It was curious. When music signaled the end of Helmut Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom, it seemed to me that I had known the tune all my life. Yet, I had never seen the 1944 German film before watching it on DVD a month ago.
In the movie, a handsome sailor, who has loitered too long in Hamburg’s waterfront brothels, resolves that he will return to the sea. After a night of drinking, the sailor and two buddies stagger out onto the infamous Reeperbahn in the city’s red light district. The hero played by German matinee idol, Hans Albers, has an accordion strapped across his chest. The scene is suffused in the warm, amber tones of Hitlerzeit Agfacolor, the German equivalent to Hollywood’s technicolor in film’s like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. In the buttery light of the whorehouse lamplight, the men move slowly at first, a bit hesitantly, but, then, the hero lifts the sagging squeeze-box in his arms and begins to play a jaunty melody. The song inspires the protagonist’s comrades and they lift their chins and square their shoulders and, as the melody continues, they march toward the ship waiting for them in the harbor. The tune has inspired them, given them fresh courage, and, in the movie’s last shot, we see the hero, ennobled on a towering sailing ship. He is piloting the vessel and a great wheel, as large as the wheels on a hay wain or covered wagon, is pressed against his breast as he steers the ship.
Critics say that Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom, known in Germany as Die Grosse Freiheit # 7 (“Great Freedom #7" – it’s a street address), is a movie uncontaminated by the political poison of the Nazi era. The film is an accomplished melodrama about a sailor becalmed in Hamburg’s brothels. The sailor, Hannes Kroeger (Hans Albers) is entrusted with the guardianship of a beautiful young woman seduced and, then, abandoned by his dying reprobate brother. Kroeger brings the girl, shunned by the villagers in the small hamlet where she lives, to Hamburg, paying for her room in a boarding house in St. Pauli, near the brothel district where the hero performs nightly as a “singing sailor” in cabaret. Kroeger has a frowsy, middle-aged whore for his girlfriend. He’s middle-aged as well, probably in his mid-forties. Of course, Kroeger falls in love with the girl, misunderstands some remarks that she has made, and, enthusiastically, plans a life together with her. But, in fact, the girl loves another and, at the end of the movie, she rejects Kroeger’s proposal, sending him into an enraged drinking binge. The scene involving the memorable melody occurs in the penultimate shot of the film as Kroeger returns to his true calling as a seaman.
Port of Freedom is a brilliantly written and very precisely made film. It’s a bit like a German version of Casablanca without the spies, but ending, like the American picture, with an affirmation of male friendship in the face of romantic tribulation. Like Casablanca, Kaeutner’s film involves some famous musical numbers, particularly an indelible version of “La Paloma” sung by Albers. Port of Freedom is decidedly adult with frank dialogue and several risque sequences – German pictures of that era were considerably more candid than their American counterparts since Nazi cinema was not afflicted by the Hays Code. Indeed, in some respects, the brothel and cabaret sequences have a decadent Weimar era flavor and parts of the movie seem to anticipate similar pictures that Rainer Werner Fassbinder would direct thirty years later. Although the movie was made under difficult circumstances, there’s little trace of the chaos of bombings and mass murder engulfing Germany at the time of the film’s production. (Location shooting in Hamburg became impossible when the city was fire-bombed resulting in about 35,000 casualties due to the air raids in the summer of 1943. Production was transferred to Berlin but halted there as well due to aerial attacks. The movie was finally completed at the Barradanov Studios in Prague – it wasn’t shown in Germany during the war because of censor’s concerns about its brothel milieu and because there were ultimately no movie theaters in which to project the film.) Some film historians remark that Port of Freedom is apolitical, imagining Hamburg as exempt from the ferocity of the war raging in Europe. As we shall see, this is untrue.
The accordion melody at the end of the movie triggered an Ohrwurm in my imagination. I recalled the song from an American version, but couldn’t put words or an artist to it. Nonetheless, I seemed to hear in my mind’s ear lyrics about having a broken heart, indeed, something to the effect of an admonition by the singer “not to break my heart.” But words that I summoned to mind didn’t exactly fit the cadences of the melody and I was puzzled by the fact that I knew the music, but couldn’t recall where or when I had heard it.
