Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

Top row: Michael Holm, Francoise Hardy, Katja Ebstein, Marianne Rosenberg, Ricky Shayne. Centre: Vicky Leandros, Udo Jürgens, Daliah Lavi, Jürgen Marcus. Bottom: Juliane Werding, Agnetha, Alexandra, Peter Maffay, Manuela

To mark Germany’s national day next week, on October 3, here’s a mix of German schlager and chanson tracks from the golden era between 1965 and 1975. Don’t be alarmed, we’re looking at the higher end of quality in schlager music.

Almost anyone who was a child in West Germany in the first half of the 1970s will tell you the routine on a Saturday, once a month: Have a bath, then into payamas, and at 18:45, the ZDF Hitparade would come on (ZDF was the channel on which the show was broadcast). Launched in 1969, it was the premier showcase for the German schlager — and it was incredibly popular. I watched it, in my payamas. Bath-time would be some time after 5, so that we’d catch Star Trek or Riptide (known in Germany as “Raumschiff Enterprise” and “SOS Charterboot”), and then once a month the Hitparade. In weeks when there was no Hitparade, we might have our bath after Star Trek.

Dieter “Thomas” Heck, shorn of his sideburns, presents the ZDF Hitparade on a Saturday evening in March 1976.

Presented by the bespectacled and sideburned Dieter “Thomas” Heck, the ZDF Hitparade came live from Berlin, filmed on a sparse set on which the stars, both established and budding, would sit among the audience. Mid-song, audience members would often get up and present the singer with flowers. It was superbly presented, even if the music was mostly awful.

Not that I cared about the defects in musical standards at the time. I loved the entertainment values, but by the time I was 10 years old, I started to become more discerning, and soon I denounced the whole schlager scene with increasing militancy. That attitude would carry me into adulthood. For a long time, I had no time for nor interest in the banal clap-along schlager fare.

In that I was with the majority of Germany’s youth. But the rejection of schlager followed no consensus. In a 1973 episode of the Disco TV show, super-square and conservative singer Heino performs his latest hit, a popular (and admittedly pretty catchy) clap-along number. The young people, guys with long hair and girls in tight stripey trousers, party to it like it’s 1999. At other times, the Disco audience would sit impassively to the glamrock of Slade or the dance-pop of ABBA or the rock of Status Quo or the disco-pop of Boney M, which suggests that this Heino mania was a spontaneous outbreak of schlager frenzy.

On the subject of Heino, a truly fascinating phenomenon who ended up doing duets with Rammstein, I recommend the documentary Made In Germany, which counts among its pundits, of all people, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. You need not know a thing about Heino to appreciate it.

Eventually I reached the age at which one may indulge in the nostalgia that evokes fond childhood memories. And many of the old schlager songs transported me back to the days when I’d sit with my payamas on the couch and watch the Hitparade with my mother, sister and brother. Much of the music might be questionable, but it recalls happy memories. Sometimes I find some old song, long-forgotten but instantly recognisable, and it’s back into the time capsule. Psychologist refer to this as our autobiographical memory, which is biased towards finding refuge in memories that recall moments when we felt safe — like sitting on the couch, watching TV with the family.

Schlager music has a bad reputation, and not without good reason. Most of it was banal and poor. But some of it was very good. ABBA fans will know that the Swedes were influenced by schlager. Before becoming an A in the group’s name, Agnetha Faltskrög tried her luck in German schlager, releasing six singles them between 1968-72; none of them was a hit. The last of these features on this mix. What might have been had Agnetha had become a big schlager star, too busy to join her husband and pals in their new pop combo? Would BBA have been as successful as they became?

Schlager star Michael Holm initiated two global hits, co-writing with Giorgio Moroder and recording the original of Chicory Tip’s Son Of My Father, and creating the first vocal version of the Italian instrumental which would become a Christmas hit for Johnny Mathis as When A Child Is Born. In Holm’s hands that song had no reference to Christmas: “Tränen lügen nicht” translates as “Tears don’t lie”.

Michael Holm performs on the ZDF Hitparade.

Drafi Deutscher kicks off this mix with one of the great schlager classics, “Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht”. He entered the US Billboard Top 100 with an English version of it, retitled “Marble Breaks And Iron Bends”.

Many schlager stars were straitjacketed into the genre’s formula. Some were broken by it, others made the best of it. Husband-and-wife duo Cindy & Bert found fame with hackneyed songs about Spanish guitars and “gypsies”, but at heart they were a rock act. They featured here before with their cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (On Any Major Schlager Covers Vol. 2); the song on this mix shows them as they wanted to be seen, rather than how their record company sought to present them.

Some of the songs here were big schlager hits, but the only one that invites a jolly clap-along is by Jürgen Marcus. I include it as an example of how that brand of schlager actually could be well-executed.

Marcus was a great singer who too often was stuck with sub-standard material. Israeli actress and singer Daliah Lavi — featuring here with as cover of a song by South African singer Emil Dean Zoghby, “Won’t You Join Me” — was more discerning. She had huge hits, usually with covers of English songs, and was a superstar among schlager singers, but musically she was closer to French chansoneers than most of her German colleagues.

As was Alexandra, the most tragic of the artists on this mix. The singer was just hitting the big time when she was killed in a car crash on July 31, 1969. She was only 27 (and thus became an unwilling member of the so-called 27 Club, comprising artists who died at that age). Rumours have it that the accident was caused by foul play. The featured song, the beautiful “Mein Freund, der Baum” (My friend, the tree) became a hit only after her death.

The wonderfully talented singer Alexandra on German TV in 1969, the year she died in a mysterious car crash.

International stars also formed part of the schlager firmament. Greek-born Vicky Leandros — who features here with her German version of the Eurovision winner Aprés toi — grew up and lived in West Germany. But stars like Caterina Valente, Mireille Mathieu, Gilbert Bécaud, France Gall, Nana Mouskouri, Danyel Gerard, Salvatore Adamo, Ricky Shayne or Françoise Hardy had hits with German songs, some originals and some covers of their mostly French originals, though Mathieu had several hits written for her by German producers (particularly Christian Bruhn, of whom more later). Of these international stars, Françoise Hardy and Ricky Shayne feature here.

Almost all songs here were single releases, albeit some of them as b-sides. Two, however, are album deep tracks. Manuela’s “Sonntag im Zoo” from 1967 is a delightful song that sounds like a Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach number arranged by The 5^th Dimension. It was co-written by Christian Bruhn, who co-wrote many schlager hits, including the tracks here by Drafi Deutscher, Marion Maerz, Peter Maffay, and the wonderful Katja Ebstein, for whom he also wrote the magnificent “Wunder gibt es immer wieder” (featured on Any Major Eurovision).

Mary Roos was highly regarded in France as a chanson singer, and even played at the Olympia. Her “Schmetterlinge weinen nicht” (Butterflies don’t cry) of 1970 sounds even more like a Bacharach song; one might think it might be a cover of a Dionne Warwick song. It was co-written and produced by the multi-talented Michael Holm.

The mix concludes with three tracks from 1975 that can be ID-tagged under different labels than “Schlager”. Joy Fleming was a blues and soul singer, Marianne Rosenberg had the first German-language disco hit in 1975 with “Ich bin wie Du”, and Juliane Werding, who broke through in 1972 as a teenager with a powerful cover of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, delivers a fine German country song with the not snappily titled “Wenn Du denkst Du denkst, dann denkst Du nur Du denkst” (“When you think you think, then you only think you think”).

I’ve re-upped the two companion mixes, wherein schlager stars sing German covers of Englosh songs — Any Major Schlager Covers Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), s well as Any Major Originals – Schlager Edition, which comprises mostly international originals of schlager hits, including Emil Drean Zoghby’s original of the Daliah Lavi song.

As a bonus I include the greatest German schlager: what it lacks in highest artistic merits it compensates for the the highest levels of banality and an overdose of cliché, but there is no song in the genre that is as catchy as this track. Germans probably already know which track it is.

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R, includes home-schunkeled covers, and the above text in an illustrated PDF. PW in comments.

1. Drafi Deutscher – Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht (1965)
2. Udo Jürgens – Siebzehn Jahr, Blondes Haar (1965)
3. Marion – Er ist wieder da (1965)
4. Françoise Hardy – Wenn dieses Lied erklingt (1965)
5. Manuela – Sonntag im Zoo (1967)
6. Hildegard Knef – Von nun an ging’s bergab (1968)
7. Alexandra – Mein Freund, der Baum (1968)
8. Lil Walker – Abschied im September (1968)
9. Mary Roos – Schmetterlinge weinen nicht (1970)
10. Haide Hansson – Du bist das Leben (1970)
11. Katja Ebstein – Und wenn ein neuer Tag erwacht (1970)
12. Peter Maffay – Du bist anders (1970)
13. Daliah Lavi – Willst du mit mir geh’n (1971)
14. Vicky Leandros – Dann kamst Du (1972)
15. Cindy & Bert – Geh’ die Straße (1972)
16. Ricky Shayne – Delta Queen (1972)
17. Su Kramer – Glaub’ an dich selbst (1972)
18. Elke Best – Nichts bleibt ungescheh’n (1972)
19. Agnetha – Komm’ doch zu mir (1972)
20. Jürgen Marcus – Eine neue Liebe ist wie ein neues Leben (1972)
21. Bernd Glüver – Der Junge mit der Mundhamonika (1973)
22. Michael Holm – Tränen lügen nicht (1974)
23. Joy Fleming – Ein Lied kann eine Brücke sein (1975)
24. Marianne Rosenberg – Ich bin wie Du (1975)
25. Juliane Werding – Wenn Du denkst Du denkst, dann denkst Du nur Du denkst (1975)

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This is the second part of the recycled German hitparade of the era just before and during the war. Again, if you dig genocidal fascism and want this mix to have a Nazi party, please go somewhere else. This mix was not made for your sorry Nazi asses. Part 1, covering 1930-37, was posted on Tuesday.

In 1944, the Third Reich’s propaganda and culture minister Joseph Goebbels issued a list of artists who were exempted from military duty. The list included individuals deemed too valuable for sacrifice on the battlefield — and friends of the regime. The Gottbegnadeten-Liste (God-gifted list) included authors, architects, painters, sculptors, composers (including 80-year-old Richard Strauss), conductors as well as singers and actors. Those included on that list have featured on these two compilations included Willy Fritsch, Paul Hörbiger (soon to be arrested for resistance activities), Hans Albers, Wilhelm Strienz, and Heinz Rühmann.

These artists enjoyed protection because of their sometimes unwitting collaboration in Goebbels’ endeavours of feeding a positive mood among an increasingly demoralised German population that had lost its youth on battlefields, its homes in bombed cities and its comforts with shortages in food, heat and clothing.

It had long been Goebbels’ strategy to distract the German population from the less savory sides of life under Nazism. Throughout the Nazi-era, he actively promoted light and apolitical feel-good films and songs (much as Hollywood did during the Depression). This meant that artists who were critical of the regime could work in the German film industry without troubling their conscience. Most probably did not realise that they were being used.

In the notes to the German Hitparade 1930-37 we encountered the affable Heinz Rühmann, who demonstrably differed with the Nazis on notions of racial purity. Yet it was he who prepared Germans for the war and the encouragement to see it through stoically when his signature hit Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern (That can’t rattle a seaman) was released just a month before the invasion of Poland. The song came from the film Paradies der Junggesellen (with Josef Sieber and Hans Brausewetter, who also appear on the song; watch the clip and note the swastika on the walls of the hall). It seems more of a coincidence, however, that Lale Andersen recorded her famous Lili Marlen, the original, almost exactly a month before the start of World War 2.

Zarah Leander confidently predicts that there will be a miracle in the 1942 film Die grosse Liebe.

