Rising over the convivial babel of West German beer halls, the tune is pure Tin Pan Alley. But Sailor Freddy Quinn's plunking baritone puts something purely Teutonic into the German lyrics ("Brennend heisser Wüstensand, fern, so fern das HeimatlandBurning 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...
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