In 1960 or 1961, my family moved from New Jersey to Minnesota. We lived in New Brighton, a suburb to St. Paul and my father worked as an Operations Analyst for a defense contractor, Honeywell. My father was close to his eldest sister, Rosemary, an English teacher in St. Peter about 80 miles to the southwest of Minneapolis. (When an unexpected pregnancy forced the marriage of my parents, high school sweethearts from a tiny town in central Nebraska, Rosemary and her husband helped the newly weds, found my father summer work at a State Park in the panhandle of that state, and, generally, acted as benefactors to the couple.) Every other weekend, my parents drove down to St. Peter where we visited Aunt Rose in her apartment on the ground floor of a dormitory at Gustavus Adolphus College. Rose’s husband, Howard Mickelson was the Dean of Men on campus; my grandmother, Helen Beckmann lived with my Aunt and was also employed by the college, a prestigious and expensive Lutheran school – she worked as a House Mother in one of the dormitories for women on campus. I don’t know exactly what my parents did during these visits. I recall that we usually arrived in time for Sunday dinner, the big meal served at noon after Church, and, usually involving mashed potatoes with gravy, pot roast, and jello. In the afternoon, I think my father watched football games or baseball depending upon the season with “Mick” Mickelson. The kids were set free to walk down the big hill from the college perched overlooking the river valley to St. Peter’s Main Street. There was a movie theater that showed matinees in the early afternoon and we often went to the show.
The theater was jammed with kids and so loud that it was hard to hear the dialogue on-screen. Grade-school children ran back and forth in the theater and teased one another and I don’t recall any adults supervising the chaos. Ordinarily, the show began with a cartoon and, then, a serial. The serials were either set in the West or outer space. In the outer space serials, people wore ridiculous costumes with turtle-neck collars and marched around to theremin music on cardboard sets; sometimes, flying discs wobbling on wires that were supposed to be invisible moved across painted backdrops of stars and spiral galaxies. The serials were old and badly frayed and, sometimes, the pictures were scuffed to the point of being almost invisible. The Westerns showed men in ten-gallon hats menacing one another on stages that were supposed to represent saloons or pioneer cabins. In between confrontations, stock footage of posses racing across the plains were intercut into the action. The overwhelming impression created by these serial films was one of decay; even, today I recall these films as being so dusty that the images were filling up, it seemed, with fine grit and silt and were abrasive to the eye.
The main feature was usually an Elvis Presley movie. These pictures produced in me an aversion to Elvis Presley that lasted until I was about forty years old. In Presley’s movies of this era, the singer plays a hillbilly with courtly southern manners who is always getting into fist fights. He woos an ingenue, usually a would-be sex symbol (I think Ann-Margaret is featured in one of his movies), and there is generally a burly rival for the girl’s affection. Predictably, Presley ends up with the girl by the end of the movie. Along the way, there are usually half-dozen songs performed by the singer. The songs are like the fist fights or rodeo scenes or race car sequences: they are interpolated into the romance plot as digressions. As a little kid, I thought these movies were detestable – I’m not sure as to reason for my animus; my father was a Dixieland jazz fan and disapproved of Elvis Presley although he was, more or less, a contemporary with the singer, and I think some element of father’s distaste colored my attitude toward these movies. But, objectively, the pictures are, indeed, pretty bad.
After the movie, we would walk back up the hill to the apartment in the dorm. Sometimes, local kids would harass us and, on a couple of occasions, I recall that we got beat up. The terrace in front of the dormitory was also perilous. Sometimes, the college kids drunk in their dorm rooms would pitch beer bottles at us, dropping them down from their high-rise rooms. It was all pretty scary and, I think, the contrast between Elvis’ heroic fisticuffs and our cowardly escapes from the local bullies also affected my experience of the afternoon matinees in St. Peter.