During the war, many songs that ostensibly dealt with matters of romance had a rather unsubtle subtext that exhorted Germans to endure the war until the inevitable final victory. As the news from the fronts became increasingly troubling, so these songs became more frequent. While Bomber Arthur Harris destroyed German cities, Zarah Leander sang Davon geht die Welt nicht unter (Cheer up, the Volk, it’s not the end of the world) and the optimistic Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n (I know there’ll be a miracle one day). In the clip of the song from the film, note the angels. They are SS officers.

Lale Andersen suggested that everything will pass eventually. By then, a sense of cynicism began to prevail. Wags would complement her hit’s title Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei with the rhyme “erst geht der Adolf, dann die Partei” (Everything must pass, everything will go away; first goes Adolf, then the Party). People were executed for less. But as the end neared, a sense of fatalism started to creep in. The final song on this compilation, from 1944, will have resonated with soldiers on the front: Seagull, you’re flying home; send it my regards. Many of the soldiers did not go the way of the title’s feathered friend.

Some of the singers certainly were glad of their relationship with the Nazi regime, but it does not follow that all of those who appeared in German film were sympathisers. Some actors were jailed in concentration camps; some were executed or died of illness in camps. These unfortunates included the actor Robert Dorsay, a dancing comic who for a few months between 1932 and ’33 was even a party member.

In 1941 he was drafted into the army, where he drove trucks. While on home leave, he was overheard making political jokes, which was reported to the Gestapo. The secret police then intercepted Dorsay’s mail. In one letter, dated 31 March 1943, he asked (rhetorically) about the war: “When will this idiocy end?” That was enough for a Nazi court to sentence Dorsay to death. The 39-year-old actor, who had appeared in more than 30 movies between 1936 and ’39, was executed within hours of being sentenced in October that year (see a clip of Dorsay singing and dancing in the 1936 film Es geht um mein Leben, which — irony spotters, take note — could be translated as “It’s a matter of my survival”).

Another singer featured here was arrested: Evelyn Künnecke (1921-2001). The daughter of two big opera stars had not impressed the Nazi hierarchy by singing the racially impure and altogether degenerate American swing music (see this article on Germany’s Swing Kids scene). Despite going on tours entertaining German troops on both eastern and western fronts, Künnecke was arrested for “defeatism” in January 1945. She was released shortly before the war ended, with a view to recording English-language “propaganda jazz” songs for the disinformation station Germany Calling. It is not clear that Künnecke ever recorded with the station’s houseband, Charlie and his Orchestra.

In short, it would be rather too easy to damn all German artists of the era for lacking the courage to openly oppose the Nazis. By the same token, it is difficult to understand how some of the enthusiastic collaborators with Nazism were able to make such an easy transition to lucrative post-war careers.

The case of Lale Andersen (1905-72) is an interesting example of the thin ice German artists skated on at the time. Andersen reputedly was Hitler’s favourite singer, and her recording of Lili Marlen (originally titled Lied eines jungen Wachtposten and based on a WW1 poem) had made her well-known beyond Germany. Andersen had been reluctant to record the song because she didn’t like its martial tone; for Goebbels, who hated it, Lili Marlen was not martial enough. By 1942, the Nazi leadership decided that Andersen’s signature song was too morbid, and banned it (it had been subject to limited bans soon after its release). It seems Andersen disregarded the proscription, for she was strongly admonished never to sing it in public again, least of all in front of soldiers.

She then aggravated matters by declining to appear in concert in Warsaw and further by writing allegedly critical letters to refugees in Switzerland, which the Gestapo had intercepted. It is said that only a premature report of her arrest on the BBC saved Andersen from an already ordered arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Like Evelyn Künnecke, Andersen was made to cut a deal in exchange for freedom: she had to perform weekly with Germany Calling’s Charlie and his Orchestra. Unlike other, more willing, participants in Nazi propaganda, this action brought the singer a brief post-war performance ban.

Foreign stars seemed to be better behaved than some of their local counterparts, such as the magnificent diva Zarah Leander (1907-81), who with her extravagant gestures and alto soprano was an obvious favourite drag queen character in the West Germany of the 1970s and ’80s. Born in Sweden, Leander’s life would make a great biopic. She enjoyed her first success in Vienna in 1936 with the operetta Axel an der Himmelstür, the libretto of which was written by one Paul Morgan, a German emigré.

Within two years, Morgan had died of pneumonia in the Buchenwald concentration camp, while the singer who had sung his words on the Vienna stage had become one of Nazi Germany’s biggest stars, appearing in many propaganda films. Leander always claimed to have been apolitical; not everybody was convinced of it. She left Germany in 1942.

Another Scandinavian, the Norwegian Kirsten Heiberg (1907-76) had a glittering career as an actress of the femme fatale type. But she did not endear herself to the Nazi brass by refusing to join the NSDAP, and when she spoke out — albeit without forthright trenchancy — against the German occupation of her home country, she was banned from performing in public for two years. Norwegians did not forgive Heiberg’s association with the Nazi regime, and she retired from show business in 1954. [Edit: See comments for a further discussion on Heiberg and her politics.]

Heiberg was married to Franz Grothe (1908-82), who was a party member, having joined the NSDAP in May 1933. Before that, the composer had written many songs for Richard Tauber (who left Germany after being beaten up by Grothe’s new pals). After the war, Grothe resisted the denazification process, but that act of noncompliance did little to obstruct his post-war career. Until his death, he was chief conductor on the very popular, long-running and conservative Volksmusik TV show Zum blauen Block.

Another non-German who had a glittering career in the Third Reich was Johannes Heesters (1903-2011), who appeared on the first compilation and here duetting with Marika Rökk (1913-2004, an admirer of Hitler in her day and, guess what, another post-war star whose Nazi-sympathising past was not a problem). The singing and dancing actor, who came to Germany in 1936, is still despised in his native Netherlands as a Nazi collaborator.

Heesters, who performed for Hitler and in 1941 visited the Dachau concentration camp (apparently to entertain SS guards, which Heesters denies), did not distance himself from the Third Reich. But at the same time, in 1938 Heesters did appear on a Dutch stage with a Jewish group of actors.

His unapologetic collaboration with the Nazi regime notwithstanding, the allies allowed him to continue his career after the war. Heesters was the world’s oldest active entertainer. His career started in 1921, he last appeared in a TV film in 2003, and died at 108 on Christmas Eve 2011.

Perhaps the most active Nazi featured here was the tenor Wilhelm Strienz (1900-87), who in 1933 joined the Sturmabteilung (Ernst Röhm’s brownshirts) and produced a series of propaganda hits on themes such as “Being German means being faithful” and “Fly, German flag, fly”. He regularly contributed to cultural Nazi propaganda, which did not deter London’s Covent Garden opera house from engaging him. After the war, German radio blacklisted Strienz — not a very common step, as we have seen — but the singer continued a successful touring and recording until his retirement in 1963.

Die Goldene Sieben was the regime’s attempt to create German jazz as an alternative to the decadent swing music from the USA. The attempt failed.

Die Goldene Sieben, featured in part 1 with Ich wollt’ ich wär ein Huhn and here with Oh Aha!, were a musical experiment by the Nazis. The group was founded in Berlin to record “German jazz”, a type that would conform to the moral requirements of the Third Reich, as opposed to the “decadent” US jazz. However, the ever rotating members of the band failed to invent German jazz, doing so much of US-style swinging that Goebbels’ ministry disbanded the group in 1939, after five years of activity.

Likewise, the Austrian singer and composer Peter Igelhoff (1904-78) was considered too jazzy, and was prohibited from performing in public and banned from radio in 1942. Instead, the entertainer was drafted into the army and sent to the front. He survived and enjoyed a rewarding career in post-war Germany.

Among the most successful songwriting teams of the era was that of Michael Jary and Bruno Balz, who wrote those escapist anthems Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern, Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n and Davon geht die Welt nicht unter. These songs were useful propaganda, and in the end might have saved Balz’s life.

Bruno Balz (1902-88) was jailed in 1936 under the notorious anti-gay law of 1872 (which the Federal Republic of Germany retained until 1973) for having homosexual relations. He was released early under the condition that he keep his name out of the public domain and that he enter into a marriage with a party loyalist. Moreover, his name was not to appear in song or film credits (a situation that was not rectified until many years after the war). Bruno “re-offended”: in 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured. It took the intervention of Jary who said that he could not produce the songs which Goebbels demanded without Balz. The lyricist was quickly released. The story goes that within a day of that traumatic event, Jary and Balz wrote the two Zarah Leander classics mentioned above.

Michael Jary (1906-88), who died just four months after his old songwriting partner, was not only a Schlager writer and an accomplished composer and arranger of classical film scores, but also a bandleader in the style of US swing orchestra leaders. Born in Poland as Maximilan Jarczyk, the Catholic Jary — who at one point studied for the priesthood — was often mistaken for being Jewish, and so changed his name (also calling himself Max Jantzen and Jackie Leeds). Running an orchestra came in useful for Jary: just 19 days after the fall of the Third Reich, he was recording programmes for Berlin radio commissioned by the Soviet forces.

Jary’s preferred lead singer was Rudi Schuricke (1913-73), who in 1931 was invited to join the Comedian Harmonists but instead went on to found his own trio, the Schuricke Terzett. He recorded with his group, guested on orchestras such as Jary’s and released solo records, often expressing sentimental longings for exotic locations (and in the 1930s and ’40s, when foreign holidays were unattainable fantasies, ideas of Napoli and Capri were very glamorous indeed). Schuricke’s post-war career was brief, a short-lived comeback in the 1970s notwithstanding, and he ended up running a hotel and laundry.

The best rumour concerning anyone featured here involves Ilse Werner (1921-2005), who was famous for whistling interludes in her songs. It is said that it is her whistling on the Scorpions’ hit Winds Of Change. Werner was also something of a pioneer of TV, presenting a programme on German television — the world’s first — before the regime stopped broadcasts in 1944. Like Andersen, Werner was given a performance ban after the war before she re-established herself.

TRACKLISTING
1. Zarah Leander – Kann Denn Liebe Sünde Sein (1938)
2. Rudi Schuricke – O Mia Bella Napoli (1938)
3. Peter Igelhoff – Der Onkel Doktor Hat Gesagt (1938)
4. Die Goldene Sieben – Oh Aha! (1939)
5. Michael Jary Tanzorchester mit Rudi Schuricke – J’attendrai (Komm zurück) (1939)
6. Lilian Harvey – Guten Tag, Liebes Glück (1939)
7. Heinz Rühmann – Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern (1939)
8. Lale Andersen – Lied eines jungen Wachtposten (Lili Marlen) (1939)
9. Hans Albers – Goodbye, Johnny (1939)
10. Marika Rökk & Johannes Heester – Musik, Musik, Musik (1939)
11. Wilhelm Strienz – Abends In Der Taverne (1940)
12. Heinz Rühmann u. Herta Feiler – Mir Geht’s Gut (1940)
13. Heinz Müller Orchester – So schön wie heut’ (1941)
14. Hans Moser – Die Reblaus (1941)
15. Ilse Werner – So Wird’s Nie Wieder Sein (1941)
16. Franz Grothe – Wenn Ein Junger Mann Kommt (1941)
17. Peter Igelhoff – Ich bin ganz verschossen in Deine Sommersprossen (1942)
18. Zarah Leander – Davon geht die Welt nicht unter (1942)
19. Zarah Leander – Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen (1942)
20. Lale Andersen – Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei (1942)
21. Kirsten Heiberg – Liebespremiere (1943)
22. Gerda Schönfelder – Ganz leis’ erklingt Musik (1943)
23. Evelyn Künnecke – Das Karussell (1943)
24. Marika Rökk – In Der Nacht Ist Der Mensch Nicht Alleine (1944)
25. Herbert Ernst Groh – Frauenaugen (1944)
26. Magda Hain – Möwe, Du Fliegst In Die Heimat (1944)

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This mix was first posted in 2010, but with last week’s 75th anniversary of the the end of WW2 in Europe and the end of the Third Reich, the era covered by this collection and its follow-up is of heightened interest again — and maybe more so the stories behind the artists on this mix. Obviously, if you want this mix because you are nostalgic for the Third Reich, you are not welcome to it. As Indiana Jones so memorably put it: “Nazis. I hate these guys.” The 1938-45 mix follows on Thursday.

