By: Bill Gruber

Before it downsized to Twitter, blogofdeath.com was the go-to place to find obituaries for (their words) “famous, infamous and interesting unknowns,” which was where I first read about the life and times of the late Norbert Arnold Wilhelm Richard Schultze. Through most of the twentieth century, Herr Schultze was a prolific and popular German composer, writing hundreds of ballets, operettas, and pop songs, but his case for artistic immortality rests on just one tune from 1938–the wartime lied called “Lili Marleen.”

Schultz’s ballad is hands down the most famous war song of all time. Since its composition, “Lili Marleen” has been translated, performed, and recorded in more than 200 different versions across forty-eight different languages ranging from Hawaiian and Spanish to Turkish and Korean. It’s been whistled, hummed, or sung impromptu in barrooms and shower stalls more times than can be credibly estimated: allied troops shouted out its verses (often with parodic lyrics) as they traversed Italy during the autumn of 1944; the song was chanted by the Sili Wangi Division of the Indonesian army in 1948 as they marched across Java, and it was crooned drunkenly by the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, who, according to his friend and biographer Ludmila Shtern, “after two or three drinks, would take the microphone and sing ‘Lili Marlene’ and the Polish ‘Red Poppies.’”

Vinyl recordings of “Lili Marleen” by professional vocalists number in the dozens. Chanson singer Lale Anderson (born Elisabeth Bunnenberg) made the first in 1939; it was Anderson’s lilting, mezzo voice which tens of thousands of British soldiers, deployed in north Africa, heard nightly on Radio Belgrade. (“Each evening,” writes Fitzroy Maclean in his memoir of World War II, “came Lale Anderson singing over the ether, the cheap, sugary and almost painfully nostalgic melody, the sex-laden, intimate, heart-rending accents of Lily Marlene.”) The German chanteuse Marlene Dietrich sang the song for Allied troops in more than 500 front-line performances, as she later reported, “for three long years, in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and England.” “Forces Sweetheart” Dame Vera Lynn produced a smoky, romanticized English translation of Schultze’s ballad in 1944, and that same year pop singer Perry Como made the first American recording of this “tale of love in all its glory.”

The end of World War 2 didn’t dim the song’s popularity. American pop singers Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, and Al Martino, all made postwar recordings of “Lili Marleen,” as did Greta Garbo and folk singer Hank Snow. In 1979, the French singer/painter/model Amanda Lear performed a gravel-voiced, upbeat version on the West German music television show Starparade. and, in testimony to the song’s ubiquity, the German playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1981 directed a film biography of Lale Anderson, including one comedic scene in which the Nazis torture Anderson’s lover, a fictional character called Robert Mendelsohn, by locking him in an isolation cell where he is forced to listen day and night to looped broadcasts of “Lili Marleen.” Carly Simon added a downtempo, piano background to the ballad on her 1997 CD Film Noir, and the specialty recording label “Bear Family Records” in 2005 produced a 7-CD collection of 195 different, historic “Lili Marleens” (“Lili Marleen on All Fronts”).  Schultze’s ballad also maintains a sprawling online presence. In 2013, Cynthia Haven wrote about the song on Stanford University’s blog for the written word, “The Book Haven”; in 2017, playwright Michael Antin wrote a musical drama about one Jewish family’s escape from Nazi Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic, calling it “Lili Marlene”; and recently, the song was resurrected in the title of a GIF commemorating war in Ukraine: “Ukrainian soldier saying goodbye to his Lili Marleen.”

What makes “Lili Marleen” so universally beloved? The answer is partly the story it tells. It’s a simple, moving tale of romantic love, sung (most often) to the cheap, dance-hall sound of bal-musette with lyrics that are wistful, innocent, and (depending on which version or translation you listen to) deeply melancholy. In four (sometimes five) short verses, the ballad voices the daydreams of a soldier who remembers “Lili Marleen,” the woman he loves, and the times when the two used to meet each evening by the streetlight outside his barracks:

            By the old barracks, in front of the big gate

            There stands a streetlight, and she stands in front of it.

            There we would meet each other

            We would stand by the streetlight

            As once, Lili Marleen; as once, Lili Marleen.[1]

            The German lyrics are both moody and credible, and they reveal a recurring, morbid tendency on the part of the soldier to picture scenes from a future in which he no longer plays a part. (“It is the very hazard of military situations,” writes Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, “that turns them theatrical. The whole thing is too grossly farcical, perverse, cruel, and absurd to be credited as a form of ‘real life.’”)

