A long long time ago, somewhere in the late sixties, Marlena Dietrich gave a concert at the Golders’ Green Hippodrome in North West London. At the time we lives in Hampstead, which neighbours on Golders’ Green and my father was gung ho for us to go to this concert?
For him Marlena Dietrich was of sexy Blue Angel fame, his generation femme fatale so he was keen. For my mother she was a ‘German woman’, pronounced with great disdain. Anyhow, she agreed and the family trundled along to see the lady in performance.
As far as I can remember she was very impressive and closed the show with a rendition of ‘Lili Marlene‘. I do not recall if this was in German or English or both. When we left the theatre my father was on a high. How great it had been how wonderful. My mother was sour.
Why did you bring us to see that ‘German woman’ singing Lili Marlene? Of all things!!!! She was outraged. Now my mother was always very polite and would never ever say something like: ‘that bloody German bitch!’. But the way she said ‘that German woman’ and the expression on her face were far far worse than any pure swear word could ever be.
Now my father had been an officer in the Greek Navy during the war, that had escaped the German occupation and joined forces with the British forces once Greece had fallen to the Nazis. So he couldn’t see what her objection to the song was. All the allied forces sang LilI Marlene, and besides, Marlena Dietrich had absconded and sang the song to the American troops.
Herrumph! My mother’s reply. Lili Marlene was a German song. A song the wretched jack booted occupying powers sang in the night as they patrolled the captive city of Athens. And she hated to be reminded of those dark satanic times and in London too, the Mecca of freedom, the seat of the BBC service that had given them what news they could get of the war and their loved ones.
But no, no! Everyone sang it. All the soldiers sang it. On both sides. He never managed to convince her. Still less, that though Marlena Dietrich was indeed ‘a German woman’ (with or without the poisonous slur of disdain) she was against the Nazis. For my mother, who lived through the terrible, inhuman occupation, like a rose, a German was a German was a German. And that went for German women too.
Some years later when I had moved to Greece. I came across another song. A different one. A haunting one, called ‘it has become a moonless night.‘ I was told that this song was sung during the Greek civil war. By both sides. Frequently together. A beautiful, mournful song about a lad locked away in prison who cannot sleep on this moonless night. As the opposing forces were holed up in the night watching and waiting for the other side to make a move, some young man would start singing this song which was then taken up by the other side and then the refrain back again from the first side.
Eerie, I thought. Human. Young men, boys still, about to be slaughtered for what? A greater ideal? Greater egos of men far away from the fray giving orders or what?
So what is the moral of this sad little story? That even in war song unites? That even in conditions of total inhumanity there is always a higher form of expression? Of communication even?
Perhaps. That too. But perhaps another point could be that little Greece, that pesky troublesome little country, went through ten years of war, civil war, destruction, pain, hunger, perhaps even a little glory when, as Churchill said “Greeks do not fight like heroes, but heroes fight like Greeks’ only to be again disdained, humiliated, the first victims of the savage onslaught of the vicious inhuman free market, or whatever it is, ideology, currently destroying not just the economy but the very social fibre of the country.
Or perhaps even that yet again, the destruction or survival of the continent is destined yet again to go through Greece?