Jeffrey C Blutinger. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 30, Issue 3, September 2021.
In the Winter of 1941-42, the Swedish singer Zarah Leander stood in a requisitioned French chateau in front of movie cameras and German army officers and sang lyrics by Bruno Balz, a gay pop song writer who was persecuted by the Nazis:
It’s not the end of the world Even when it sometimes looks gray. One day it will be colorful again, One day it will be sky blue again. Sometimes things go up and Sometimes things go down, Even when our head is spinning. It’s not the end of the world, We still need it, after all.
As she sang, the German officers linked arms and joined her in a roaring sing-along. This remarkable scene occurs in the middle of Die grosse Liebe (The great love, 1942), the most popular film produced during the twelve years of Nazi rule. It featured Zarah Leander, UFA studios’ answer to Greta Garbo and replacement for Marlene Dietrich and the highest-paid star in the Nazi film firmament. This song, “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” (It’s not the end of the world), along with another one in the musical, “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” (I know one day a miracle will happen), became the most popular songs in Nazi Germany for the last three years of the war. Yet during that time and even since, almost no one knew that they were written by a gay man.
Given the prominence of these songs in wartime Nazi Germany, it is surprising how little has been written about Bruno Balz, particularly as his story can illuminate the precarious place of gay popular artists in Nazi Germany. Beyond a brief biographical sketch in a 1997 exhibition—Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung—at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin, the only scholarly discussions of Balz or his work appear in passing as context for a discussion either of Zarah Leander or of the film Die grosse Liebe. Some scholars omit his role in the film entirely.
One reason for the lack of attention to Balz’s role is that like many other gay Germans persecuted by the Nazi regime, he almost never spoke about it afterward. In fact, in his will, Balz forbade his longtime partner, Jurgen Draeger, from publicly discussing his private life for ten years after his death. As I will explore in more detail below, what little that has been published about him almost exclusively repeats various legends: that he wrote the lyrics for these songs while imprisoned for being gay or that Josef Goebbels released him so that Die grosse Liebe could be completed.
Whether or not Balz actually wrote these two songs in a Gestapo prison, his songs from the Nazi period cast light on how gay popular artists attempted to accommodate themselves to the needs of the fascist state in order to earn a living and survive. Relying on double entendre, Balz found a way to express his own desires in song. Although this approach was an effort to resist the Nazi state’s attempts to suppress gay men and gay culture and transform them into an Aryan ideal of masculinity, it would be a mistake to simply see Balz’s songs as an example of a crafty’ artist slipping a message of resistance past dim-witted censors, as Balz himself implied in a rare press interview. These songs would never have been approved for use in German films if they did not at the same time serve a valuable purpose for the Nazi regime.
The story behind Balz’s songs, therefore, is less about secret resistance than it is about revealing how limited and complicated the agency employed by popular artists in Nazi Germany actually was. An examination of the reception of these songs shows the need for a more nuanced understanding of how culture was received in Nazi Germany, including attention to both the multiple meanings different audiences found in this music and some listeners’ ability to “hear” the messages Balz hid within the text. Balz’s lyrics, which reflect his experience of persecution as a gay man, came to define the German home front during the last years of the war, but they could only have done so by containing carefully crafted and ambiguous meanings.
Bruno Baltz: Portrait of the Artist as A Gay Man
Born in Berlin in 1902, Balz realized two things early in life: that he wanted to be a songwriter and that he was attracted to men. He started writing verses while still a teenager, and after graduation he wrote light fiction and poetry for several newspapers and periodicals. Balz received his big break in 1923 when the composer Eduard May asked him to write the text to accompany his melody for “Aladin,” a song that May called an “oriental ballad and shimmy.” Balz quickly became a popular writer of Schlager (hits) in Germany. Real fame came to Balz when he wrote the lyrics for the first sound film produced in Germany: Dich hab’ ich geliebt! (It’s you I have loved), a 1929 drama about a singer, played by Mady Christians, who gives up her career for marriage but then is reunited with her former lover/ costar. Not only did this film earn Balz “appreciable royalties,” but be also came to the attention of other composers who had been commissioned to create music for UFA. By the mid-1930s, Balz estimated that he had worked on some fifty sound films for Tobis and UFA studios.
Balz’s sexuality also emerged quite early. One of Balz’s earliest successful hits was the gay-themed song “Bubi, lab uns Freunde sein” (Bubi, let’s be friends), with music by Erwin Neuber. This light-hearted song recounts a love affair between the singer and a young Portuguese man (“the brown Escandio”), depicted as a rosy-cheeked, red-caped bull fighter on the cov er of the sheet music. The singer describes his affair:
But what happened then and everything I saw
I will conceal here. But when the sun went down,
Love sick, I spoke to the brown boy without fear:
“I love you, I love you, listen to me!”