In those days, first-run movies reached St. Peter about a year after they had been released in New York or Hollywood. Elvis Presley’s G. I Blues was shot in April 1960 and released in November of that year. The film probably played in St. Peter in the Fall of 1961 or, even, later – perhaps the Summer of ‘62. I suspect that I saw the movie in a rambunctious mob of children and teenagers at the theater on Main Street. I don’t specifically remember the movie. All of the pictures starring Elvis in those days were, more or less, interchangeable. I have seen parts of G.I. Blues in the last decade, at the time that my daughter was briefly obsessed with Elvis and so collected all of his movies. G. I. Blues is weirdly meta-textual. A handsome soldier, Tulsa, is stationed at an American military base near Frankfurt. Tulsa (Presley) has heard a song on the radio called “Blue Suede Shoes” performed by an artist named “Elvis Presley”. Inspired by the music, and Presley’s success, Tulsa schemes to raise money to open a night-club, a business plan he hopes to implement after his discharge from the military. At the time the movie was made, Elvis Presley was, indeed, enlisted in the army and had been stationed in Germany. (He was nearing the end of his two-year stint when the Department of Defense cooperated in the film’s production – the movie was deemed good for recruitment.) In the picture, Tulsa is competing with a buddy, betting that he can seduce the icy virgin, Lily (Juliette Prowse) before his comrade. Of course, Tulsa falls in love with Lily and a romance ensues. Vintage advertising for the film proclaims that it features “ten new songs” performed by its star. One of those songs is a jaunty tune called “Wooden Heart”.
In the picture, Tulsa and Lily embark on a river cruise identified as the Duesseldorf - Cologne line. The movie is shot in technicolor and simulates Germany with extensive, and unconvincing, rear-projection – high bluffs with ruined castles, barges plying the mighty Rhine. On the river-cruiser, Lily points out grafitti carved into a wooden table, a heart enclosing the words “Fritz liebt Ema”. Lily and Tulsa discuss the meaning of the word “lieben” and the G.I. says that “it’s first word GIs learn here – “ich liebe Sauerkraut.” Lily says that she’s not “sauerkraut.” Tulsa tells her that she has many nicknames, including “cold potato” and “the original fish eye.” Lily says that she’ll have to accept those epithets as compliments.
Juliet Prowse who plays Lily was primarily famous for her gams – “the best legs since Betty Grable.” She’s a bit homely in the film, apple-cheeked with squinty eyes and a perpetually forced smile, speaking with a fake German accent. (In fact, she was a Brit, born in Bombay and raised in South Africa.) In G.I Blues, her appeal is hampered by the role – she’s forced to play the wholesome girl next door. In fact, she was sexually provocative in other parts: in Can-Can, featuring her famous legs, she offended Nikita Krushchev when he visited the set by performing a suggestive dance for the Soviet premiere. At that time, she was having an affair with Frank Sinatra. She was sleeping with Elvis during the production of G.I. Blues but the affair was concealed – already Presley was a victim of his fame and unable to leave his hotel room without being swarmed by fans; the starlet was insulted that they had to hide in his suite. (Prowse was later a fixture on TV; she was badly mauled twice by a leopard and her ear had to be reattached by plastic surgeons – the gig with the cat was some kind of publicity stunt that went badly awry. She died at 59 of pancreatic cancer.)
After disembarking from the river cruise, Tulsa and Lily attend a puppet show. Again the “meta” self-reflexive aspects of the script are on display: the puppets are an American G.I. courting a German Maedchen. When the puppet master tries to play a record on a phonograph, the device fails – it’s “kaputt” as the old man tells Tulsa. The hero has heard enough of the song before the phonograph’s failure to be able to improvise lyrics on the tune. Tulsa enters the puppet theater and performs “Wooden Heart” serenading the marionette of the German Jungfer. The words to the refrain always end with “ ‘Cause I don’t have a wooden heart...,” that is, “If you say goodbye / Maybe I would cry / ‘Cause I don’t have a wooden heart.” After singing a couple stanzas to the puppet in English, Tulsa, then, sings in German, repeating the words “Muss i denn, muss i denn” with other lyrics as the children in audience sing along. The girl’s puppet-father appears at the end of the song and bops Tulsa on the head with a toy cane. The spectacle of Elvis Presley singing a love song to a dirndl-clad puppet (the doll has twin pony-tails like “Wendy”, the inspiration for the burger franchise) is dispiriting. Elvis is pretty as a picture with unbelievable smooth and white skin (he has a better and softer complexion than Juliet Prowse), but the situation is humiliating for the King of Rock and Roll. Nonetheless, G.I. Blues was successful at the box-office – the 14th highest grossing picture in the year of its release – the song “Wooden Heart” was released as both a single and on the LP featuring music from the movie. On the single and LP, the song is credited to a number of writers and said to be arranged by Bert Kaempfert, a prominent German pop composer and bandleader in the late fifties and early sixties.
