Music, Politics, and Violence

3. Between the Lines: “Lili Marlene,” Sexuality, and the Desert War

83 chapter three Between the Lines “Lili Marlene,” Sexuality, and the Desert War christina baade “Lili Marlene” was “the most bewitching, haunting, sentimental song of the war” in the words of the British Captain C. F. Milner, who was stationed in North Africa during the Second World War.1 Although now closely associated with Marlene Dietrich, the song first became popular with Axis and Allied forces during the Desert War of 1941 and 1942. A nearly legendary level of mutual respect and the sparsely populated desert allowed what the German General Erwin Rommel famously labeled, “Krieg ohne Hass” (“war without hate”). Radio, with its ability to disseminate propaganda and to support troop morale, played a key role in the conflict. First broadcast by the Nazi-controlled Radio Belgrade and later by the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc), “Lili Marlene” crossed and re-crossed the lines of combat, ultimately becoming the marching song of the British Eighth Army and, according to the 1944 collection gi Songs, nearly “the song of this war.”2 When the Allies finally triumphed in North Africa, the song was one of their “trophies,” according to Humphrey Jennings’s 1944 Ministry of Information film, The True Story of Lili Marlene.3 According to the film, the trophy of “Lili Marlene” was not merely its copyright; rather, it was the physical object of Lale Andersen’s August 1939 recording of the song, the same version that Radio Belgrade broadcast daily from the summer of 1941.4 The primacy that Jennings accorded to a German Electro disk of “Lili Marleen,”5 which was captured in the Libyan desert in 1942, suggested the powerful role it played for listeners as musical surrogate, to borrow Carol Muller’s term describing recording and broadcasting ’s function as replacements for absent performers.6 Milner suggested objective and subjective violences / 84 the intimacies that Andersen’s mechanically reproduced and broadcast voice offered: Perhaps you have not been away from the sound of a woman’s voice for a year; for this voice was at once seductive and soothing, husky, intimate but mysteriously unattainable, reaching down to you as you lay in your blankets on the unsympathetic desert as though from the stars you were gazing at, longing for. Yet somehow she was just beside your head.7 Andersen’s appealing aural persona vaulted her to stardom and the song to hit status throughout North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Occupied Europe , where Radio Belgrade was heard. Many of the thousands of letters sent to Radio Belgrade conflated Andersen with Lili Marleen, the subject of the song, who waited under a lantern outside the barracks to meet her soldier sweetheart.8 For German and British forces, Lili Marlene embodied the sweetheart waiting faithfully in the homeland, but she was also a woman who frequented the street by a barracks—and insinuated herself aurally into a soldier ’s desert bed. As John Bierman and Colin Smith argue, she was an ambivalent character, “that archetypal if clichéd male fantasy figure: Virgin and Whore.”9 The situation was more complicated, however: Lili Marlene and the voices of women who sang the song resonated with the phenomenon of the pinup girl, the term Americans coined (and the British adopted) for the glamorous star photographs and sexy illustrations believed to bolster military morale. While wartime love and sexuality were laced with fear—of unfaithfulness, venereal disease, and mechanized death—the unthreatening pinup reinforced the heterosexual masculinity of her consumer.10 Cecil Madden, who directed overseas popular programming for the bbc, transferred the concept to radio, promoting numerous “radio girl-friends,” including wholesome Anne Shelton, whom the bbc promoted “to counteract the Marlene idea for sex-starved troops.”11 Ruth Yorck encapsulated the transition of Lili Marlene from German seductress to Anglo-American pinup: “She has defied all rules; jumped over all boundaries. Lili Marlene is export goods.”12 Lili Marlene dramatized the ambivalent roles that real women negotiated in the war. For Germans, she symbolized the power of romantic love in a culture where the Nazis instrumentalized marriage, sex, and women’s bodies for building a master race.13 In North Africa, Allied ideology and military policy were unified regarding “foreign” women: they were cast as exotic, sexually available, and potentially diseased. Servicemen could enjoy the benefits of both ostensibly faithful wives and sweethearts at home and tacit approval for sexual relations abroad, but the situation was more complicated [18.118.12.222] Project MUSE (2024...