This leads to the song’s refrain, where he sings:
Bubi, let’s be friends.
Let your heart beat on my heart.
If you are mine and I yours
The world laughs in the sunshine
For the friend helps [one] endure all suffering!
Unlike his later songs written under the Nazis, here Balz was very much “out of the closet,” and his songs fit into the queer cabaret culture of Weimar Berlin by embracing a playful sexuality.
In addition to his work as a songwriter and writer of popular fiction, Balz wrote for several journals with a specifically gay readership. These included Der Eigene: Zeitschrift fur Freundschaft und Freiheit, the Schweizerisches Freundschafts-Banner, Das Freundshafts-Blatt, Die Insel, and Blatter fur Menschenrecht. In 1927 Balz’s poem “Wir wachen!” (We wake!) was recited at the reception for the eighth anniversary of the founding of the Bund fur Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights), a German gay rights organization, and Die Insel published it two months later. Balz’s poem deseribed the efforts of the gay rights movement in Germany:
We struggle and fight year after year
For freedom and for understanding.
We struggle—and see year after year
That suffering will pass.
While acknowledging the heavy opposition they faced and the difficulties of the fight, Balz encouraged his audience to persevere:
Derision and folly should not
Make us more discouraged,
Defiantly, we clench the fist
And awake! Awake! Awake!
In February 1934 the Schweizeriscbes Freundschafts-Banner reprinted this poem, along with a photo of Balz, on its front page in response to the increasing persecution of gay men and lesbians in Nazi Germany.
Despite his relative openness about his sexuality, the rise of the Nazis did not hinder Balz’s career. In fact, he enjoyed one of his greatest successes with the premiere of the comedy film Viktor und Viktoria (1933), for which Balz wrote not only the lyrics but also some of the sung dialogue. Like the 1982 remake by Blake Edwards, the plot revolves around a woman pretending to be a female impersonator. Unlike the later film, however, homosexuality is not an overt part of the original film’s plot. In many ways, it was the swan song of Weimar cinema and, despite the Nazi assault on gay, lesbian, and transgender nightlife, the most popular German film of 1933.
Like many artists, Balz accommodated himself to the Nazi government. He became a member of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture, RKK), the Nazi professional organization created by Goebbels that oversaw all German creative artists, meaning that he was required to submit proof of “Aryan” ancestry. In the curriculum vitae that he submitted to the RKK, Balz carefully omitted any references to his work for gay publications. As a result, Balz continued to enjoy success as a lyricist on major German film musicals, including Prinzessin Turandot, Amphitryon, and Konigswalzer.
Balz’s life changed dramatically in 1936 when he was arrested for violating Paragraph 175, the German law against sex between men. In September 1935 the language of Paragraph 175 was broadened by the replacement of the term widernatiirliche Unzucht (unnatural lewdness) with just Unzucht (lewdness). The removal of the modifier widernaturliche meant that any form of self-gratification in the presence of another man could now be prosecuted. As a result, there was a wave of raids and prosecutions. In Berlin, the number of prosecutions under Paragraph 175 quadrupled over the first three years of the regime, from 333 in 1933 to 500 in 1934 and then 1,196 in 1935, and then doubled to 2,309 in 1936. In October 1936 Heinrich Himmler established the Reich Office for the Combatting of Homosexuality and Abortion, which maintained so-called pink lists of men charged with homosexuality, particularly “rent boys,” who sold sex for money.
Although Himmler suspended some of the operations against foreign gay men in Berlin during the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, this did not save Balz. He was arrested as part of a roundup near the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest city park, in August 1936.” Balz had been to a screening of one of his films at the Ufa-Palast theater and had then gone to the Tiergarten. This part of the park was both close to Balz’s home and a popular meeting place for gay men. Balz was tried with three other defendants and convicted for violation of Paragraph 175.
According to the court’s verdict, Balz had also been in the Tiergarten in June 1936, where he met his seventeen-year-old codefendant, Berthold G., “who w as seeking to meet men for same-sex activity for remuneration” and who had already had sexual intercourse with another codefendant, Erich F. Balz had sexual contact with Berthold G. on a total of three occasions and each time provided him with cigarettes and a small amount of cash. The court declared Balz guilty of violating Paragraph 175 for various sex offenses, but he was declared innocent of the more serious charge of violating Paragraph 175(a)(3), which prohibited “seducing a male person under twenty-one years to commit lewdness with him.” The judges found that “the accused Balz had not seduced [Berthold G.] to commit lewdness, as [he] had specifically sought to make the acquaintance of Balz for this purpose.”
