Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II

‘Lili Marlene’, the unlikely anthem of the Second World War, cut across front lines and ideological divides. This love song began as a poem written by a German soldier during the First World War. The words were set to music in Berlin in the 1930s by one of Hitler’s favoured composers. The song’s singer, however, found herself torn between her desire for fame and her hatred of the Nazi regime. In Lili Marlene the three artists’ remarkable stories of arrests and close calls are intertwined with the recollections of soldiers who sought solace and found hope in ‘Lili Marlene’.