When Dietrich performs the song in German, she sings:

            It knows your footsteps, your classy walk

            It still shines every evening, but me it’s long forgotten.

            And if some misfortune should befall me,

Who will stand beside the streetlight

 With you, Lili Marlene, with you, Lili Marlene?[2]

Dietrich’s recording of “Lily Marleen” in English, in contrast to her German performances, seems sentimentalized and shallow:

Give me a rose to show how much you care

            Tie to the stem a lock of golden hair

            Surely tomorrow, you’ll feel blue

            But then will come a love that’s new

            For you, Lili Marleen, for you, Lili Marleen.

This difference between English and German versions of the song is as puzzling as it is striking. Perhaps the schmaltzy lyrics cater to the preferences of English-speaking audiences, much as “All Quiet on the Western Front” softens and romanticizes the blunt, ironic title of Eric Maria Remarque’s story of life and death in the trenches of World War I: Im Western nichts Neues, “In the West, Nothing New.”

Schultze’s famous ballad has a long, complicated, and partly sketchy history. Good art, as Barbara Kingsolver says, “doesn’t always match the sofa.” Before it was a musical composition, “Lili Marleen” was a poem called “The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch,” three brief stanzas (later expanded to five) written by Hans Leip, a German soldier of World War I. Leip wrote the verses in 1915 when he was a young infantryman about to be sent to the trenches on the eastern front. Later, while fighting in the Carpathian Mountains, he was severely wounded and subsequently given a medical discharge. After the war, Leip worked as a draftsman and journalist, continuing to write poems as well as tales about life on the sea and around harbors.

 Both the narrative and the environment referenced in “Song of a Young Soldier on Watch” are so convincingly specific as to make it seem that Leip had been remembering personal experience. Despite its specificity, however, the poem seems not to be autobiographical, or at least only minimally so. After the song based on his poem became widely known, Leip sometimes spoke of a one-time girlfriend named “Lili” whom he had known during the war years as a clerk in a local grocery store. Most likely, however, “Lili Marleen” was contrived by fusing separate, real people–the “Lili” whom Leip knew, and a different woman named “Marleen” who was another soldier’s girlfriend or a young nurse called “Marleen” who had once waved at him on sentry duty as she walked off into the nighttime fog. Some say that “Lili Marleen” was a hospital aide Leip met during the war and around whom he constructed a fantasy romance, much as Earnest Hemingway created “Catherine Barkley” in A Farewell to Arms. Leip may even have written the poem to express buried feelings for Sigmund Freud’s niece (Lilly Freud-Marlé), who for years boasted that she herself was the mystery “Lilly Marleen” of the song.

            Whatever its source, Leip’s poem lay obscure for more than twenty years after its composition. He included it (along with two more verses added for the occasion) in a collection of his works, Die Hafenorgel (“The Harbor Organ”) published in 1937, still under his original title, Das Lied eines jungen Soldaten auf der Wacht. Then, at some time during the following year—it is not known how or when–the poem crossed the desk of Norbert Schultze. Schultze was by then a well-known contemporary musician who had been recruited by the Nazis to write militaristic songs as well as backing music to propaganda films. The job may have been noxious to Schultze, but he took it because writing songs kept him safely out of combat. (“For me,” he explained later, “the alternatives were: compose or croak. So I decided for the former.”) With intentions to write a song that blended soldiering with romance, Schultze set the words of Leip’s poem to music. At its premier performance, however, Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, thought Schultze’s ballad was not inspirational. It was, he complained, “crap, with the stench of death.”

The margin between renown and obscurity is thin. Goebbels was not alone in his dislike for Schultze’s lied, and the song almost died aborning. Schultze’s publisher didn’t want to produce it, and Lale Anderson (for whom specifically Schultze had written the piece), didn’t want to sing it. She conceded only after splicing in backup singers and a peppy, marching beat. Even then, “Lili Marleen” received little public exposure. Two years after its release, sales of Anderson’s record had stalled at about 700 copies, when inexplicably and unexpectedly a junior officer working for then Nazi-occupied Radio Belgrade in Yugoslavia added it to a pile of second-hand discs he’d scrounged to broadcast to Erwin Rommel’s troops in the north African desert. On the night of August 18, 1941, radio waves emanating from Belgrade skipped off the ionosphere and propagated around the curve of the Earth, scattering “Lili Marleen” from Britain to Libya to Russia and appealing instantly to soldiers no matter which uniforms they happened to be wearing.