This made a huge difference when it came to Balz’s sentencing. He faced up to ten years in prison if he were found guilty of violating Paragraph 175(a)(3), but he was instead only sentenced to six months in prison. The court stated that he was “incited” by Berthold G., for whom “this was not a one-time aberration but rather a continuous behavior” and that Balz “regrets his action.” While the court did not go into details about the nature of Balz’s “regret,” it likely refers to his hastily arranged marriage with his second cousin, Selma Pett, on 26 September 1936. The Nazis had conflicting beliefs about the origins of homosexuality and whether it was curable, with some believing that the condition could be “environmentally caused,” while others insisted that it was an “instinctual drive.” The reference to a “one-time aberration” indicates that the judges must have concluded that Balz was capable of rehabilitation, something his marriage might have been meant to confirm.
Although Balz was sentenced to six months in prison, he was released alter three months for good behavior (although he was still required to report regularly to the police). Following his release, Balz went back to work as a lyricist at UFA, but not only were his publicity photos destroyed, he was also no longer part of the public relations campaigns for the films he worked on, and his name was omitted from film credits. This is a good example of the ambivalence of the Nazi approach: Balz could continue to work as long as he remained useful to the Nazi state, but only if he remained invisible.
Following his release from prison in the spring of 1937, Balz began a collaboration with Swedish singer Zarah Leander that would transform his career. He had first met her in September 1936, when UFA sent him to Vienna to review her performance in a play where her role parodied Greta Garbo. Her first film in Germany was Zu nenen Ufern (To new shores, 1937), which was directed by Dedef Sierck while Balz was still in prison. He was available, however, to work on her next project, La Habanera. In her autobiography, Leander describes how Balz created the signature song for the film. The night before they were supposed to film Leander singing it, it still did not exist. Sierck assured Leander that the song would be ready, and sure enough, at 11:00 p.m., the composer, Lothar Briihne, arrived at her villa with the melody. Unfortunately, they still did not have any words to go with it. Leander called Balz and said, “Bruno, you have to write a good text for this fantastic piece of music.” Balz asked what the song was meant to convey. “Sierck said it is about unfulfilled longing,” Leander replied. Balz got to work and soon called back with “Das Wind hat mir ein Lied erzahlt” (The wind has told me a song). The song became a huge hit.
Even though Balz’s role as lyricist for some of the biggest musical hits of the late 1930s was uncredited in the films he worked on, at least he remained employed by the major German film studios. Balz’s probation lasted until 1 June 1940, and shortly thereafter he wrote the RKK, asking to be released from his continued obligations to report to the police. The RKK official then forwarded this request to Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, noting that “since there are actually not enough useful lyricists right now, I have decided to support the application.” Balz was freed from all police obligations on 10 October 1940. A few months later, Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda granted Balz an exemption from military service, allowing him to continue to work as a lyricist in the film industry.
The RKK’s actions toward Balz are consistent with its treatment of other members suspected or even convicted of homosexual acts. Under Paragraph 10 of the law establishing the RKK, the chamber could expel members deemed “dangerous” or “undesirable.” While many members convicted under Paragraph 175 were expelled, until 1942 there was an “internal directive” that those who received sentences of less than six months should not be expelled. Balz had reason to believe that his position at UFA and Tobis studios provided him with a degree of protection from the police. In October 1937 Himmler issued a special regulation covering the arrests of anyone in the entertainment industry for violations of Paragraph 175: “Any detention of an actor or artist for unnatural sex acts requires his [Himmler’s] prior approval, unless one of the above is actually caught in the act.” Unfortunately for Balz, his expectation of immunity was misplaced.
The Legend(s) of How Balz Wrote the Songs for Die Grosse Liebe
Over the last three decades, two dramatic legends have emerged concerning the circumstances under which Balz wrote the lyrics for the two most famous songs from Die grosse Liebe, including stories about his arrest, about a dramatic plea to Goebbels to release him, and about how the two songs were the key to his release from a Gestapo prison. I refer to them as “legends” because there is no direct evidence to corroborate either version of the story and because each version contains one or more elements that are either false or highly unlikely. Unfortunately, almost all relevant arrest records were destroyed at the end of the war either as part of a general purge of Gestapo files or as a result of Allied bombing raids on Berlin, so many of the underlying facts are unverifiable.
The first version of these legends to be published can be found in Micaela Jary’s 1993 fictionalized biography, Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n: Die grosse Liebe der Zarah Leander (I know one day a miracle will happen: The great love of Zarah Leander). The second version is what Balz told his lover Jurgen Draeger after they met in 1960 and what Draeger has recounted in numerous interviews in the German press since Balz’s death. Since both of these versions appear in scholarly and popular discussions of the film, it is worth briefly exploring their historicity.
Micaela Jary’s Version
Micaela Jary is the daughter of Balz’s composing partner Michael Jary. In her correspondence with me, Jary emphasized that her novel is fiction and, to my disappointment, that she is not able to say with certainty which parts were based on what her father told her and which parts sprang from her imagination.