This is the first of two compilations of German hits covering the era from the rise of Nazism to its demise. The first compilation leads us through the latter years of the Weimar Republic to 1937, just before war became an inevitable prospect. The second mix will start in 1938 — the year of the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria — through the war to 1944 (there were no hits in 1945, it seems).

None of the pre-war Schlager featured here are of the Nazi propaganda sort, and even the propaganda of the war-period songs is subtle, framing national optimism and encouragement in romantic song (with sentiments such as “I know one day there’ll be a miracle” and “Everything must pass”), which was very much in line with Goebbels’ propaganda strategy which used film and song to distract the Volk‘s mind from matters of war.

The careers of some of the artists featured in the first mix ended with the advent of Nazism. Marlene Dietrich (1901-92), whose Ich bin die fesche Lola comes from Der Blaue Engel (filmed simultaneously as The Blue Angel in 1929), launched her Hollywood career before Hitler assumed power on 31 January 1933. While Dietrich agitated against the Nazis from the safety of Hollywood, her sister ran a cinema near the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, frequented mainly by SS guards. Marlene renounced her sister as a result, yet after the war helped her financially. In post-war West Germany, Dietrich was long regarded by many as a traitor on account of her support for the Allies in WW2. At a 1960 concert in Düsseldorf, an audience member threw an egg at her (in fairness, other audience members gave the offender a good beating for his troubles).

Comedian Harmonists

The sextett Comedian Harmonists created many pre-Nazi classics which became German standards (such as Veronika, der Lenz ist da; Wochenend und Sonnenschein; Ein Freund, ein guter Freund; Mein kleiner Kaktus). Half of the group comprised Jewish members, and the group struggled soon after the Nazis took power. In 1934 the group was prohibited from performing in Germany; after a year of foreign tours it split in 1936. The three Jewish members emigrated, and formed a band which toured under the original name; the three Aryans formed a new group called the Meistersextett. Likewise, the Hungarian Jewish singer Gitta Alpar (1903-91) left Germany after 1933, and was divorced by her Aryan actor husband Gustav Fröhlich on top of that.

Richard Tauber (1891-1948), the Austrian tenor and actor, was the son of a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, and had even hoped Richard would become a priest. Instead, Richard joined the stage, appearing in operas and operettas. Already a big star in Germany, Tauber was badly beaten up by Nazi thugs, presumably because of his Jewish ancestry, and left Germany for Austria. He fled his homeland after its annexation. He subsequently became a British citizen, and died in London at the age of 57.

Then there was the tragic Joseph Schmidt (1904-42), a Jewish tenor who was among the first artists to be banned from German radio by the Nazis. A few months after the release of his film Ein Lied geht um die Welt (the title track features on this set; see the video clip from the film) in May 1933, Schmidt fled Germany for Vienna, then after the Anschluss to Belgium, then after its invasion by Germany to France, and following France”s occupation to neutral Switzerland, where he arrived in September 1942. Several escape attempts had weakened Schmidt, leading to his collapse on a Zürich street. He was identified as a Jewish refugee, a category that in Swiss law was not regarded as political emigrés, and taken to the internment camp Girenbad while his residence application was being processed. While interned he fell ill and was treated in a hospital for an inflammation of the throat. The doctors refused to follow up his complaint about chest pains, and Schmidt was returned to Girenbad. Two days later, on November 16, he died of a heart attack. The following day, his approved residence permit arrived.

Just as dramatic is the story of Renate Müller (1906-37). Müller was a movie star (appearing in 1933’s Viktor und Viktoria, a movie banned by the Nazis and remade in English in 1980 as Victor/Victoria, from which the featured song comes. See video clip). After the departure of Marlene Dietrich, Adolf Hitler himself asked the beautiful, thoroughly Aryan Müller to make Nazi propaganda movies. She refused to do so, and also resisted pressure to split from her Jewish lover. Her sudden death at 31 in 1937 was attributed to epilepsy, but in reality she died after falling from a window. It might have been suicide, but Gestapo officers were seen entering the building shortly before. She might have jumped in a panic at the approach of the feared secret police, or she might have been pushed the agents. There are rumours that Müller had some incriminating information on Hitler.

The Polish-born actress Pola Negri (1897-1987), the famous femme fatale of Hollywood’s silent movies era and former lover of Rudolfo Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, had returned to Europe after her career floundered with the advent of the talkies and after losing a fortune in the Wall Street Crash. She acted in a few Goebbels-commissioned films, then fled Germany in 1938 as rumours of her part-Jewish ancestry appeared. Other rumours concerned an alleged affair with Hitler, who counted the Negri movie Mazurka among his favourites. Negri won a libel suit against a French magazine that had made the claim.

Like the unfortunate Joseph Schmidt, many artists left Germany as the horror of life under the Nazis began to reveal itself. The movie folks and writers among them, Jewish and gentile, tended to move to the US. These included the comic actor Siegfried Arno (1895-1975), who in his day was known as “the German Chaplin”. But the USA had no great demand for singers. So many of them continued their careers in Germany. Some of them surely had Nazi sympathies, or at least exhibited exceedingly high levels of pragmatism and wilful ignorance. Some, like Dutch-born singing hoofer Johannes Heesters, Swedish diva Zarah Leander or Führer-favourite Lale Andersen, would claim that they had no idea about politics, as though one needed the insights of a Chomsky to realise that very bad things indeed were happening under the swastika, even while cocooned in the protective shell of celebrity.

But it would be an error to believe that all artists were supportive of the Nazis. Hans Albers (1891-1960), one of the biggest stars in Nazi Germany, despised the Nazis. The regime forced him to officially split from his half-Jewish girlfriend, Hansi Burg, but he continued to live with her. In 1939, he arranged for her escape to Switzerland. When she returned to post-war Germany, Albers dropped his girlfriend at the time to reunite with Burg, with whom he lived until his death in 1960. His Flieger, grüss mir die Sonne is sometimes considered a Nazi propaganda anthem. It was nothing of the sort, at least not in intent. Released the year before the Nazis took power, Albers sung it in the sci-fi film F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht.

Paul Hörbiger (1894-1981), an Hungarian-Austrian actor, became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. Arrested by the Nazis in 1945, he was sentenced to death for treason, with the BBC even reporting his death. Hörbiger lived, and enjoyed a long career on film, TV and stage which ended just a year before his death in 1981 at 86. Long revered in Germany and Austria as a grand old gentleman of stage and screen, Hörbiger’s film credits include the classic The Third Man, in which he played Harry Lime’s nameless porter.

Hans Söhnker (1903-1981) was discovered just as the Nazis took power. With some fellow actors of much courage he helped hide Jews on the run from the Nazis. Reportedly Söhnker was blacklisted by the Gestapo on several occasions because of these activities, with his celebrity presumably protecting him from the serious consequences non-famous Germans risked doing the same noble thing. He went on to have a long, fruitful career in Germany, where there was much affection for him.

Lilian Harvey (1906-1968) was born in London to English and German parents. During WW1, her father worked in Magdeburg, preventing the family from returning to England. Lilian might have become a big British star; instead her career hit the big time in Germany. After a failed attempt at breaking through in Hollywood, she drew the attention of the Gestapo in the ’30s for her refusal to disassociate from her Jewish friends. Based in France after war, she resumed her career in West Germany.

Others were apolitical. Heinz Rühmann (1902-94) was one of Germany’s biggest stars for close to six decades (he appeared in the excellent 1930 comedy Die drei von der Tankstelle, and in a 1941 propaganda comedy with the entirely unfortunate title Der Gasmann, which, unusually for comedies, liberally used the “Heil Hitler” salute). Rühmann, reportedly Anne Frank’s favourite actor, presented himself in public as entirely apolitical, but after the war he was accused of having divorced his Jewish wife in 1938 so as to protect his career in the Third Reich. However, his next wife, Hertha Feiler, (with whom he remained until her death in 1975) had a Jewish grandfather, which caused Rühmann some trouble with the Nazi hierarchy. A Rühmann & Feiler duet appears on the second mix.

Willi Forst (1903-80), an Austrian actor, director and singer, was highly regarded by the Nazis, and made movies commissioned by them (including that Hitler favourite starring Pola Negri). After the war he defended himself from accusations of having been a sell-out, referring to his country’s “occupation” (for which his compatriots had voted, of course) and pointing to subtle subversion in his films. The fine actor Curd Jürgens later recalled Forst’s advice during the Nazi era to never make any political statement in case it might come back later to bite him.

Actor Willy Fritsch (1901-73) was a member of the NSDAP, though he made no political statements in his films other than the 1944 propaganda flick Junge Adler (which featured post-war movie star Hardy Krüger and 1970s TV host Dietmar Schönherr). Fritsch’s Nazi party membership was not held against him after the war, when he was one of Germany’s most popular actors. Singing with him on Ich wollt’ ich wär’ ein Huhn, recycled from the film Glückskinder, is Lilian Harvey (video clip). Their lyric is different from the more comedic version of Die Goldene Sieben (more about whom in part 2), who draw some verses from the movie version of the song, including the notion that Mickey Mouse lives in a mousehole. In the hit version Fritsch is more interested in being a chicken so that he need not have to go to the office. And it is that everyday-man persona with which he cemented his acting career. His son Thomas became one of West-Germany’s biggest actors in the 1960s and ’70s.

In some of these post-war roles Willy Fritsch played the father to young Romy Schneider’s characters. The ill-fated Romy was the daughter of the committed Austrian Nazi actor Wolf Albach-Retty and Magda Schneider (1909-96), of whom it is said that she had been close to Adolf Hitler. Like Heesters and Fritsch, Magda’s post-war career was not inhibited by the taint of Nazi associations. Another performer with a dodgy Third Reich record could never be taken to task: the Viennese crooner Luigi Bernauer (1899-1945) died in Oslo while on a tour entertaining German troops in occupied territories.

1. Marlene Dietrich – Ich Bin Die Fesche Lola (1930)
2. Comedian Harmonists – Ein Freund, Ein Guter Freund (1930)
3. Siegfried Arno – Wenn Die Elisabeth Nicht So Schöne Beine Hätt (1930)
4. Richard Tauber – Adieu, Mein Kleiner Gardeoffizier (1930)
5. Paul Hörbiger – Das Muss Ein Stück Vom Himmel Sein (1931)
6. Lilian Harvey – Das Gibt’s Nur Einmal (1931)
7. Gitta Alpar – Was Kann So Schön Sein Wie Deine Liebe (1932)
8. Hans Albers – Flieger, Grüss’ Mir Die Sonne (1932)
9. Die Weintraubs – Wenn Wieder Frühling Ist (1933)
10. Joseph Schmidt – Ein Lied Geht Um Die Welt (1933)
11. Renate Müller – An einem Tag im Frühling (1934)
12. Comedian Harmonists – Gitarren spielt auf (1934)
13. Herbert Ernst Groh – Ein Walzer für dich (1934)
14. Hilde Hildebrandt – Liebe ist ein Geheimnis (1934)
15. Eric Helgar – Wir wollen Freunde sein für’s ganze Leben (1934)
16. Erwin Hartung – Kannst du pfeifen, Johanna (1934)
17. Luigi Bernauer – Nachts Ging Das Telefon (1935)
18. Jan Kiepura – Ob Blond, Ob Braun, Ich Liebe Alle Frau’n (1935)
19. Pola Negri – Wenn Die Sonne Hinter Den Dächern versinkt (1936)
20. Hans Albers – Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins (1936)
21. Willy Fritsch & Lilian Harvey – Ich wollt’ ich wär ein Huhn (1936)
22. Die Goldene Sieben – Ich wollt’ ich wär ein Huh (1936)
23. Die Metropol Vokalisten – Buh-Buh (1937)
24. Hans Söhnker & Magda Schneider – Wem gehört Ihr Herz am nächsten Sonntag, Fräulein? (1937)
25. Heinz Rühmann & Hans Albers – Jawohl, Meine Herren (1937)
26. Johannes Heesters – Ich werde jede Nacht von Ihnen träumen (1937)
27. Willy Forst – Kapriolen (1937)

RUNTERLADEN!

