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Tango from Berlin: Dajos Bela & Leo Monosson - Du Hast Ja Eine Träne Im Knopfloch,1931

2,560 views · Published 8 October 2015 · 3:00 · Indexed 21 October 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2015 · Music

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Du hast ja eine Träne im Knopfloch (I See A Tear In Your Buttonhole), Tango a.d. Tonfilm "Der Andere" (Text u. Musik: Friedrich Holländer) - Tanz-Orchester DAJOS BELA mit Gesang: Leo Frank (Leo Monosson), Odeon 1931 (Germany)

NOTE: This tango is composed by Friedrich Holländer (1896-1976) who was a German revue and sound film composer, cabaret artist and poet, one of the most prominent artists in Berlin in the Jazz Age. Born in London as only son of the German Operetta composer Victor Holländer and Rosa Perl, a singer in the circus. Friedrich was, so to speak, born into the stage, for also two of his paternal uncles held important positions in Berlin's cultural and musical life: Felix as a dramaturge at Max Reinhardt and Gustav as director of the renowned Stern Conservatory. 

Around the turn of the 20th century, the family moved to Berlin, where they also originally came from. Friedrich became a master student at the Stern Conservatory in the class of piano, yet besides his serious stuidies, he enjoyed playing in the nickelodeon on the corner, improvising musical tunes for the silent movies. During the Great War, he was in New York and in Prague, then, after the war he entusiastically dived into the mainstream of Berlin’s revue, cabaret and theatre life. Together with people like poet Kurt Tucholsky, composer and pianist Mischa Spoliansky or actress Blandine Ebinger, he started a successful cabaret in the basement of Max Reinhardt’s theatre. Through the 1920s, Friedrich Holländer worked at various cabaret theaters (including Trude Hester’s Mountain Wild Stage), composed and wrote the lyrics for songs and accompanied Blandine and others, like Marlene Dietrich, Margo Lion or Grete Mosheim on the piano. He also played in Stefan Weintraub’s Syncopators – one of the most renowned dance jazz-bands of Berlin of the Roaring Twenties. He wrote revues for Rudolf Nelson’s theatre and, in the dawn of sound movies era, he started writing for the film companies. A highlight of his work was certainly The Blue Angel (1930) in which he appears personally on the screen, as a pianist. In 1933, forced to leave Germany because of his Jewish ancestry, Holländer began his new life first in Paris. He stayed there for about a year in the large German immigrant community. In 1934, he traveled to USA, following many German/Jewish artists, who decided to move as far away as possible from Hitler and his comerades. In Hollywood, he initially opened the American edition of the Berlin-style tingel-tangling theater, which was not a great success, performing almost exclusively for the German audience. That failure made Holläender return to the movies, where his great success waited for him again. He wrote music for such movie-blockbusters like Destry Rides Again (1939), A Foreign Affair (1948), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953 Academy Award nomination) and Sabrina (1954). Many of his old songs, which he wrote back in Germany, were again made famous by his faithful friend, Marlene Dietrich. He can be seen as the piano accompanist in A Foreign Affair (on the songs, "Black Market", "Illusions" and "Ruins of Berlin"). He received four Academy Award nominations for composition. As "Frederick Hollander", he also wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Those Torn From Earth, which was released in 1941. 
Holländer remained in the US until 1955, when he traveled back to Germany. He settled in Munich, where he began again with the cabaret. But the time of the great cabaret was over, so Holländer had to come back to the movie business. He had a cameo appearance in 1961 in Billy Wilder’s film One, Two, Three as a conductor of a hotel band. In 1960 he was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1965 he received the German Film Award for many years of outstanding achievements in German film. In 1972, Friedrich Holländer received the prestigeous Schwabing Art Prize. He died in Munich in 1976. 

See also the prewar Polish version of this song: “Łza w butonierce” sung by Tadeusz Faliszewski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j8eHRHVSg

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