In Jary’s novel, Balz was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1942 when he attempted to pick up a Hitler Youth in the Tiergarten. The young man apparently knew who Balz was and knew of his friendship with Zarah Leander, so he went out to Leander’s villa in Dahlem to tell her that Balz had been arrested by the Gestapo. For several weeks, Leander did not know what to do, but when Michael Jary returned to Berlin she informed him that Balz was in prison and begged him to help. That evening, Jary attended a party held in the villa of the KddK (Kameradschaft der deutschen Kunstler, Fellowship of German Artists). There he ran into Goebbels, who addressed the assembled artists, telling them that Germany needed more songs like “Dass kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschiittern” (That cannot upset a sailor), a popular song Balz had written with Jary for the comedy Paradies der Junggesellen (Bachelors’ paradise, 1939). Jary then approached Goebbels and told him that the man who had written the words to the song he had just praised had been arrested. Goebbels agreed to allow Balz to go free, and Jary raced to the prison to bring him to UFA’s studios in Babelsberg. They set the two songs he had written to music, and Leander sang them. Goebbels, who just happened to be passing by, complimented Jary for producing precisely the songs he wanted.
Jurgen Draeger’s Version
Draeger’s account is based on what Balz told him after thev met in 1960 and on what Draeger told me when I met him at the Bruno Balz Archive in Berlin in June 2013 and through correspondence afterward. According to Draeger, because of the complexity involved with the film’s production, it faced major obstacles that delayed the start of shooting multiple times. As a result, while Balz normally hosted a wrap party in his home, this time he held a start-of-filming party in early September 1941. Balz had invited members of the film crew, as well as colleagues from the entertainment industry, to the party, but the Gestapo decided to gate-crash it. They sent in a young, attractive, blond man to seduce Balz. The Nazis regularly used decoys and informers to catch men they suspected were gay. When Balz took the young man back to his bedroom, the Gestapo was already in position, with a photographer hidden in the room. Balz was arrested and taken to the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where for the next three weeks he was held in solitary confinement, beaten, and tortured. His only contact with the outside world was through his attorney. While he was in prison, Balz composed two poems reflecting his spirit: “Da von geht die Welt nicht unter” and “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n.” Unable to write them down, he dictated them to his attorney as his “last testament.”
With Balz in prison, work on Die grosse Liebe stalled. As they had no songs to shoot for their musical, the director looked for a replacement lyricist but found no takers. Instead, after Balz had been in prison for three weeks, Zarah Leander and Michael Jary approached the leadership of UFA to ask them to help get Balz out of prison. Leander then met with both the head of UFA and Goebbels in order to win Balz’s release to work on the film. Goebbels agreed on one condition: that Balz produce two songs by the next day that met with his approval. Balz was then taken from the Gestapo prison to Babelsberg, where he was placed in a barracks under guard. Balz received medical attention, Michael Jary came to visit, and they set the two poems he had written in prison to music. These satisfied Goebbels, and Balz was freed.
Assessing the Two Legends
As noted above, all Gestapo records concerning Balz’s possible second arrest have been lost. Is there any evidence, then, that Balz was actually arrested and tortured? Yes, but only in part. While Balz never spoke publicly about his second arrest, there was visible evidence that he had been tortured: a livid scar around his neck from when a cord was placed there and then tightened in order to strangle him until he passed out. Unfortunately, there is no way to know when Balz was tortured, and it may well hat e happened during his 1936 arrest or 1937 imprisonment.
What about Goebbels’s role in Balz’s release? There is no evidence that Goebbels played any role in Balz’s release from prison. Goebbels seems to have had a fan-boy crush on Leander and recorded every meeting with her in his diary. In addition, he followed the production of Die grosse Liebe obsessively; it was a major and expensive undertaking involving his biggest star. Had he been approached by either Leander or Jary or even heard Leander singing Balz’s songs in Babelsberg, he likely would have recorded it in his diary, yet Balz is not mentioned anywhere in it. For diat reason, it is likely that both versions significantly overstate Goebbels’s role, if he even played any role at all. In addition, the timing of Balz’s arrest in Jary’s version cannot be accurate if, as she writes, he composed the songs while under arrest. According to the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS, German radio was already playing Leander singing “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” in January and February 1942, well before the date described by Micaela Jary in her novel.
Must we conclude, dierefbre, that these legends have no basis at all in fact? Not necessarily. There is evidence that the matter of Balz’s homosexuality was brought to Goebbels’s attention during the film’s production and that he discussed Balz’s case, at least once, with Hans Hinkel, the ministerial director of the RKK. An undated memo in Balz’s RKK file, apparently front March 1942, summarizes the details of his 1937 conviction and states that “following a conversation with Ministerialdirektor Hinkel, the Reichsminister [Goebbels] has decided that Balz may no longer be employed in broadcasting; however, no further steps should be taken against him.” This statement also seems to have sparked a flurry of memos between the RKK and the head of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the Reich Chamber of Writers), a subdivision of the RKK, concerning Balz’s employability as a writer. The correspondence between the RKK and the Reichsschrifttumskammer took place between March and May 1942, corresponding to the postproduction of Die grosse Liebe. Photography on the film ended on 18 March 1942, and it had its premiere on 12 June 1942. This all suggests that after Balz’s work on the film had ended, the RKK needed to decide what to do with him going forward.