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In a 1979 interview with the Swiss-German pop magazine, Schlager singer Benny was asked whether recording German versions of foreign songs wasn’t a cop-out for producing good local music. Benny answered along the lines that German versions help listeners with no foreign language skills understand the original song.

But Benny was wrong: at the time the singer himself issued versions of Plastic Bertrand’s Ça Plane Pour Moi and Sham 69’s If The Kids Are Alright, and their lyrics failed to resemble the lyrics of the original. The interviewer had a point: good German tunes were thin on the ground, until the New German Wave hit a couple of years later.

In Any Major Schlager Covers Vol. 1 we looked at German covers of international hits, some of which were pretty good, and others were curious. This second mix repeats that exercise.

It kicks off with the most iconic of the lesser-known cover, a cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid by the most quintessential of square Schlager singers, the husband-and-wife duo Cindy & Bert. The Sabbath cover was released when they were still doing music part-time, seeing themselves as serious musicians. Soon Cindy & Bert became staples of clap-along Schlager songs, mostly on Fernweh themes of exotic locations and Spanish guitars in Malaga. Cindy & Bert competed in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which Sweden’s ABBA won while the German pair finished rock bottom of the table.

Some Schlager singers successfully straddled the line between cultured chanson and banal Schlager. One of them was Greek-born and Germany-raised singer Vicky Leandros, whose father gave up his successful music career to mentor his daughter to stardom. His plan worked: Leandros created two of the great Eurovision classics, both in French representing Luxembourg (no Brexit in the Leandros household): L’amour est Bleu and Aprés Toi (better known in English as Love Is Blue and Then Came You; both featured on Any Major Eurovision). Here Leandros, who also did a fine cover of My Sweet Lord, reinterprets The Box Tops’ The Letter.

Likewise, the great Katja Ebstein was a credible singing artist who had success in Schlager (and in the Eurovision Song Contest, which she finished as runner-up three times). She featured in Vol. 1; here she covers Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. In terms of vocals, I prefer Ebstein’s to those of Mitchell or Judy Collins.

Also part of the Schlager scene but transcending it was the sassy Juliane Werding, who as a 16-year-old landed a huge hit with an anti-drug version of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Personal problems got in the way of her career which was marked by several comebacks.

The late Jürgen Marcus, on the other hand, was a Schlager singer of the intergenerational clap-along variety, though one always suspected that he could have been much better than that (as did he). His competent but unconvincing cover of the Bee Gees’ Massachussets gives little indication of that, though the arrangement is very nice. Perhaps he was better off singing those catchy Schlager hits.

Also going back to the canon of mid-1960s ballads is Thomas Fritsch’s version of Wichitia Lineman, which also is scored in good taste, with a nice piano solo. Fritsch was an acting star, starting his long career as a child, and never really had great success as a singer.

The weedy voice that croons the Eagles’ New Kid In Town on the old theme of seductive 17-year-olds is that of Frank Farian, who became the male and a female voice of Boney M., and later had Milli Vanilli lip-sync for him.

One act here comes from East-Germany, which was not exactly not a mine of pop jewels. So it seems quite fitting that ABBA would be covered by a choir ensemble, the eight-member Gerd Michaelis Chor. Their cover of Waterloo, recorded soon after ABBA won the Eurovision, does the right thing: play it straight, and accept that it won’t be superior to the original.

As a teenager Suzanne Doucet had her first hit with her German take on The Ronettes’ Be My Baby. The daughter of a well-known psychologist went on to become a prolific songwriter, producer and music entrepreneur, as well as an actress. Much of her career was devoted to new age music.

I take no responsibility for some pretty weird covers here. Rock & roll singer John Dattelbaum’s version of Dion’s Runaway is included for its WTF qualities. In it, the singer styles himself as Mädchenschreck (one who frightens off girls); his vocal performance confirms the validity of the title.

Gaby Baginsky recorded her German version of Paul McCartney’s Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey in 1972, a few years before she became a star with traditionally banal Schlager numbers. Incredibly, somebody thought it was a good idea to, firstly, cover that song, and, secondly, to issue her cover as a single. I recently learnt that I had once seen Baginsky in concert, as a support act. I had no memory of that in any way.

At least four acts here are very much not Schlager stars. Christopher & Michael were protest singers in the 1960s, so it seemed obvious that they would cover Barry McGuire’s Eve Of Destruction. The lyrics are certainly heartfelt, and issue a timely reminder that Germans should look at their own society before calling for “Death to Red Russia”. But some in the protest movement saw the twosome as a bit naïve and embarrassing. Joan Baez didn’t think so: she appeared alongside them during a famous protest in Frankfurt in 1966.

I have written before about Jürgen Zeltinger, an overweight, balding, openly gay punk singer often seen in a kaftan who delivered his lyrics in Kölsch, the dialect specific to Cologne. I’ve also posted his cover of the Ramones’ Rockaway Beach before, but include it here because it is so good.

Marius Müller-Westernhagen was better known as an actor before he became a well-known, often quotable rock singer. His voice was not very good, but his lyrics had punch, often of the satirical variety. And then it wasn’t always clear whether he meant it or not, as it was with his song Dicke (“fat people”), which lyrically more than borrowed from Randy Newman’s Short People. Here Müller-Westernhagen adapts Paul McCartney’s sincere but artless Give Ireland Back To The Irish to a call to give Bavaria back to the Bavarians, for the good of West-Germany. For US readers, it’s a bit like telling Texas to secede for the greater good of the USA — except many secession-minded Bavarians would agree with Marius.

Finally, there is The Hunters doing a German cover of the Sweet’s Fox On The Run. The Hunters were already active as an English-language rock band: The Scorpions.

As a bonus track, I offer you the first German rap record, a cover of Rapper’s Delight performed by a trio of German TV music show presenters: Frank Laufenberg, the superbly-named Manfred Sexauer, and Thomas Gottschalk as G.L.S.-United. It is a total disaster as the trio recall their musical influences: other than Gottschalk mentioning “disco, from time to time” and Sexauer remembering Little Richard, they have no black influences. But they rap…

As always, CD-R length, home-eisbeined covers, PW in comments.

1. Cindy & Bert – Der Hund von Baskerville (1970 – Paranoid)
2. Gus Ferlin – Es steht ein Haus im Westen (1966 – House Of The Rising Sun)
3. Inga – The Beat Goes On (1967 – The Beat Goes On)
4. Lisa Bauer – Song vom Hilfsarbeiter (1971 – Son Of A Preacherman)
5. Peter Horton – Mrs Robinson (1971 – Mrs Robinson)
6. Christopher & Michael – Wir sind am Ende (1965 – Eve Of Destruction)
7. Jürgen Marcus – Warum kann ich deine Liebe nicht vergessen? (1971 – Massachusetts)
8. Thomas Fritsch – Draht in der Sonne (1969 – Wichita Lineman)
9. Howard Carpendale – Heiss wie Feuer (1971 – Ring Of Fire)
10. Bernd Spier – Memphis Tennessee (1964 – Memphis, Tennessee)
11. John Dattelbaum – Mädchenschreck (1961 – Runaway)
12. Suzanne Doucet – Sei mein Baby (1964 – Be My Baby)
13. Die Five Tops – Frag doch nur dein Herz (1965 – Trains And Boats And Planes)
14. Marion Maerz – Warten und hoffen (1971 – Wishing And Hoping)
15. Vicky Leandros – Er hat mir geschrieben (1971 – The Letter)
16. Anita Traversi – Es ist so schön verliebt zu sein (1965 – As Tears Go By)
17. Katja Ebstein – Beide Seiten (1973 – Both Sides Now)
18. Drafi Deutscher – Weil ich Dich liebe (1970 – Wigwam [by Bob Dylan])
19. Frank Farian – Sie war erst 17 (1977 – New Kid In Town)
20. Gerd Michaelis Chor – Waterloo (1974 – Waterloo)
21. Juliane Werding – Da staunste, was (1977 – Howzat)
22. The Hunters (Scorpions) – Fuchs geh’ voran (1975 – Fox On The Run)
23. Zeltinger Band – Müngersdorfer Stadion (1979 – Rockaway Beach)
24. Benny – Bin wieder frei (1978 – Ça Plane Pour Moi)
25. Marius Müller-Westernhagen – Gebt Bayern zurück an die Bayern (1972 – Give Ireland Back To The Irish)
26. Gaby Baginsky – Von Calais nach Dover (1972 – Admiral Halsey)
Bonus:  G.L.S.-United – Rapper’s Deutsch (1980 – Rapper’s Delight)

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I have previously posted some German versions of English-language hits sung by the stars of these songs themselves. Here’s a mix of 29 such songs, spanning just over a decade, from 1961-72.

The fashion of Anglophone artists to record in various European languages hit overdrive in the mid-’60s. As mainland Europe’s biggest record market, Germany benefited (or not) from that fashion in particular. Some artists just recorded a few songs, often used as b-sides (for example, The Supremes’ German version of Where Did Our Love Go was the flip side of the English-language Moonlight And Kisses). Others recorded more regularly. British singers such as Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw and Peter & Gordon, as well as Connie Francis recorded several original German songs.

Some singers clearly could not speak German and sang their lyrics phonetically, often poorly, such as Millie, The Searchers, The Temptations and Dionne Warwick. Others made at the very least an effort, such as The Supremes, Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, Connie Francis, Brian Hyland, The Honeycombs or Manfred Mann.

And some either spoke German or made a great effort to learn the proper pronunciation of words. Top of the class would be The New Christy Minstrels, Peter Paul & Mary, Olivia Newton-John (whose mother was German, the daughter of physics Nobel laureate Max Born) and ABBA (whose Agnetha once tried to make it as a Schlager singer).

Johnny Cash, who as a GI was stationed in Bavaria, does a good job on In Virginia (which features here), but did some violence to German on his version of I Walk The Line.

Most of the translations more or less reflect the original; but a few take a whole new theme. Sandie Shaw‘s Puppet On A String becomes Wiedehopf im Mai, for example. A Wiedehopf is a bird (picture here). Of course, she also recorded the Eurovision Song Contest-winning song in French, Spanish and Italian, possibly without reference to tongue-twisting feathered friends. And then there is Donny Osmond, whose Go Away, Little Girl becomes the opposite: Bleib’ bei mir (Stay with me).

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R, and includes home-deutsched covers (as well as a larger version of the above collage of single covers). PW in comments.

