LILI MARLENE COMES BACK

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29112, 26 January 1960, Page 2

LILI MARLENE COMES BACK

War-Time “Forces Sweetheart” (By SUSAN VAUGHAN] “Lili Marlene,” hit tune of World War II with Rommel’s Afrika Korps and Montgomery's Eighth Army—who learned it from their German prisoners—is sweeping back into popularity with the German Army again. And the girl who first‘made it famous is singing it again. Her name —though she will always be simply “Lili” to tens of thousands of war-time soldiers—is Liselotte Helene Laie Andersen, an attractive blonde who now has Swiss nationality. Laie was an unknown nightclub entertainer in 1938 when a composer called Norbert Schultze persuaded her to sing “Lili Marlene” at Berlin’s Kabarett der Komiker.

She was applauded politely and made a record of the song, but the recording was a flop. Then in 1941 a corporal who had run short of popular discs played it for German forces, over Radio Belgrade. Within a week there were more than 1000 requests for it.

Investigation by the Nazi authorities led to a ruling that Laie Andersen, born in Bremerhaven, the daughter of a Norwegian shipwright, was not sufficiently representative of German womanhood to be a "forces sweetheart.”

But German soldiers preferred her recording and Goebbels ordered her to go to Belgrade to sing the song in person. When she refused she was threatened with a concentration camp. When the Gestapo arrived she was unconscious, from an overdose of sleeping tablets, but recovered and was interned until the end of the war. Divorced from her first husband, she married Arthur Baull, the Swiss composer, in 1949. Now she has two sons, a house .in Zurich and an apartment in Munich. She appears chiefly on television and still gets some 70 fan letters a day. About 3,000.000 records of “Lili Marlene” have been sold throughout the world.