These memos in the RKK file also suggest that something had raised the issue of Balz’s homosexuality during the production of the film. The RKK’s October 1940 decision to support his release from probation indicates that they were already aware of his 1937 conviction for violating Paragraph 175. The memos indicate that Nazi officials found his talents useful, and he was therefore to be allowed to remain employable. At the same time, though, they barred him from any activity that might raise his public profile. He could work, but again, only if he remained invisible.
A review of the publicity material for Die grosse Liebe indicates that in addition to barring Balz from working in radio broadcasting, there was a concerted and systemic effort within Goebbels’s ministry to conceal Balz’s role in the film. Not only does his name not appear in the credits, he is also not mentioned in any of the film’s publicity or in public discussion of the film’s songs. Newspaper articles promoting the film and its music, prominently and only mention Michael Jary’s role as the composer. Balz’s credits for the film were only restored after the war.
While we may never find evidence to establish the truth behind these legends, their emergence half a century after the war reflects a growing willingness in postreunification German culture to explore the experiences of gay men during the Nazi period. Both Micaela Jary’s 1993 novel and Jurgen Draeger’s newspaper interviews in the early 2000s are evidence of the German public’s interest in accounts of the persecution ot gay men in Nazi Germany. They also serve to rehabilitate songs from the Nazi period by allowing them to be heard in a context of resistance.
Balz’s Postwar Life
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Balz underwent a denazification review and was cleared by the British Intelligence Section to go back to work in 1946. Balz resumed composing popular songs for West German musicals and continued to collaborate with Zarah Leander. For example, he wrote the lyrics for two musicals Leander filmed in West Germany in the 1950s, and the two remained friends for the rest of her life. Despite the end of Nazi rule, Balz did not return to the uncloseted life he had lived in the 1920s. In fact, the West German government brought charges against Balz twice more for violating Paragraph 175, in 1953 and 1966. In both cases, Balz believed that his wife, who lived separately from him, had denounced him in order to gain control of his royalty revenue. Paragraph 175 was only completely repealed in 1994, six years after Balz’s death.
Songs from the Closet
An examination of the song lyrics that Balz composed during the Nazi period, particularly after his 1936 arrest, demonstrates how Balz tailored his lyrics to a far more dangerous period. These songs rely on a double entendre, a surface level that reads as heterosexual and a second level that could be read as gay. For example, his lyrics for La Habanera met the needs of the film’s plot (about a woman in an unhappy marriage), but they can at the same time be read as a description of a gay man in Nazi Germany:
The wind has told me a song
Of happiness, inexpressibly beautiful.
I know what my heart is missing,
For whom it beats and glows.
I know for whom.
Come, come, ah.
The wind has told me a song
Of a heart that I am missing.
Within the context of the film, the lyrics refer to the longings and sufferings of the heroine, trapped in a loveless marriage to a non-German Cuban; at the same time, though, a gay audience could identify with the unfulfilled desire for love and companionship. Leander thus became a vehicle for expressing Balz’s own suppressed desires, while her singing affirmed, at least by implication, a nonnormative sexuality. At the same time, the momentary transgressive nature of the music was ultimately exorcised by a plot that was meant to bring the audience to a realization of the truth of Nazi values, as Leander’s character returns to her Germanic home.
The combination of Balz’s lyrics with Leander’s performance created a powerful draw on gay German audiences that has lasted three generations, with many postwar drag personas based on Leander. As Rosa von Praunheim wrote in his 1981 obituary for Leander: “Zarah worked like a transvestite: strong body, big hands, big feet, small breasts, and a wonderful male voice.” Part of Leander’s appeal to gay Germans was that she played characters whose sorrows and hardships had to remain hidden from society and who could therefore only express them in song, obliquely or allegorically. For example, in Der Blaufuchs (The blue fox), Leander plays the bored and unhappy wife of a scientist. While toying with the idea of having an affair, she sings:
Can love be a sin?
Must no one know
If one kisses,
If one for once forgets everything
For happiness?
While the song concludes, “I would prefer to sin once than be without love,” in the end, Leander’s character remains true to her husband. Balz was even more explicit about the need for the concealment of one’s true feelings in a song he wrote for a 1939 film starring Pola Negri:
Show the world your face, But don’t show them your soul. No matter how sad you are, Keep smiling, my dear, keep smiling.