Of course, “Wooden Heart” is the tune that bored its way into my ear after I heard the melody in Port of Freedom. The song is called Muss i denn in Swabian German, although it has a more descriptive formal name: Abscheid, that is, “Departure.” In its present form, the melody was first published in 1827 in an arrangement by Friedrich Silcher. In the sheet music, the song is set for four male voices with piano accompaniment. Silcher said that the tune originated in Wurttemburg and was very old. (Silcher was prominent collector of German folk songs and arranged many of them – he is most famous for his setting of Heinrich Heine’s ballad “Die Lorelei”, and, also, well-known for the plaintive war song “Ich hatte ein’ Kameraden” – “I had a comrade” or “The Good Comrade,” a military lament for a fallen soldier frequently played at German armed services funerals.) The lyrics of Muss i denn involve an apprentice leaving his sweetheart for his mandatory Wanderjahr – that is, the apprentice setting out to practice his trade for other masters in other parts of the country so as to demonstrate his proficiency as an artisan. The Wanderjahr was an important aspect of German vocational training in the medieval and early modern eras and the song represents an apprentice bidding farewell to his girlfriend. The apprentice promises to return and marry his sweetheart; he tells her that he will resist the temptations of other women and that she should wait for him to return when “the grapes are ripe for cutting:” Muss i denn, muss i denn / Zum Staedele heraus, zum Staedele heraus/ Und du, mein Schatz, bleib hier (Must I now, must I now/ To the village then, to the village, then / And you, my dear, stay here...” – some translations are more prosaic and vernacular: Muss i denn becomes “Gotta go.’)
Helmut Kaeutner’s Port of Freedom is said to be uncontaminated with militarism. This is almost true. But, in context, the folk song Muss i denn would have carried some martial implications. The song was well-known as a capstan-shanty, that is, a work song frequently heard in the German merchant marine. The idea of the apprentice setting out on his year-long sabbatical Wanderjahre is cognate with the notion of a sailor leaving his girlfriend to return to the sea – the context in Port of Freedom. The song was also played as a quick-step march in the Imperial German navy. As the sailors in Port of Freedom take heart at the thought of returning to the sea, they increase their pace and, in fact, end up marching toward their ship. Furthermore, there are obvious parallels with military service in general. The notion of duty is encoded in the song in the repeated words Muss i denn – that is “I must now” depart for war.
The military significance of the tune is confirmed by Marlene Dietrich’s version of Muss i denn appearing as a B-side on the singer’s recording of “Lili Marlene”. “Lili Marlene” is another departure or “Abscheid” song, much more famous than Muss i denn. The song, based on a poem by Hans Leip (set by Norbert Schultze), portrays a young soldier, conscripted into the army, bidding farewell to his sweetheart, probably a prostitute, who is waiting for him under a street lamp near the barracks. The song was extremely popular with both German and Allied soldiers and, often, performed by Dietrich during her USO tours during the Second World War. Both “Lili Marlene” and Muss i denn represent men renouncing (or, at least, deferring) love in favor of service. Elvis is in uniform in G. I Blues when he sings “Wooden Heart”. In context, a German audience in 1944 would have interpreted the song Muss i denn as a summons to return to the Front. Love is all well and good in peace-time, but during war, we must be made of sterner stuff. The history of humanity would be different if young men renounced war to pursue sex. But, for some inexplicable reason, duty is accorded more value than love. And, so, it has always been.
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