave and return him to her arms: “If anything happens to me and no one is with you, when the night fog falls, I will come, under the streetlamp, to wait for you and be by your side, as always, Lili Marleen”.

These final, defeatist verses did not please the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, at all, who tried to ban it. However, the continuous protests from his soldiers prevented him from doing so. Soon, the civilian population also embraced that song of love and death. No one remembered its original title anymore. They sang it as Lili Marleen, which was the imaginary name of its recipient, a result of combining the names Lili – a vegetable seller, the platonic love of the young soldier poet – and Marlene – the surname of a nurse with whom he had a relationship. For a time, it was also believed that the true inspiration for the song was the Jewish artist Lilly Freud-Marlé, niece of the father of psychoanalysis.

Meanwhile, Schultze, the composer of the popular melody, enjoyed the tranquility of not having to go and shoot. From his home he kept receiving hundreds of letters from women who had lost their sons at the front. "My son -said one of them- is dead, but in the last letter he sent me he mentioned our song, Lili Marleen. Even today, every time I hear Lili Marleen I remember my son's last letter." That song, however, also had a dark side. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, played it in the crematoria of the concentration camps. It was also the melody that accompanied the rapes of Polish women that the Nazis perpetrated in 1944 when crushing a revolt in Warsaw.

Marlene DietrichThe unexpected success of Lili Marleen among Allied troops also worried the BBC officials. They shared Goebbels' same fear that such sentimental lyrics could weaken the soldiers' military spirit. Soon, however, British propaganda services found an ingenious method to market that enemy product well. At the end of 1942, when the Allies forced the Germans' withdrawal from Africa, they officially made it war booty. This way, they stopped feeling guilty about humming it in its English version, Lili Marlene.

The definitive denazification of Schultze's famous tune would come in 1943 from the hand of the Hollywood diva of the moment, Marlene Dietrich, a Germanized American, considered a traitor by her compatriots. In the rough and irresistible voice of this great femme fatale, the bugle that accompanied the initial version of Lili Marleen would be replaced by a more melancholic instrument, the accordion. Thus, Schultze's melody no longer sounded like a military march or death. Rather, it reinforced the hope for a better world, symbolized by the love of Lili and the soldier. Dietrich's appearance on the war scene singing for the Allies had incalculable propaganda potential. Even in 1944, she was encouraged to record the song in German to better reach the hearts of the Nazi troops.

The Lili BarbieAfter the Second World War, Lili Marleen would take the form of a caricature from the pages of the German sensationalist newspaper Bild, founded in 1952. She appeared drawn as a young blonde, flirtatious and voluptuous woman. This ideal of feminine beauty responded to the erotic dreams of a whole generation of men who, after having suffered and witnessed unimaginable experiences, were trying to smile again in the new consumerist Germany of the Marshall Plan.

In 1955, the humble cartoon from Bild would give rise to one of the most curious commercial phenomena of the 20th century. It was transformed into a sexy doll that was to serve as a small corporate gift for celebrities interviewed by the German tabloid. In 1959, the American company Mattel began to manufacture that "blonde ambition" with impossible measurements as a toy for girls. It was then renamed Barbie in honor of the daughter of the company's president, Barbara.

Undoubtedly, the opportunistic Norbert Schultze knew how to profit from his kiss of the devil's backside. Little could he imagine that his trivial melody would end up inspiring one of the icons of capitalism. Now, all that remains is for a new version of Barbie to appear singing "the only positive contribution of the Nazis to the world," in the words of the American John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate in literature in 1962.