Balz’s use of the female voice as a way of expressing the gay male experience of hiding one’s emotions was not a phenomenon unique to Nazi Germany. One can find similar examples among gay lyricists working in American musical theater in the same period, such as Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart. Many of their most famous works were written to be sung by women, as “the women’s song allowed the lyricist space for more private expression.” At a time when they could not express themselves directly, gay lyricists embraced a creative ambiguity in their texts that allowed them to be read differently by different audiences.
This dual level of reading became even more important in the two songs from Die grosse Liebe at the heart of this research project: “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” and “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n.” Regardless of whether the legends about their composition are true, these song lyrics were certainly written at a time when Balz was experiencing increased scrutiny and restrictions from the Nazi state. The lines of these two poems reflected his darker situation. “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” begins:
Whenever my heart is unhappy in love,
When it is inexpressibly saddened with grief,
Then I always think
Everything is over,
I am so alone.
The second stanza of “Ich web, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” is even darker:
If I had to live without hope,
If I had to believe that no one loves me,
That there never will be any happiness for me,
Ah, that would be hard.
If I did not know in my heart
That you had once said to me, I love you,
Then life would have no meaning for me.
Balz held out the hope that he might yet be rescued front his hell. Referring to the gray sky around him, he writes, “One day it will be colorful again. / One day it will be sky blue again.” The refrain from “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” is even more emphatic:
I know that one day a miracle will happen,
And then a thousand fairy tales will come true.
I know that no love can quickly pass away
That is so great and wonderful.
That’s why one day a miracle will happen,
And I know’ that we will see each other again.
Yet this hope remains rather tenuous; it is a “fairy tale,” one that now requires a miracle. As we have already seen, Balz had been writing songs with two levels of meaning—one straight, one gay—for many years. These two new songs, however, were far darker than his previous ones, reflecting the dire circumstances under which they were written. Instead of hinting at a forbidden love affair, they now referred to Balz’s fear that he would the in prison or a concentration camp.
Durchhaltelieder, “Getting-Through Songs”
Historians usually treat “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” and “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n” simply as Durchhaltelieder, “getting-through songs,” which supported the morale of the civilian population during the war. The more the civilian population suffered, the more the war turned against Germany, the more popular such songs became. The problem with this approach is that it ignores both the radically different intentions of the various authors of these songs (which included their writers, composers, performers, and producers) and the differing ways these songs were heard by various audiences, who found meanings in these songs that sometimes radically varied from what some of the songs’ authors intended. We have already looked at what Balz intended with these lyrics, but he was not the only author of these songs’ success; they were produced with the composer Michael Jary and the singer Zarah Leander, and above them all was the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who oversaw the entire German film and entertainment industry.
Goebbels strongly believed in the importance of popular music in shaping Nazi German society. Once the war began, the minister of propaganda feared that the German public might tune in to British radio in order to hear “lively music” and then end up hearing British news broadcasts. In order to prevent this, Goebbels redesigned German radio to produce comedies and light entertainment. The most popular of these broadcasts was the weekly show Wunschkonzert (Request concert), on which numerous German musicians performed for free. The show inspired the second-most popular film produced in Nazi Germany: Wunschkonzert (1940). Like the radio show on which it was based and named, the film emphasized the idea that soldiers at the front and their loved ones at home could listen to the same songs and thus share the same imaginary space. The promotional material for Wunschkonzert emphasized that the film brings together the German soldiers serving in Europe and the audience at home: “A magical ribbon embraces front and homeland…. The sorrow and joy of the individual, the unknown, the nameless become the sorrow and joy of the entire nation. All hearts beat in the same rhythm of feelings.”
The film’s plot depicts women patiently supporting their men who serve in the German army. The lovers realize that the needs of the nation take precedence over their personal desires, and they are united during the key moment when one recognizes the song the other has requested. Although the film incorporates newsreel footage, its depictions of war are in no way realistic; instead, the war is portrayed as a necessary element of defending German society and culture. In many ways, Die grosse Liebe was a sequel to this film. As in Wunschkonzert, Leander’s songs bring together the home front and the military front. She sings “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” to a room full of German soldiers, and her words about the vicissitudes of love parallel their experiences of the vicissitudes of war, showing that they are united in overcoming any adversities. When Leander sings, “I know one day a miracle will happen,” we understand that she has accepted that she must wait patiently for her lover to return from the front. The film ends with Leander and her fighter pilot lover reunited, watching together as German planes fly east to bomb the Soviet Union.