1. Gene Pitney – Bleibe bei mir (Town Without Pity) (1961)
2. Connie Francis – Schöner fremder Mann (Someone Else’s Boy) (1961)
3. Brian Hyland – Schön war die Zeit (Sealed With A Kiss) (1962)
4. Leroy Van Dyke – Geh nicht vorbei (Walk On By) (1962)
5. Peter, Paul & Mary – Die Antwort weiß ganz allein der Wind (Blowin’ In The Wind) (1962)
6. The New Christy Minstrels – Grün, grün ist Tennessee (Geen Green) (1963)
7. Roy Orbison – Mama (Mama) (1963)
8. Willie Nelson – Little Darling (Pretty Paper) (1964)
9. Millie – My Boy Lollipop (My Boy Lollipop) (1964)
10. The Beatles – Komm, gib mir deine Hand (I Want To Hold Your Hand) (1964)
11. The Honeycombs – Hab’ ich das Recht (Have I The Right) (1964)
12. The Searchers – Süss ist sie (Sugar And Spice) (1964)
13. Marvin Gaye – Wie schön das ist (How Sweet It Is) (1964)
14. The Temptations – Mein Girl (My Girl) (1964)
15. Dionne Warwick – Geh Vorbei (Walk On By) (1964)
16. Dusty Springfield – Warten und hoffen (Wishin’ And Hopin’) (1965)
17. The Supremes – Baby, Baby, wo ist unsere Liebe (Where Did Our Love Go) (1965)
18. Georgie Fame – Yeah, Yeh, Yeh (Yeh Yeh) (1965)
19. Manfred Mann – Sie (She) (1965)
20. The Beach Boys – Ganz allein (In My Room) (1965)
21. Johnny Cash – In Virginia (In Virginia) (1966)
22. Petula Clark – Downtown (Downtown) (1966)
23. Sandie Shaw – Wiedehopf im Mai (Puppet On A String) (1967)
24. Donny Osmond – Bleib bei mir, little Girl (Go Away Little Girl) (1971)
25. Olivia Newton-John – Unten am Fluß, der Ohio heißt (On The Banks Of The Ohio) (1972)
26. The New Seekers – Oh, ich will betteln, ich will stehlen (Beg Steal Or Borrow) (1972)
27. Daniel Boone – Beautiful Sunday (Beautiful Sunday) (1972)
28. Abba – Ring Ring (Ring Ring) (1973)
29. Abba – Waterloo (Waterloo) (1974)

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The germanised cover version was a staple of the Schlager scene. Often they were cash-ins of songs that were big hits in other countries — not just from the Anglophone world but also from other European countries, especially France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

But not all German covers were cash-ins. Some were sophisticated and sincere interpretations by artists who in France would record under the rather more satisfying title “chanson”. These artists included the likes of Daliah Lavi, Katja Ebstein, Dunja Raiter and Joy Fleming, who are represented here. And others were reinterpreted in ways that gave the artist a break from recording grandmother-approved music. Some of these were filler album tracks. For example, former Les Humphries Singers member Jürgen Drews covered Hotel California, which features here, as he was having a hit with Eddie Rabbitt’s Rocky Mountain Music (as Barfuss durch den Sommer).

The collection kicks off with Joy Fleming‘s cover of Aretha Franklin’s version of R-E-S-P-E-C-T. And if there was one German singer qualified to sing soul, it was Fleming, a woman of big voice and big personality. In 1975 Fleming came third-last in the Eurovision Song Contest with a soul-touched song that deserved better, Ein Lied kann eine Brücke sein. Fleming sadly died in September, after this mix had been compiled.

Former teen star Manuela gives us a version of Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman. The title, which translates as When Night Falls In Harlem, is not promising, but her version turns out to be okay. The singer, who was something of Germany”s version of Connie Francis, resists the temptation to emote.

Also singing soul is Katja Ebstein with her 1972 take on Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay, which has a tasteful arrangement and is well interpreted. Ebstein also represented West-Germany in the Eurovision, coming third in 1970 with the excellent Wunder gibt es immer wieder, and again in 1971 (with the ecology song Diese Welt), and second in 1980 (backed by mimes, with Theater). A social-democrat, the now 72-year-old Ebstein is still an engaged social activist.

Like Ebstein, Israeli singer Daliah Lavi, who died this year, enjoyed mainstream success with music that transcended the clap-along fare of the Schlager scene. Her take on The Beatles’ Something is a proper, understated reinterpretation of the song, most of it spoken. Lavi had a powerful voice; she knew better than to let it loose here.

It’s probably a stretch to call Volker Lechtenbrink a Schlager star. He already had a long career as an actor when he recorded his well-received debut album in 1976, which consisted almost entirely of covers of Kris Kristofferson songs. As a KK afficionado, I can confirm that he did the man’s songs no injustice. Hear his version of Sunday Morning, Coming Down to see if you agree.

Also starting out in acting was Croatian-born Dunja Raiter. In her musical career she was always was more chanteuse than Schlager singer. Her soulful version of Leonard Cohen”s Suzanne bears that out. There was not much clapping-along to be had with that.

Given the poor production values of many German versions of international hits, one is entitled to expect awful things from Hoffmann & Hoffmann‘s German take on The Boxer. The lads sing it well enough — neither will be mistaken for Art Garfunkel, though — and the arrangement stays clear of cliché and shortcuts.

Worse things might have happened to another “60s classic here. Peter Haupt‘s version of Monday Monday is not likely to displace The Mamas & The Papas’ original, with those gorgeous harmonies, in anyone’s affection, but he gives it his personality without disrespecting the song. Haupt never became famous and died in 1999 at 58.

Those who know the Schlager scene might suspect that I tagged on Nina & Mike with their version of In The Year 2525 as a bit of a joke. They were very much of the mind-killing, rhythm-defying clap-along variety of Schlager (sample their hit Fahrende Musikanten as an example). But, Nina and Mike had higher aspirations than shitty Schlager music. Folk Music, not Volksmusik. In that they were much like their fellow husband-and-wife act Cindy & Bert, whose cover of Paranoid we encountered in Curious Germany.

That Curious Germany mix also included a bunch of songs sung in German by English-speaking artists. Two more feature here: Alma Cogan gives us her German take on Tennessee Waltz; Cliff Richard appears here with his German version of Power To All My Friends, his 1973 entry for the Eurovision (here he is just grateful for having friends; he doesn’t want to give Germans ideas about power). I once actually posted a whole mix of international stars singing their hits in Deutsch.

Another foreign Eurovision alumni, this one a winner, here is Dutch singer Cory Brokken, singing her very songbirdy version of Do You Know The Way To San José, which Bacharach would approve of. Here the coffee is hot in San José, presaging the liquid crimes that coffee chains like Starbucks (boo!) commit today. Brokken died last year, earning a backgrounder entry in In Memoriam thanks to her unusual career: from being a singer to becoming a lawyer in her 40s and then a judge — before making a showbiz comeback.

Also from far shores was Bill Ramsey, who was born in 1931 in Cincinnati. Stationed with the US Air Force in Germany in the 1950s he began to play on stage, and went on to have a career in Germany. Most of his early stuff was square, sometimes ingratiatingly so. With the advent of beat music, Ramsey found a new voice, which often delivered some clever lyrics in that genre. Here he is with an interesting version of Jimi Hendrix’s The Wind Cries Mary. A bit over a decade later, rock group Spliff seemed to borrow from Ramsey’s vocals on their hit Deja Vu.

Another artist who got his big break thanks to the US army was Gerhard Wendland — but in his case it was thanks to being a POW of the Americans after World War 2, through Berlin station RIAS. His first record actually already came out in 1943, under the mentorship of Franz Grothe, a full-on Nazi who unaccountably enjoyed a long career in West-Germany. In the 1950s Wendland, already in his 30s/40s, was one of the biggest singing stars in West-Germany. By the 1960s his star started to fade slowly; now in his 50s he was an anachronism. His Sweet Caroline is the worst of the lot here.

In the 1990s old Schlager music enjoyed a rehabilitation, along the lines of semi-ironic nostalgic cult, and few artists benefitted from the revival in reputations more than Marianne Rosenberg. The good girl from next-door started out as a performer of standard Schlager fare before in the mid-’70s tapping into that new-fangled disco music. Her cover of Blondie’s Heart Of Glass belongs in that context. Rosenberg is one of the classic gay club favourites in Germany.

Rosenberg’s version of Heart Of Glass is not bad, nor is it particularly great. I do, however, like Christina Harrison‘s rather faithful cover of ABBA’s S.O.S. The singer had previously released singles as Christina May. After her career, Christina became a practitioner of ayurveda (an Indian wellness approach) and an activist for Native American rights, having lived on a Lakota reservation. In 1990 she married old Beatles friend Klaus Voormann, the designer of the Revolver cover, with whom she still lives near Munich.

The most demented track here is Karel Gott‘s take on the Stones’ Paint It Black. The Czechoslovakian singer with the presumptuous surname was better known for his clean-cut crooning; later he’d sing the theme song for an animated kids’ show about a bee. But here Karel, “The Sinatra of the East”, goes apeshit: the arrangement is Slavic gypsy, and the singer can barely contain his voice with arousal as he yelps and hits high notes for no good reason, and as the song climaxes, Gott lets out a devil-possessed scream. It”s bizarre and absolutely wonderful. You’d think a well-mannered crooner would have political views as bland as most of his music, but Gott was a committed supporter of his country’s communist regime — and apparently remained a communist even after the fall of the regime there.

As always, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R and includes hausgemachte covers. PW in comments.

1. Joy Fleming – Geld (1975 – Respect)
2. Mary Roos – Die Liebe kommt leis’ (1972 – You Can’t Hurry Love)
3. Corry Brokken – Heiss ist der Kaffee (1968 – Do You Know The Way To San José)
4. Monica – Bang Bang (1966 – Bang Bang)
5. Karel Gott – Rot und schwarz (1969 – Paint It Black)
6. Bill Ramsey – Der Wind ruft Mary (1971 – The Wind Cries Mary)
7. Daliah Lavi – Manchmal (1971 – Something)
8. Katja Ebstein – Der Mann am Meer (1972 – Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay)
9. Manuela – Wenn es Nacht wird in Harlem (1967 – When A Man Loves A Woman)
10. Dunja Rajter – Susann (1969 – Suzanne)
11. Hoffmann & Hoffmann – Der Boxer (1977 – The Boxer)
12. Volker Lechtenbrink – Sonntag Morgen (1976 – Sunday Morning, Coming Down)
13. Hans Hass Jr – American Pie (1972 – American Pie)
14. Jürgen Drews – Hotel California (1977 – Hotel California)
15. Olivia Molina – Aber wie (1972 – Let It Be)
16. Gerhard Wendland – Sweet Caroline (1970 – Sweet Caroline)
17. Christina Harrison – S.O.S. (1975 – S.O.S.)
18. Marianne Rosenberg – Herz aus Glas (1979 – Heart Of Glass)
19. Cliff Richard – Gut dass es Freunde gibt (1973 – Power To All Our Friends)
20. Alma Cogan – Tennessee Waltz (1964 – Tennessee Waltz)
21. Eileen – Die Stiefel sind zum wandern (1966 – These Boots Are Made For Walking)
22. Peter Haupt – Monday Monday, was bringst Du mir (1966 – Monday Monday)
23. Nina & Mike – Was wird sein in sieben Jahren (1972 – In The Year 2525)

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More Curious German
More mixes

Here is a mix of German curiosities, some chosen because they are very good or interesting (or both), and a couple of football-themed songs at the end, selected because they are entertaining in their musical poverty.

This mix was previously posted in May 2013. Some tracks have featured here before, but the links are long dead. I”ve also cribbed a few notes from those instalments. As ever, the mix is timed to fit on a standard CD-R, and includes hausgemachte covers. PW in comments

1. Die Toten Hosen – Bayern (2000)
The title refer to Germany’s most dominant football club, whom non-fans regard, with no exaggeration, as a cancer in the body of German football. So the alternative rock band Die Toten Hosen (The Dead Trousers) composed a very catchy number explaining how, if they were “super-talented” young footballers, they would never sign a contract with that club because such an act would be thoroughly corrupting. At one point the singer demands to know: “What kind of parents must one have to be so stupid as to sign for that shitty club?”

2. Alexander Wolfrum – Hey Büblein (2006)
When somebody records an acoustic version of “Hey Joe” and renders the title as, roughly translated, Hey Little Boy, it”s worth listening to. The lyrics have nothing to do with the original either: it deals with metaphors involving thin ice, drowning in a lake and a rescue. And in-between a female voice warns that Joe is going to catch a cold.