That a German song should move the hearts of British soldiers displeased Allied commanding officers. Germans were the enemy—Huns, Krauts, Jerrys, Nazis. How in the world could you shoot men who love the same music you do? To stiffen the soldiers’ resolve, the British command decided to educate them. The British Ministry of Information put together a short docudrama titled “The True Story of Lili Marlene” that conflated the song with Nazi ideology. The film transformed Leip’s wistful ballad into a Wagnerian aria which became (in the words of the narrator) a “Nazi battle song,” sung with full orchestral accompaniment by a woman dressed like Bugs Bunny’s caricature of Brunhilda in the Disney cartoon. To make doubly sure that soldiers were immunized, the British military command joined forces with the BBC, this time to educate British troops that “Lili Marlene” was really a well-known German prostitute. Knowing this, the BBC reasoned, would surely douse the woman’s appeal to British soldiers.

            What were they thinking? The effort to sully “Lili Marlene” only made sex-starved troops’ fascination with the song all the greater, and when Marlene Dietrich with her sensuous stage presence and husky, unmistakably erotic voice began to feature the lied in her shows for Allied soldiers, it became famous across all fronts. Because of her performances, Dietrich was said to have sold more war bonds than any other celebrity to help the Allied cause; she was at the front, said film director Billy Wilder (whose mother, grandfather, and stepfather were victims of the Holocaust), “more often than Eisenhower.” You can still hear her wartime performances of “Lili Marlene” on YouTube.[3]

            In the catalog of twentieth century artists, where do we rank Norbert Schultze? His talent, such as it was, seems to have been mostly misspent. Given the stark choice either to write songs for the Nazis or to serve in combat, Schultze opted for—his words—the “comfortable route of the coward.” After the close of the war, Schultze was routinely classified as a Nazi sympathizer. His music was banned, and for years he was forbidden to practice his profession as a composer; he worked mainly as a gardener and as a manual laborer in heavy construction. It’s deeply thought-provoking that the creator of “Lili Marlene” was also, regrettably, the person who wrote the score for Nazi propagandist songs like “Bombs On England” and “Panzers Roll into Africa.” Schultze ultimately repented these compositions, and now, nearing a century later, “Lili Marlene” stands as his supreme artistic accomplishment. Lale Anderson, asked once to explain the raw power of this simple, deeply moving lied, gave only this indirect, cryptic answer: “Can the wind explain what makes it become a storm?” It makes you wonder if the art ever really does belong to the artist, or whether the real thing, when it comes, comes on its own terms, unruly and unbidden, a gift from the muses on Mount Helicon.

References:

“[A]fter two or three drinks”: Ludmilla Shtern, Brodsky: A Personal Memoir (Baskerville Publishers, 2004), p. 292.

“Each evening came Lale Anderson”: Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches, Part 3, Chapter 13, 1949.

“Lili Marleen,” military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Lili_Marleen, accessed 4/10/2022.

John Vinocur, “Fassbinder’s Nazi Fable a Hit,” The New York Times, 2/16/1981, nytimes.com, accessed 1/15/2026. 

“1944 True Story of Lili Marlene,” J. D. Wall on vimeo.com, accessed 2/1/2026.

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[1] Bei der alt Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor/Steht eine Laterne, und steht sie noch davor/Dort wollen wir uns wiedersehen/Bei der Laterne wollen wir stehen/Wie einst, Lili Marleen; wie einst, Lili Marleen.

[2] Deine Schritte kennt Sie, deine schönen Gang/Alle Abend brennt sie, doch mich vergass sie lang/Und sollte mir ein Leid geschehen/Wer will bei der Laterne stehen/Mit dir, Lili Marleen, mit dir, Lili Marleen.

[3]When I tried to play Dietrich’s recording recently on my smartphone, however, the first thing to appear on screen was an appeal to my discretion, warning me that “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.” This seems an ignorant (and deeply ironic) misapprehension of Marlene Dietrich and what she and “Lili Marleen” stood for. In the late 1930s, Dietrich established a fund to help Jews escape from Nazi Germany. Soon afterwards (1939), she renounced her German citizenship and became an American citizen; she was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947, which she has said was her proudest accomplishment.