The argument that Goebbels intended these songs as Durchhaltelieder in 1941, when he approved the script and signed Leander to star in the film, is unconvincing. Germany was at the height of its military power, and German forces had conquered large swaths of the Soviet Union. When Goebbels saw the finished film a month before its premiere, he described it as “trying to incorporate a private story into the larger story of the war, and quite skillfully. Although the film cannot lay claim to high artistic value, it will certainly be a very strong audience seller.” What Goebbels was looking for was a film in which individual desires would be subsumed into the larger war effort. His demand for more optimistic films and songs came later. After the first significant Allied bombardment of German cities in the spring of 1942, Goebbels wrote that “a good mood is a tool of war. Under certain circumstances it is not only of military importance but even decisive for the war,” and in November 1942 he sponsored a competition for the writing of optimistic songs. Following the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels embraced both Durchhaltelieder and Dnrchbaltefilmen with a series of movies running from light entertainment pieces featuring love stories or operettas to more serious historical costume dramas about the need for epic struggles and great sacrifice. That the music and plot of Die grosse Liebe could serve as “getting-through” material was more of a happy accident than Goebbels’s planned intent.
Leander, Jary, and Balz had a very different intent for these songs. In 1974 Leander gave an interview in which she contrasted how she felt about these songs with the goals of the Nazi leadership: “I know one day a miracle will happen … with the war. That’s what we meant. There will be peace again, there will be something to eat again. The people will be able to live normal lives again. That’s what the higher-ups didn’t understand. Instead, they interpreted it this way: I know one day a miracle will happen, we will rule the world. That, however, wasn’t our goal.”
Leander’s claims here about what she intended in 1942 have more than a little air of ex post facto about them. Throughout her time in Nazi-era films, Leander remained a Swedish citizen, and she arranged to have her salary paid to her bank in Sweden. In 1943 Goebbels proposed granting her and her family German citizenship and awarding her the title “state actress,” but she demurred and left Germany after her villa in Dahlem was bombed. Leander faced a great deal of criticism after the war for her participation in the Nazi film industry, so her postwar interpretation is noticeably exculpatory.
Balz too emphasized that the lyrics were capable of having multiple meanings. “One could interpret it the way one wanted,” he said about the lyrics of “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter.” They could refer to “the bombs, how they were not the end of the world for us, or to the evil of the Nazis’ maliciousness.” According to Micaela Jarv, this was also the way her father and Balz intended these songs from the beginning: “Both my father and Bruno Balz were aware that it had to be a ‘getting-through song.’ One can look at the text in either one way or the other—and that was definitely what was intended.” Not all the members of the film crew, however, saw things this way. Wolfgang Preiss, who played a supporting character in the film, disputed the idea in an interview for the documentary film Hitlers Frauen (Hitler’s women), stating that singing “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” in front of soldiers had no propaganda value: “Of course it does, yes, it is quite clear. The world is still needed. OK, good, we have the same opinion. You will still be needed, I will still be needed. So it is quite clear that this is propaganda.”
If the various people involved in creating and promoting these songs had differing understandings of what they meant, what about the German public? Goelibels had intended the film as a way of uniting the home front and the army, and this was the meaning that some filmgoers took away from it. As one former German soldier said: “Everyone wanted to see this film, in Russia or in the area of the front or in the rear home area. It instilled a feeling of common belonging between the front and home.” Other soldiers, however, heard the song the way Leander intended, as expressing the hope for the end of the war. “If one heard or sang the song himself,” Rudolf Hildmann, a German veteran of World War II, said in an interview, “then of course you believed in the miracle with a dreamy look or dreamy eyes, that when the war is over, that when you come home, that nothing has happened. That was the miracle. When you have gone through the war to the bitter end, then it will seem to you a miracle that you came through it. That was the miracle that one wished for and desired to receive.”
Both the promotional materials and media reviews of the film emphasized Leander’s glamour, her nobility and inner beauty, as well as the “unsentimental” depiction of everyday life during wartime, including a scene in a bomb shelter during an attack. But the film’s air raid scene is merely a chance for the newly met lovers to get to know each other; the fact that children were playing games around the lovers underlines the unthreatening atmosphere of the scene, and the only negative consequences of the raid are a few knocked-over bottles. The audience’s reality was, of course, quite different. The British air force fire-bombed Lubeck at the end of March 1942 and launched a massive air attack on Cologne with over a thousand bombers just two weeks before the film’s premiere in June. This was a very different context for the film’s viewers from the one that had been anticipated when the film was conceived, written, and produced.
The reviews of the film promoted Goebbels’s intended message: that Leander’s character learns “through her own inner courage” the hard fact that “as millions of her fellow sisters have before her,” she must remain separated from her beloved as he fights at the front. (For German audiences increasingly feeling the effects of the war, however, including food rationing and Allied bombardment of German cities, these songs later came to be about maintaining morale. It is not surprising that so many Germans came to hear these songs as Durchhaltelieder, since that is how they were written: Balz wrote them as a way of keeping his own hopes up while fearing arrest, imprisonment, or death. Unable to write overtly about his own specific fears and longings as a gay man, Balz was forced to abstract them in such a way that a diverse audience could read these lyrics as referring to their own fears and longings.
