A compelling examination of a simple song’s enormous psychological and political power.
The story of World War II’s accidental megahit, a song surpassingly popular with troops of all stripes.
In their unpretentious retelling, Miller and Leibovitz (Aliya: Three Generations of American-Jewish Immigration to Israel, 2005) feature characters arrayed along the continuum of humanity, from dutiful soldiers, Nazis and Allies alike, to brutal bureaucrats, in particular Reich Culture Chamber head Hans Hinkel. Standing guard duty in Berlin in 1915, poet Hans Leip got the idea for a poem about a lonely soldier. Back in his room, he wrote “Song of a Young Sentry,” combining the names of his landlady’s niece and a girl he’d met at an art gallery to christen the soldier’s lover Lili Marlene. Leip put the poem in a drawer, but 20 years later, he found it, revised it and published it. Enter pianist/composer Norbert Schultze, who discovered the poem, set it to music and sent it to cabaret singer Lale Andersen. She recorded it, but its first broadcast was on the same November 1938 evening as Kristallnacht, so not many minds were on music. Then Karl-Heinz Reintgen, head of Soldier’s Radio Belgrade, found the recording in 1941 and put it into rotation. From that moment, “Song of a Young Sentry” was a phenomenal success with troops, who waited to hear it—and sing along with it—every night. Referred to by soldiers simply as “Lili Marlene,” it was eventually translated into other languages, and people wrote additional lyrics for special occasions. Goebbels despised this sentimental ballad, which he thought weakened the will of Aryan troops, and Nazi leaders did all they could to suppress it, including the attempted rape and confinement of Andersen. British authorities, troubled by the popularity of a song in German with Nazi connotations, took the simpler expedient of arranging an English-language recording. The multiple versions available on the Internet, including Marlene Dietrich’s famous interpretation, attest to the song’s enduring appeal.
A compelling examination of a simple song’s enormous psychological and political power.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06584-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
