Tuesday, July 13, 2021

The time I won a heart by singing a Nazi song


This happened over 50 years ago so perhaps I can risk mentioning it now

I was at the time a member of a folk-music club at which everyone was welcome to get up and sing if they wanted to.  I decided I would like to give it a go.

I was never a good singer so I had very little in the way of repertoire.  But I had been very interested in history since even my pre-teen years and the one big historical event that we were -- and still are -- constantly belaboured with was WWII and the Nazi era.  So I knew a lot about that.  I even had a record of Nazis speeches and songs with explanatory comments

Through playing that record many times, I had come to know a couple of the songs on it by heart.  So it was one of those songs that I decided to sing:  The Horst Wessel Lied, the song of the Nazi Brownshirts. I thought it was a good song musically. It was  bold of me to sing it as it did anger some of the audience

There was however in the audience an attractive little lady singer who had not noticed me at all up to that point.  She thought my singing was crap but was positively impressed by my self confidence in standing up in front of an audience and doing something unpopular.  No woman wants a wimp and  I was obviously in the opposite direction to that. So we were soon in communication -- leading to a rather raunchy relationship.

There is a recording of the song here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT8RPphCtiw

Incidentally, the Horst Wessel Lied does not mention Jews.  It is basically an anti-Red song. I am very philosemitic so I would never have sung any anti-Jewish song.


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