The same ambiguity of meaning that allowed for a gay reading of his lyrics later allowed the public to read hope for a successful end to the war into them. This ambiguity even allowed for subversive readings. By 1943 an understanding of these songs as referring not to a separation of lovers but to the hope that Germany would not lose the war had become so widespread that it could be used as the punch line for an anti-Hitler joke. The Sicherheitsdienst reported that the following joke was being widely told throughout Germany: “Zarah Leander was required to go to Hitler’s headquarters, where she must sing to the Fuhrer T know that one day a miracle will happen.'”That German victory now required a miracle was certainly not a reading that Goebbels ever intended.
One context that Goebbels probably never contemplated for this music was in concentration camps, yet here too, these songs were sung and heard. Jorge Semprun was a prisoner in Buchenwald, where he would sometimes hear Leander’s music on Sunday afternoons. “The SS officer in the watchtower must have had a weakness for Zarah Leander’s songs. He put on nothing hut her records,” Semprun wrote in his memoir. Semprun does not specify which songs but described how she sang “of love, as if life were nothing more but a succession of tiny joys, heart-rending memories, feelings that tinkle like crystal.” When Semprun and his friend heard Leander’s music, they would talk about the girlfriends they had had before being sent to the camp. For Semprun and his fellow prisoners, and presumably for the SS guard as well, Leander’s music was nothing more than a reminder of happier times and a momentary escape from the horror and/or dull routine of the camp. The ability’ of so many people to read these lyrics in such different ways points to Balz’s skill as a lyricist; by crafting words capable of multiple interpretations, he was able to convey the emotional experience of the war and Nazi rule with a variety’ of radically different and even contradictory meanings to an extraordinary range of audiences.
Other prisoners were able to hear a lot more in these songs. Gerry Philipp, a young gay Jew’ imprisoned in a concentration camp, remembered how important Leander’s songs were to him and other prisoners: “In the camp, when we prisoners got together, we sang the song ‘Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’ now and then, and we hoped that a miracle would come to pass, that the war would come to an end, and that we would be saved. That soothed us.” It is highly unlikely that Philipp or the other gay concentration camp prisoners were aware that Balz had written these lyrics while being persecuted by the regime for being gay, yet they were still able to “hear” a message that inspired hope and perseverance in the face of terrible suffering.
Conclusion
When audiences saw Zarah Leander standing before German officers singing “Davon geht die Welt nicht unter” or heard her on the radio or record singing “Ich weib, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n,” almost none were aware that the songs were written by a gay man who had been arrested at least once and was persecuted by the Nazi regime. As I have noted, Bruno Balz’s name was omitted from the credits of the film, and his role in writing the texts for these songs was not mentioned in press reports during the war. Yet in a very limited way, Balz’s own experiences as a gay man persecuted by the Nazis were able to shape the public attitude toward the war in its final years, literally’ providing the soundtrack for the German home front. Although he was out of the closet during the Weimar era, Balz had to be far more careful about the language he used in his songs in order to survive in Nazi Germany. He wrote songs about love, lust, and longing that were only made palatable to Nazi censors because they were sung by women such as Zarah Leander. The constructed ambiguity of language that Balz used in those earlier songs played a key role in the two most famous songs from Die grosse Liebe. Depending on the context, they could be interpreted to mean that wives and girlfriends should be willing to endure minor hardships while their men were at the front, or that one should hold on until the war ends, or that one day this evil Nazi regime will pass away, and one had to just try to survive until that happened.
While we have a tendency to view the Nazi period in black and white, with only perpetrators or victims, collaborators or resisters, we would be better served by remembering Primo Levi’s description of the moral “gray zone” experienced by those who lived and tried to survive under Nazism. This moral ambiguity applies not only to the people under Nazi rule but also to the art they created. It is only because these songs were capable of serving Goebbels’s goal of bringing together the home front and the army that Balz was able to use them in the film. At the same time, Balz wrote these lyrics as his own act of personal resistance against the Nazis and to encourage others who were suffering to hold out hope against despair. Balz’s strategy of writing lyrics with a double entendre—a surface level aligned with Nazi values and a hidden level expressing the desires and suffering of a gay man—allowed him to continue to work and live in Nazi Germany. While Balz’s survival strategy was similar to that employed by closeted gay artists elsewhere at the time, the stakes for him were much higher, as they were nothing less than his life. Despite the state’s significant constraints on his agency, Balz was able to write lyrics about his own experiences, and some of his audience succeeded in “decoding” his words.
But even for the majority of Germans who did not pick up on the gay subtext, his own desire for an end to suffering expressed their own desires for a successful end to the war. It was precisely the ambiguity of Balz’s lyrics, with multivalent meanings rooted in his experience as a gay man in Nazi Germany, that allowed his songs to be interpreted in such a way as to create powerful public morale boosters during the final years of the war.