Wolfrum, known by everybody as Sandy, is a singer-songwriter who performs in the dialect of Franconia — the region around Nuremberg — and founded a Festival der Liedermacher (or Festival of Songwriters) in Bayreuth, the home town of Richard Wagner.  Check out more by Alexander Wolfrum.

3. David Bowie – Helden (1977)
In his Berlin period Bowie fused the cultures of the Weimar Republic cabarets, Krautrock and Kraftwerk, and the local junkie scene. It’s very nice that David Bowie sought to pay tribute to the city that served as his muse by recording in German, but since he lived and recorded there, one might quibble that he could have taken better care with his pronunciations. As it turns out, he put as much effort in enunciating German words correctly as English football commentators do in pronouncing the names of German (or any non-Latinate) football players.

4. Cindy & Bert – Der Hund von Baskerville (1970)
Husband-and-wife duo Cindy & Bert were a Schlager duo that epitomised the idea of the Spiesser (square) in the 1970s. My grandmother thought Cindy & Bert were delightful, so Oma would have been shocked to discover that Cindy & Bert’s catalogue included a cover version of Black Sabbath”s “Paranoid”, with the lyrics taking a Sherlock Holmes theme.  It need no pointing out that my grandmother probably wasn’t a hardcore Sabbath fan.

5. Howard Carpendale – Du hast mich (1970)
In German Schlager history, Howard Carpendale wrote a particularly successful chapter. Unable to hack it in his home country South Africa as an Elvis impersonator, the former shotput champion moved to Germany, learned to speak the language with just enough of a touch of an accent (German audiences really got off on foreign accents; but only in entertainment and romance, not in shops, pubs or public transport), and became the leading romantic singer of the 1970s and ’80s Schlager scene, selling some 25 million records. None of those 25 million records soiled my collection, I am pleased to say. His first breakthrough came with the standard Schlager “Das Mädchen von Seite 1″ (The girl from the front page). The flip side, however, was entire unschlagerish, a rocker called “Du hast mich” (You Have Me), a cover of the song Glory Be by German psychedelic rockers Daisy Clan which sounds like a heavy fuzz-guitared, organ-hammering Santana number.

Glory Be was the b-side of Daisy Clan”s 1970 single “Love Needs Love”, apparently the group’s final English-language single (their final release in 1972 was appropriately titled “Es geht vorrüber”, which could be translated as “It goes by”). The Daisy Clan apparently were Schlager singer Michael Holm and songwriter Joachim Haider, going by the name of Alfie Khan.

6. Udo Jürgens – Peace Now (1970)
The first of a fistful of English-language tracks here is by the late Udo Jürgens, the Austrian-born Swiss national who enjoyed immense success in West Germany, the place of his parents” birth. Jürgens was as big a star as any on the Schlager scene, though his songs tended to be a notch or five above the usual banalities of the genre. Jürgens also wrote hits for Matt Munro, Sammy Davis Jr and Shirley Bassey.

“Peace Now” was the rocking English-language b-side of a German single titled “Deine Einsamkeit”, released in October 1970. It”s pretty good, in a dated sort of way that draws from rock, funk and gospel. Udo, exhibiting a rather lilting German accent, buys into the Zeitgeist as he sings: “Everybody is talkin’ ’bout peace in the world, but every time I hear a hungry baby cry I ask: Peace, now show me your face.”

7. Heidi Brühl – Berlin (1969)
Schlager singers, as a rule, were not cool. Heidi Brühl was not cool either. She had been a popular child actress, making her screen debut in 1954 as a 12-year-old. As a 17-year-old she became a Schlager singer, selling a million copies of her 1960 hit “Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh’n”, the runner-up in the Eurovision Song Contest that year. In the late ’60s Heidi, now married to American actor Brett Halsey, wanted to be cool — understandably, since her first hit in three years in 1966 was a cover of “The Ballad of the Green Berets”.

By now living in Rome, she went to London and recorded in English. “Berlin”, released in 1969, has that Swingin’ London sound which might have had a revival in an Austin Powers movie. Brühl’s new sound — think Petula Clark covering Nico — was not well received, and the excellent “Berlin” was relegated to the status of a b-side. In 1970 the singer moved to the USA, thereby putting a slow end to her Schlager career. Brühl died of breast cancer in 1991 at the age of 49.

8. Vicky Leandros Singers – Wo ist er (1971)
Last weekend a whole continent took part in the annual ritual of the Eurovision Song Contest. Here is a singer who won the thing in 1972, for Luxembourg with a song called “Aprés Toi“. The English version of it, “Come What May”, reached #2 in the UK. But the career of the Greek-born singer was based mainly in West Germany, where her singer father had moved in search of success. Vicky began recording as a teenager in the mid-’60s, but broke through when she adopted her dad’s Christian name as her surname.

“Wo ist er” is a German take on George Harrison”s “My Sweet Lord”; an obvious imitation of the Edwin Hawkins Singers, whose Oh Happy Day arrangement this borrows from (and which inspired Harrison). Vicky’s vocals are quite excellent.

Until recently Leandros participated in Greek politics. Under the magnificent name of Vassiliki von Ruffin (her real first name and the surname from her second marriage) she has served as deputy mayor of Piraeus as a representative of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) .

9. Barry Ryan – Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt (1971)
Best known for his crazy hit “Eloise”, Barry Ryan had a fairly decent career in West Germany, where he recorded his rather good Sanctus album in 1971. In 1972 he had a top 10 in West Germany hit with the catchy “Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt” (Time stops only before the devil). The melody was written by his brother Paul Ryan, and used for Irish singer Dana”s song “Today”. Barry Ryan even appeared on the only German-language music show ZDF Hitparade with “Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt”, to my knowledge the first time an international rock star appeared on the show.

10. Francoise Hardy – Ich bin nun mal ein Mädchen (1965)
The French superstar had some hits in Germany as well, with covers of French hits as well as German originals with material that took a bit from chanson, a bit from what was called Beat music. As a former student of German, her command of German was excellent, with that lovely French inflection. She also recorded in English and Italian. “Ich bin nun mal ein Mädchen” (I am a girl after all) was a version of her French 1964 hit “Pourtant tu m”aimes”, itself a cover of The Joys’ “I Still Love Him”. It”s a cute song with cute lyrics. The song was a minor hit in 1966.

11. The Supremes – Where Did Our Love Go (German) (1964)
Berry Gordy could spot a marketing opportunity, and so he had the stars of his Motown roster record their big hits in various European languages, apparently singing from phonetic lyric sheets. Unlike most others, Diana Ross makes a game attempt at it; one can understand her implorations not to be left by the addressee of the song.

12. Marvin Gaye – Sympatica (1964)
I have no idea whether Marvin Gaye was a polyglot or whether he just gave more of a shit, but, like La Ross, he did a better job of it than most of his peers — and even sang a German original composition. So here we have one instance of Motown going Schlager, sort of.

13. Johnny Cash – Wer kennt den Weg (1966)
In 1966, Johnny Cash recorded “I Walk The Line” as “Wer kennt den Weg?” (alas not as Johannes Bargeld). In the early 1950s, Cash had been based as an US soldier in southern Germany. Clearly he did little in that time to benefit from the opportunity to learn German; his accent is quite appalling.

14. Peter, Paul & Mary – Puff (1963)
It must have seemed an excellent idea for Peter, Paul & Mary to record their version of “Puff, The Magic Dragon” in German. The monster in question became a Zauberdrachen, and our biblically-named trio sung it with clear diction. So it is a little unfortunate that they titled the song “Puff” — the colloquial German for the word “brothel”.

15. Hildegard Knef – From Here On It Got Rough (1969)
The actress Hildegard Knef was a remarkable woman. Having made her breakthrough just after World War II with the film classic Die Mörder sind unter uns, she became the first actress in German cinema to do a nude scene in 1950, for which the Spiesser (squares) couldn’t forgive her for a long time. She was so good that Hollywood beckoned, but she turned down Hollywood because she was expected to change her name to Gilda Christian and pretend to be Austrian (she later acted on Broadway as Hildegard Neff). Privately, Knef fought several battles with cancer; when she died in 2002 at 76, it was emphysema that claimed her, not the Big C.

Knef became a singer and frequent songwriter in 1963, though not on the Schlager scene but in the Chanson genre, singing in German and English. “From Here On It Got Rough”, an amusing autobiography with a cute pay-off line, was the English version of her song “Von nun ging’s bergab“.

16. Max Raabe & Palast Orchester – Lady Marmalade (2002)
The career of Max Raabe, a 54-year-old baritone, is predicated on conjuring the chanson of the Weimar Republic, either by covering songs or writing songs in the style of the era. He is brilliant at it, with his clipped diction and straight-faced wit — so much so that one yearns for Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward to join on him on stage. He performed at the wedding of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese, which must have been quite a scene. Raabe records prolifically; this track comes from the second of a pair of novelty albums on which Raabe covers pop songs, with mixed results.

17. Kandy – Die Kung-Fu-Leute (1974)
It was quite normal for Schlager acts to record German versions of international hits. I have no information about Kandy, but despite obviously not being German, it was his lot to record the teutonic take on Carl Douglas” novelty hit “Kung Fu Fighting”. And when Douglas said everybody was kung fu fighting, Kandy meant it was the kung fu people doing the fighting.  It was produced by Michael Kunze, who also gave us the Silver Convention and has since become the German equivalent of Andrew Lloyd-Webber (though possibly with a more attractive persona).

18. Udo Lindenberg – Reeperbahn (1978)
Udo Lindenberg was the posterboy of the anti-establishment in the 1970s and ’80s, with his long hair, his sneering brashness, his supposedly cool one-liners, and presumably his steadfast refusal to hold a note. He gets aggressively out-of-tune on “Reeperbahn”, his cover of The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”, transposed to the street in Hamburg’s red light district where The Beatles spent their formative musical years. In his nostalgic paean, Lindenberg pretends to have grown up in the city in which he lived; he actually grew up in a small town near the Dutch border and moved to Hamburg only in 1968.

19. Klaus Doldinger – Theme of Tatort (1970)
This is the full theme of the German crime TV series Tatort, which has run for 43 years now. I know the theme has been re-recorded twice, in 1978 and 2004. I’m not sure which version this is, but on the original our friend Udo Lindenberg from the previous song played the drums. Composer Klaus Doldinger, a jazz saxophonist, also wrote the theme of the German cinema classic Das Boot, which was directed by Wolfgang Petersen. And Petersen came to national prominence for directing a landmark Tatort episode in 1977, tited “Reifezeugnis” and featuring the teenage Nastassja Kinski in various states of undress.

20. Peter Gabriel – Schock den Affen (1982)
I include this for reader Johnny Diego, who in a comment (you do know that you are welcome to comment, right?) proposes the theory that “there are two languages that lend themselves perfectly to [rock] music. One is, of course, English. The other is German, with its harsh guttural sounds. One can hear some that gutsiness in German bands that will never be heard in, say, French speaking bands.”

This track is from Peter Gabriel’s second effort at re-recording an album in German, new instrumentation and all. The first was the self-titled 1980 album with “Games Without Frontiers”; the second was the self-titled 1982 album with “Shock The Monkey”, the German take of which features here.

21. Zeltinger Band – Der lachende Vagabund (1980)
The Zeltinger Band was a punk outfit fronted by what may be Germany”s first openly gay singer, whose bruising appearance challenged the stereotype of common imagination (see this video). Their biggest hit was a cover of the Ramones song Rockaway Beach, which was renamed “Müngersdorfer Stadion” — after the public swimming baths, not the football stadium — and advocated the practice of fare dodging on public transport. “Der lachende Vagabund” is a contemptuous version of the 1957 Schlager hit by Fred Bertelmann, which was a cover of the country song Rusty Draper”s 1953 hit “Gambler”s Guitar”. The German version was so popular, it sold more copies in Germany that Draper’s million-seller did in the US. Hear Draper’s song and Bertelmann’s.

