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3rd Reich Film: Zarah Leander - Merci, mon ami (1937)

3,742 views · Published 18 December 2014 · 3:14 · Indexed 14 November 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2014 · Music

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Zarah Leander mit Orchesterbegleitung (Einar Groth Orchester) - Merci, mon ami (aus dem Film „Premiere“) Musik: Peter Fenyes, Text: Hanns Schachner,  Odeon 1937 (Germany)

NOTE: Zarah Leander, born in 1907 in Sweden, died in 1981 in Stockholm, Sweden. One of the most prominent film stars of the 1930/40s in Europe. After having acquired a significant position in the theatre- and vadeuville productions in Stockholm in 1st half of the 1930s , Leander was suddenly catapulted in 1936 into a sensational career in Germany, as Number One film star of the Third Reich. Her contract with UFA had furnished her with insanely high salary of ca 180 000 reichsmark per year, a half of which was paid in Swedish crowns into her bank in Stockholm (Which seems to prove, Zarah from the very beginning of her flirt with the Third Reich, disbelieved in Adolf Hitler promises of the 1000 years of life of his empire and preferred to secure her future in the Swedish currency). Until 1943, which was the end of her film career in Germany (she left Germany when her luxurious villa in Berlin’s suburb Grunewald was hit during one of heavy British air raids in March 1943) Zarah Leander filmed 10 very successful melodramatic movies, each of them enriched by several songs, usually written by the best German composers  such as Michael Jary, Theo Mackeben, Lothar Brühne, each of them thus sentenced to immediately becoming a great hit. In her films she usually played strong, self-confident women, who were not easy to be broken in life  by anything else, but love. But even broken, they rose up again and with a song on their lips, they trustfully waited for better future looking lovingly into the sky (...on which, brave nazi Luftwaffe boys were just flying on their bombers towards Warsaw or some other European city...). Such model of a woman was ofcourse something, what her German female fans looked for, especially when many of them  lost temporarily, or forever, their life partners in the war. Through all those years, her enormous popularity in Germany (she was called by Germans “die Leander”) protected her from unfriendliness , which – in a discreet way – was sometimes expressed to her by the Nazi officials. They needed her as an antidote to their deep frustration, after German’s favorite star Marlene Dietrich left Hitler’s Germania with a huge international noise; on the other side, Zarah Leander was more than reluctant  to appear publicly with Adolf or glisten on NSDAP gala meetings, on the contrary to another UFA stars, like Leni Riefenstahl, Ilse Werner or Olga Tschechova. Also - and similarily to many foreigners, who were publicly active in the Third Reich - she was suspected of being a “spy” or a “hidden Jew”. At a party she once met the Nazi minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who asked her ironically: "Zarah... Isn't that a Jewish name?" "Oh, maybe… but what about Josef?" – she replied, leaving him speechless.  

However, her Nazi-manipulated career – which provided her with nothing but material profits (for the Reichsmarks she earned at UFA, she bought a castle in Sweden, where she lived in luxury until her death) -  made her also pay a high moral and artistic price after the war. Attempts to come back to her not long-ago-fans in Germany, failed. German press – which a decade earlier published nothing but enthusiastic praises about “her beauty and talent”, now loudly heralded news about her serious refractive error (she had to wear thick minus glasses) or her “thick legs”.  In one of press reviews after the performance of an operetta, with which she toured in postwar Germany, she was disdainfully called the “Nazi-sirene” and “Zirkus-pferde” – meaning, a “circus horse”. In later years she therefore limited her public appearances to recitals in Sweden, where – after a prolonged pause, when her public performances were also unwished-for by the Swedish audience –  she found again many fans among younger generations, whose anti-Nazi resentments started to wane.  Also, her contralto voice, which in pass of time was becoming almost masculine, was one of the reasons why in the 1980s she was unofficially nominated a favorite star of the homosexual circles in Europe.  A Nobel-prize winning Russian poet Josip Brodsky, writing in his memoirs about his father - a Soviet-army officer who, in Josip’s childhood returned home from the 2nd World War with the trophies from Berlin, and in this number a collection of gramophone records and Third Reich cinema magazines – called Zarah Leander’s photographs “the most beautiful female face he has ever seen”…

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