So far, “Lilli” had been solely a German
problem, but now the British Eighth Army began to take prisoners and among the
spoils they got “Lilli Marlene.” And the song swept through the Eighth Army.
Australians hummed it and fastened new words to it. The powers hesitated, considering
whether it was a good idea to let a German song about a girl who did not have
all the sterling virtues become the favorite song of the British Army, for by
now the thing had crept into the First Army and the Americans were beginning to
experiment with close harmony and were putting an off-beat into it. It wouldn’t
have done the powers a bit of good if they had decided against the song.
It was out of hand. The Eighth Army was doing
all right in the field and it was decided to consider “Lilli Marlene” a
prisoner of war, which would have happened anyway, no matter what the powers
thought about it. Now “Lilli” is getting deeply into the American Forces in
Africa. The Office of War Information took up the problem and decided to keep
the melody, but to turn new words against the Germans. Whether this will work
or not remains to be seen. “Lilli Marlene” is international. It is to be
suspected that she will emerge beside the barrack walls—young and fair and
incorruptly inconsistent.
There is nothing you can do about a song like
this except to let it go. War songs need not be about the war at all. Indeed,
they rarely are. In the last war, “Madelon” and “Tipperary” had nothing to do
with war. The great Australian song of this war, “Waltzing Matilda,” concerns
itself with sheep-stealing. It is to be expected that some groups in America
will attack “Lilli,” first, on the ground that she is an enemy alien, and,
second, because she is no better than she should be. Such attacks will have
little effect. “Lilli” is immortal. Her simple desire to meet a brigadier is
hardly a German copyright. Politics may be dominated and nationalized, but
songs have a way of leaping boundaries.
And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss
and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the
world by the Nazis was “Lilli Marlene.”
WAR TALK
LONDON, July 13, 1943—It is interesting
to see that the nearer one comes to a war zone the less one hears of grand
strategy. There is more discussion of tactics and the over-all picture in the
Stork Club on a Saturday night than in the whole European theater of
operations. This may be, to a certain extent, because of a lack of generals to
give the strategists a social foundation. For that matter, there are more
generals in the Carlton Hotel in Washington at lunch time than in all the rest
of the world.