22. Agnetha – Senor Gonzales (1968)
Before she became one of the As in ABBA, Agnetha Fältskog tried to realise the ambition of many Scandinavian singers of the day with a dream of musical success: breaking into the German Schlager scene. Agnetha released a batch of German singles between 1968 and 1972, most of them quite awful even by the low standards of the genre, though a couple were actually quite good. In her endeavours, Agnetha — who already had a career in Sweden but put it on hold while going for stardom in West Germany — was produced by her boyfriend, Dieter Zimmermann. Once Dieter was history, her next boyfriend, Björn, worked out better on the way to stardom.

“Senor Gonzales” was Agnetha’s second German single. I see no reason why it shouldn’t have been a Schlager hit: it has the necessary hackneyed lyrics and banal melody; it even has the faux-Mexican sound the Schlager-buying public was so fond of — though here Agnetha might have been ahead of her time; the Mexican Schlager wave peaked in 1972 with Rex Gildo’s superbly tacky “Fiesta Mexicana“.

23. Gerd Müller – Dann macht es bumm (1969)
Fans of English football (or soccer, as my American friends would say) are likely to cringe at the memory of their players” attempts at pop stardom: Kevin Keegan’s 1979 hit single “Head Over Heels”, or Glenn Hoddle & Chris Waddle with their 1987 UK #12 hit “Diamond Lights”, or Paul Gascoigne teaming up with Lindisfarne to warble “The Fog On The Tyne” (there’s a Newcastle United thread here). Bad though these might be, English football fans would have no cause to cringe if they knew what their German counterparts have been subjected to, horrors that would make Hoddle & Waddle seem like the Righteous Brothers.

Two Bayern München legends perpetrated particular crimes against music. I”ll spare you Franz Beckenbauer’s attempts at romancing the Schlager audience, but shall inflict upon you the stylings of his teammate Gerd Müller. His nickname, just a quarter of a century after World War II, was “Der Bomber”, though this was based on a mistaken notion: though the greatest goalscoring machine ever, Müller didn”t have a powerful shot. His single, “Dann macht es bum” (“And then it goes bang”), perpetuates the mistaken notion of the blitzkrieging bomber. It also perpetuates the reality that Gerd Müller wasn’t particularly intellectual.

24. Village People & die Deutsche Fussballnationalmannschaft – Far Away In America (1994)
Sticking with the football theme, we close this mix with a most bizarre collaboration: the Village People and the German football squad, recording the official song for the German team’s participation in the 1994 World Cup in the USA. It is as awful yet insidiously catchy as one would expect, continuing a lamentable tradition of the German team recording the most appalling songs their federation could commission, and giving them the worst production possible. There was even an LP, which featured such acts as Udo Lindenberg, The Scorpions and — you guessed it — David Hasselhoff.

The lyrics of “Far Away In America” were possibly not inspired by Goethe or Schiller. “We’re gonna make it, get it up and shake it. You”re gonna fight for the light, baby, come on and know it’s allright,” Klinsmann, Matthäus, Völler and pals croon with the Village People. Bring on those light-demanding Bulgarians, baby! The football-loving German public sent its team on its way to defend the World Cup title by propelling the lead single to the dizzy heights on the hit parade of #44.

Bonus:  Albert Brooks – The Englishman-German-Jew Blues (1975)
We”re ending this collection with a song that has no real connection with German music, nor much with Germany, but this is so good I want to share it. It’s from Albert Brooks’ concept comedy album A Star Is Bought, on which various music stars appeared as the comedian tries to become a musician. On this track, he riffs with blues legend Albert King, whose career is based on feeling blue.

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More German Stuff
More mixes

In the fifth instalment of Curious Germany we have Françoise Hardy singing in German, a Schlager star getting groovy in London, a British rock singer going German, country star Lynn Anderson doing a German original, and retired football players singing about flags.

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Françoise Hardy – Ich bin nun mal ein Mädchen (1965).mp3
Fran̤oise Hardy РEr war wie du (1965).mp3
I grew up in the 1970s, so my first celebrity crush was the lovely Agnetha from ABBA. Had I been born ten years earlier, that first celebrity crush probably would have been Françoise Hardy. What an absolutely beautiful woman she was, as even Any Minor Dude (now 17) agrees. Obviously a superstar in France, she had some hits in Germany as well, with covers of French hits as well as German originals with material that took a bit from chanson, a bit from what was called Beat music. As a former student of German, her command of German was excellent, with that lovely French inflection. She also recorded in English and Italian.

Ich bin nun mal ein Mädchen (I am a girl after all) was a version of her French 1964 hit Pourtant tu m”aimes, itself a cover of The Joys” I Still Love Him. A cute song, it has cute lyrics. One verse goes: “˜I am a girl, after all, and you a man, and each one does things the other can’t understand, it’s true. You are looking at other girls even when I’m around, and I’m afraid you might forget about me soon, and yet you love me and I can’t be without you.”  The song was a minor hit in 1966. Er war wie Du was the b-side, a lilting song very much of its time.

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Heidi Brühl ““ Berlin (1969).mp3
Schlager singers, as a rule, were not cool. We”ve met some who dabbled with cool, such as Michael Holm, who was a Krautrocker with Daisy Chain before donning the Schlager singer”s suit, crooner Howard Carpendale who covered Daisy Chain for a b-side, and the usually über-square Cindy & Bert who made a German version of Black Sabbath”s Paranoid (all in Curious Germany Vol. 3). Heidi Brühl was not cool. She had been a popular child actress, making her screen debut in 1954 as a 12-year-old. As a 17-year-old she became a Schlager singer, selling a million copies of her 1960 hit Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh”n, the runner-up in the Eurovision Song Contest that year.

In the late “60s Heidi, now married to American actor Brett Halsey, wanted to be cool “” understandably, since her first hit in three years in 1966 was a cover of The Ballad of the Green Berets. By now living in Rome, she went to London and recorded in English. Berlin, released in 1969, has that Swingin” London sound which might have had a revival in an Austin Powers movie. Brühl”s Petula Clark covering Nico sound was not well received, and the excellent Berlin was relegated to the status of a b-side. In 1970 the singer moved to the USA, thereby putting a slow end to her Schlager career. Brühl died of breast cancer in 1991 at the age of 49.

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Barry Ryan – Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt (1971).mp3
Best known for his crazy hit Eloise, Barry Ryan had a fairly decent career in West Germany, where he recorded his rather good Sanctus album in 1971. In 1972 he had a top 10 in West Germany hit with the catchy Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt (Time stops only before the devil). The melody was written by his brother Paul Ryan, and used for Irish singer Dana”s song Today, and the lyrics by one Miriam Frances. The latter wrote the lyrics for other songs Ryan recorded in German, to less commercial attention, and also the English lyrics for his minor hit Sanctus Sanctus Hallelujah. Frances made a career of writing Schlager lyrics, as well as adapting German lyrics to English-language hits (such as Wann kommst Du and Willst du mit mir geh’n  by Daliah Lavi from the John Kongos songs Won”t You Join Me and Would You Follow Me, see HERE and HERE). Barry Ryan even appeared on the German-language only music show ZDF Hitparade with Zeit macht nur vor dem Teufel halt, to my knowledge the first time an international rock star appeared on the show (Video here).

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Lynn Anderson – Ich hab” einen Boy in Germany (1968).mp3
A few years before she had a huge hit in West Germany with Rose Garden, Lynn Anderson recorded a pretty terrible number about having a boy in Germany, in the process linking Tennessee with Deutschland. Of course, the Fräuleins with whom Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash exchanged international fluids during their stints as GIs in Germany could have reciprocated by singing about having a boy in Tennessee. This was a German original, written by Herbert Falk and Helmut Flohr, neither one of whom ever set the world alight with their hitmaking potential. One might say that Ich hab” einen Boy in Germany served as fertile manure for the Rose Garden.

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Fritz Walter und die Altinternationalen – Schwarz und Weiss (1973).mp3
In 1954, West-Germany”s football team sensationally won the World Cup, beating the virtually unbeatable Hungarian side 3-2. It is difficult to measure the social, political and even economic impact of that on West Germany. Just nine years earlier Germany had been structurally, socially, politically and morally devastated like no other European nation in modern history (ravaged and savaged by both the Allies and by the Nazis, it must be said). Now, being world champions, the refrain in West Germany was: “Wir sind wieder wer” (We are somebody again). The inspirational captain on that July day in 1954 ““ the same day, give or take a few hours, that Elvis Presley entered the Sun studios in Memphis to record his first single ““ was Fritz Walter.

Two decades later, with West Germany preparing to host the 1974 World Cup (which their team would win), Fritz got together a bunch of old internationals (the Altinternationalen), ranging from pre-war player Paul Janes to recently retired Uwe Seeler, to record a ditty titled Schwarz und Weiss ““ black and white, the colours of the German team ““ written by serial hitmaker Jack White. Rarely has a song sounded as comprehensively German as this. And not in a good way. The lyrics are infused with customary German subtlety: “Black and white are our colours, and our flag is black, red, gold. Today we want to beat our foe, we’ve never wanted to lose.” Ah yes, land of Goethe, Schiller and Mann.

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More Curious Germany

We haven”t had German curiosities for a while. Well, here are some: Marlene Dietrich singing a folk anthem, Bowie going to Berlin,  a Schlager icon rocking out for peace, a short-haired teen doing Be My Baby, Chubby Checker twisten in Deutsch,  and a politician getting remixed.

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Marlene Dietrich ““ Sag” mir wo die Blumen sind (1962).mp3
The Springfields – Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind (1963).mp3
While Mae West was singing Light My Fire in the 1960s (see HERE), Marlene Dietrich became a bit of a folkie with her German versions of Blowin” In The Wind, retitled in German Die Antwort weiß ganz allein der Wind (HERE), and this cover of Pete Seeger”s 1955 anti-war anthem Where Have All The Flowers Gone.  The German version, with the lyrics by the author Max Colpet (who, among other things, wrote five scripts for Billy Wilder films) , has been recorded many times, even by Joan Baez; Dietrich”s was the first. In 1963, The Springfields, featuring Dusty Springfield, issued a rather lovely folk recording of that and other German-language songs.

Seeger has praised Sag” mir wo die Blumen sind as being better than his original lyrics. Dietrich also recorded the English version of the song, as well as a French adaptation (titled Où vont les fleurs?).

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David Bowie ““ Helden (1977).mp3
Bowie lately hit the retirement age of 65, prompting many to lament the curious notion that Ziggy Stardust can now travel on a pensioner travelcard. When Bowie recorded Heroes, he was long past the Ziggy deal. It was his Berlin period during which he fused the cultures of the Weimar Republic cabarets, Krautrock and Kraftwerk, and the local junkie scene. It”s very nice that David Bowie sought to pay tribute to the city that served as his muse by recording in German, but since he lived and recorded there, one might quibble that he could have taken better care with his pronunciations. As it turns out, he put as much effort in enunciating German words correctly as English football commentators take care to pronounce the names of German (or any non-Latinate) football players.

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Udo Jürgens – Peace Now (1970).mp3
Here”s one in English, by Udo Jürgens, the Austrian-born Swiss national who enjoyed immense success in West Germany, the place of his parents’ birth. Jürgens provided one of my earliest musical memories since my sister was a big fan of the man in the late 1960s (see HERE). I still think that Siebzehn Jahr Blondes Haar and the funny Es Wird Nacht Senorita are superior Schlager moments; if more songs of that genre were as good as those, nobody would have cause to laugh at German music.  Jürgens also wrote hits for Matt Munro, Sammy Davis Jr and Shirley Bassey.

Peace Now was the rocking English-language b-side of a German single titled Deine Einsamkeit, released in October 1970. It”s actually pretty good, in a dated sort of way that draws from rock, funk and gospel. Udo, exhibiting a rather lilting German accent, buys into the Zeitgeist as he sings: “Everybody is talkin” “bout peace in the world, but everytime I hear a hungry baby cry I ask: Peace, now show me your face.”

