MIKE WALSH CLASSICAL NOTES: Like Japanese infantrymen emerging from Far Eastern jungles Britain’s tabloids remain convinced that WW2 still rages. For most of us it is a fading memory but never to be forgotten the four women singers who evoke the troubled period like no other. For the Allies there was Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn and for the Axis Marlene Dietrich and Lale Andersen (1905-1972). Through a quirk of fate, both Fields and Dietrich were exiled from their homelands due to their being perceived as turncoats.

Destined to be the feminine icon of the war years, Lale Andersen was little known outside Germany. As a Berlin cabaret artiste during the 1930s, she recorded the Franz Leip poem, The Song of a Young Soldier. Renamed Lili Marlene it had been put to music in 1938 by composer Norbert Schultze. Her recording of it brought her international acclaim.

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From 1945 to 1952 Lale was largely forgotten; she was a phantom of Germany’s troubled past. Renewed confidence and prosperity launched her reappearance with the song Die blaue Nacht am Hafen, the lyrics of which she had written herself. It was an instant hit as was Ein Schiff wird kommen written in 1959. She was awarded a Gold Album for each of these songs.

With the prejudices and bitterness of war largely evaporating Lale Andersen took part in the Eurovision Song Contest; coming No 13, in 1961. Adored both at home and abroad she completed a world tour during the 1960s. Her book, The Sky Has Many Colours topped Der Spiegel magazine’s bestselling list.

A beautiful woman and the loveliest of singers Lale Andersen will always be synonymous with a lonely soldier’s poem, penned in a barracks shortly before being posted to the Russian front. Lili Marlene was in fact two women. Lili was Hans Leips’s own sweetheart and Marlene, a young nurse who was dating his comrade in arms.

It was a poem of little significance and when its haunting words were put to music its sales numbered less than 700 discs. In occupied Yugoslavia in 1941 Radio Belgrade broadcast Lale Andersen’s Lili Marlene as a space filler. It was enthusiastically adopted not only by the Afrika Korp but by the British Eighth Army too. Forces favourite Anne Shelton and Vera Lynn both sang Lili Marlene on the BBC.

It has since been translated into 48 languages and became the most popular wartime song ever recorded, a record unlikely to be broken. The one question remains. Did Lale Andersen become famous through her own qualities or was it the twenty-five-year-old serviceman’s poem that brought her international acclaim? I leave it to you to decide. She was still performing in her sixties and remained stunningly beautiful and elegant when tragically, by today’s life expectations, this beautiful singer died of a heart attack when still young. Auf Weidersehn, Lale.

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