Word: heimweh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Quinn's plunking baritone puts something purely Teutonic into the German lyrics ("Brennend heisser Wüstensand, fern, so fern das Heimatland-Burning hot desert sand, far, so far, the homeland"). That well-forgotten U.S. ballad, Memories Are Made of This, beats out of the German jukeboxes as Heimweh (homesickness), and the manufactured nostalgia seems violently contagious. In three years, Freddy's Heimweh has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. It is the alltime European pop-record champ...
...When Heimweh first appeared, a Munich disk jockey labeled it the "most horrible Schnulze [sentimental trash] of the year" and broke the record over his microphone. But the song caught on quickly, largely because many other German singers working the Wanderlust beat have never been farther from home than the casino at Travemünde. Freddy managed to sing as if he really knew what it meant to be a lonely traveler...
People's Choice. By the time he got back to Germany in 1953, Manfred Petz had changed his name to Freddy Quinn. He began to play nightclubs and pick up TV and radio spots, then he recorded Heimweh. "The people," says he, "discovered me." Freddy has already made another record. Heimatlos (Homeless), which has hit the 1,000,000 mark, has still another, Die Gitarre und das Meer (The Guitar and the Sea), that is climbing fast and was released in the U.S. last week. He has three hit movies behind him and a turn-of-the-century Hamburg...