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Suzanne Doucet – Sei mein Baby (1964).mp3
It”s quite interesting that in the 1960s, a female singer”s image could be defined by her short hair. So it was with Suzanne Doucet. Born in 1944 in the university town of Tübingen to a family of thespians and artists, she was briefly a Schlager star while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, as you do. Later she appeared with Donna Summer in the German version of the musical Godspell. Then she married an American, moved to the US and became a leading New Age musician, a field in which she remains active (so it”s important to know that she was born with the sun in Virgo, Aquarius rising, and Saggitarius moon ““ whatever that means).

Sei mein Baby is a lovely bilingual cover of The Ronettes” Be My Baby, and appeared on the b-side of Doucet”s first hit single, Das geht doch keinen etwas an (That is nobody”s business).

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Chubby Checker – Der Twist Beginnt (1962).mp3
I got this German version of Chubby Checker”s Let”s Twist Again  courtesy of reader Ton, who certainly would agree with me that Chubby did not put much effort into his translations. “Sei nicht so lazy”, indeed. In fact, Chubby sounds a bit like a cliché Wehrmacht soldier in a 1960s war movie, right down to the way he enunciates the affirmative word “Ja”. You can almost hear it: “Ve hef vays of making you tvist.” At least the backing track is new, which makes this a proper cover version of Checker”s own original. He compiled a fairly impressive catalogue of German-language records, with titles such as Twist doch mal mit mir, Autobahn-Baby, Holla Hi Holla Ho and Troola-Troola-Troola-La. But he proably recorded loads in other languages, as his LP Twistin” Around The World suggests.

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Karl Schiller – High.mp3
Karl Schiller was West Germany”s economic minister from 1966-72. He did not record this track. High appeared on one of four LPs of politicians” speeches set to far out music by Volker Kühn and Roland Schneider (featuring jazz-rock guitar maestro Volker Kriegel) . Schiller”s speech was economic babble laced with contemporary lingo about drugs, being high and blow-ups. Schiller had a rather colourful political career. In 1937, at the age of 26, he joined the Nazi party, but after the war he joined the left-of-centre Social Democratic Party (SPD). He left them in 1972 when he clashed with Chancellor Willy Brandt (possibly Germany”s greatest politician and a co-star on Kühn and Schneider”s Pol(H)itparade LP) over economic policy, and collaborated with. Eight years later he re-joined the SPD. He died in 1994.

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More Curious Germany

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In the previous instalments of Curious Germany we noted the tendency in the 1960s of artists re-recording their hits in European languages, particularly in German to cater for the mainland continent”s biggest market. Here are a few more German re-recordings, plus a Motown-goes-Schlager track, a most unexpected cover, pre-Schlager stardom Krautrock, a slightly strange Beatles cover, and another singing footballer.

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The Beatles ““ Komm, gib” mir Deine Hand.mp3
The Beatles ““ Sie liebt Dich.mp3
The Fabs recorded their first record in Germany. Backing Tony Sheridan on his Bert Kaempfert-produced LP, they sang on a couple of songs (Ain”t She Sweet and My Bonnie) and recorded a self-penned instrumental, Cry For A Shadow, on which George Harrison got a writing credit alongside John Lennon (it was intended to be a parody of The Shadows). And, of course, in St Pauli the boys really grew up. And yet, they did not seem to have much of a sentimental attachment to the country that gave them their first international break. A mini-tour of three cities “” Munich, Essen and Hamburg “” in 1966 was the extent of their concerts there (with typical teutonic subtlety, the sponsors, teen mag Bravo, called it a “Blitz” tour). And the Beatles really did not want to record any of their songs in German, or any other language.

The idea to do so originated with the group”s German label, Odeon, whose executives thought that German-language singles would sell even better than the orginals in their country. The Beatles resisted the instruction to record in German, going as far as not turning up to the booked session in the EMI Pathe Marconi studio in Paris in January 1964. A stern George Martin (who himself thought the idea was stupid) had to remindhis truant boys of their professional obligations before they gathered in the studio the following day, January 29. Komm gib mir eine Hand was quickly recorded to the backing track sent from London, but the instrumentation of the German She Loves You had to be re-recorded because the tape with the original track had been lost. It took 14 takes to record the song. Once they were done, with a little time to kill, the Beatles started work on a new song written by Paul called Can”t Buy Me Love.

The lyrics for the two German songs had been written by singer and TV personality Camillo Felgen under the pseudonym J. Nicolas. Two other non-Beatles are credited: one Montogue on Sie liebt Dich, and a H. Hellmer on the German version of I Want To Hold Your Hand. These credits have long puzzled Beatles historian. It appears that both Heinz Hellmer and Jean Montague (incorrectly spelled on the credits) were additional pseudonyms employed by Felgen, I would guess as a tax dodge.

These credits appeared on the German single release and the US album Something New, on which the German songs incongruously turned up. Subsequent releases, such as Beatles Rarities and Past Masters, credit only Lennon-McCartney.
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Cindy & Bert – Der Hund von Baskerville.mp3
We previously encountered husband-and-wife duo Cindy & Bert in the 1973 installment of the nostalgia series Stepping Back, with a typically horrible Schlager. The pair epitomised square. My grandmother thought Cindy & Bert were delightful. They reminded us of the nice young couple who rented the apartment on the top floor of her house and always paid the rent on time. So Oma would have been shocked to discover that Cindy & Bert”s catalogue included a cover version of Black Sabbath”s Paranoid (it need no pointing out that my grandmother would not have been a big Sabbath fan even if “” especially if “” she knew who they were). The cover photo of the 1970 single, which is not bad, is entirely misleading. Did I mention that Cindy & Bert were considered squares?
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Howard Carpendale ““ Du hast mich.mp3
Daisy Clan – Glory Be.mp3
In German Schlager history, Howard Carpendale wrote a particularly successful chapter. Unable to hack it in his home country South Africa as an Elvis impersonator, the former shotput champion moved to Germany, learned to speak the language with just enough of a touch of an accent (as I”ve noted before, German audiences really got off on foreign accents; in entertainment, not in shops, pubs or public transport), and became the leading romantic singer of the 1970s and “80s Schlager scene, selling some 25 million records. None of those 25 million records soiled my collection, I am pleased to say, for I always thought he was a bit of a drip. His first breakthrough came with the standard Schlager Das Mädchen von Seite 1 (The girl from the front page). The flip side, however, was entire unschlagerish, a rocker called Du hast mich (You Have Me), a cover of the song Glory Be by German psychedelic rockers Daisy Clan which sounds like a heavy fuzz-guitared, organ-hammering Santana number. Thanks to my friend Sky, I can”t consider Carpendale as a drip any longer. The dude actually knew how to rock.

Glory Be was the b-side of Daisy Clan’s 1970 single Love Needs Love, apparently the group’s final English-language single (their final release in 1972 was appropriately titled Es geht vorrüber, which could be translated as “It passes on”). The Daisy Clan apparently were Schlager singer Michael Holm and songwriter Joachim Haider, going by the name of Alfie Khan. Holm had his first chart entry in 1962, but did not really break through until late 1969 with his version of the Sir Douglas Quintett’s Mendocino. It seems that his Schlager success put paid to his career as a psychedelic rock musician; Holm enjoyed a long string of Schlager hits (he featured HERE and HERE). Just to prove that not all Schlagersingers are naff fools with bad hair, Holm also collaborated with the eternally cool Giorgio Moroder in a project named, unappetisingly, Spinach. Holm has even been nominated for Grammys three times as part of the ambient music outfit Cusco.

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Dusty Springfield – Auf Dich nur wart” immerzu.mp3
Like her contemporaries Petula Clark and Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield did a fair number of German recordings. Auf Dich nur wart” ich ich immerzu (I”m always waiting for you only) was her German version of I Only Want To Be With You, released as a single in July 1964 with a German rendering of Wishin” And Hopin” as the b-side. Like most other songs transcribed from English to German, it was not a hit. It was quite usual for the original performer of a French or Italian song to score big successes with their German versions of these “” singers such as Mireille Mathieu and Salvatore Adamo made a career of that “” but English pop translations rarely impressed the record-buying public. I suspect the reason for that was two-fold. Firstly, pop sounds better in English, its own language; secondly, the German listener could differentiate between a Gilbert Bécaud”s heavy accent interpreting the lyrics and English-language singers not knowing what they were phonetically singing.
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Marvin Gaye ““ Wie schön das ist.mp3
Marvin Gaye – Sympatica
Motown had their stars record many versions of their songs in Spanish, Italian, French and German. Curious Germany Volume 2 included German covers by the Supremes and by the Temptations. Marvin chipped in with this take on How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). The vocals were usually sung from phonetic lyric sheets, and most international stars who recorded in German did not pay meticulous attention to the standards of their pronunciation. I have no idea whether Marvin Gaye was a polyglot or whether he just gave more of a shit, but he did a better job of it than most of his peers. Wie schön das ist was the b-side of a song Gaye recorded exclusively in German, Sympatica, which was written by Schlager composers Jonny Bartels (not to be confused with singer Johnny Bartel) and Kurt Feltz. So here we have one instance of Motown going Schlager, sort of.
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Katja Ebstein – A Hard Day’s Night.mp3
Katja Ebstein had a reputation as one of Germany’s more sophisticated Schlager stars. When she represented West Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, her song was titled Theater. It got nowhere. Ten years earlier the singer born in Poland as Karin Witkiewicz did somewhat better, coming third with the rather good Wunder gibt es immer wieder, and repeating the trick the following year with the ecological number Diese Welt (see, it wasn’t only Marvin Gaye who was concerned). The international exposure helped her maintain an international career, recording in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and even Japanese.

Ebstein’s rather peculiar version of A Hard Day’s Night preceded her breakthrough by a year; she was still something of a leftist activist (she still is; in the 1980s she was arrested for taking part in a blockade of a US nuclear arms depot; in 2003 she demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq). Released in 1969 on the Katja album (the legend Twen on the cover advertises a youth magazine which promoted the LP), the Beatles cover was the set’s only English-language track. In her hands, the hard day was suffered not by her but by a unspecified him, and the whole shebang includes a strong hint of a Harrison-style eastern vibe.  File under “Interesting Beatles Covers”.

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Johnny Cash – Viel zu spät.mp3
Johnny Cash – Wo ist zu Hause, Mama.mp3
Cash”s 1965 German version of I Walk The Line also featured in the second volume of this series. In 1959, Cash recorded two other German versions of his songs, though neither was released until 1978. Viel zu spät (Much too late) is a take on the murder ballad I Got Stripes; Wo Ist Zu Hause, Mama (Where is home, mom) is the allemanic version of Five Feet High and Rising. Both, it seems, were intended to be released as a single, but I can find no record of their release. Cash”s relationship with Germany went back to the early 1950s, when he was stationed as a GI in Bavaria (it was a local girl who damaged his hearing when she stick a pencil in his ear). And it was there that Cash started to become serious about music.

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Radi Radenkovic РBin i Radi bin i K̦nig.mp3
Here”s an example of an idiosyncratic accent helping to create celebrity on the football pitch and in the pop charts. Yugoslav Petar “Radi” Radenkovic was the goalkeeper for the München 1860 football team, which won the German championship in 1966 (the last team playing in blue shirts to do so). The goalkeeper was something of a humorous character on the pitch who had the entertaining tendency to run outside his penalty area to dribble around opponents., He was hugely popular. As one does, he recorded a single to celebrate his celebrity. This frankly quite awful ditty fuses Radenkovic”s guttural Serbian accent with the thick Bavarian dialect which has the rest of Germany (or Prussia, as a Bavarian might counter) amused at its sheer yokelness. The song “” literally: “Am I Radi am I king” “” does little to suggest that Radenkovic”s parents were in fact fairly successful musicians.

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More Curious German