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 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.
Two-Bit Circus. For Freddy, that feeling comes easily. He was 13 when the Red Army advanced on Vienna in 1945. In the confusion, he escaped to Belgium, earned his living shining combat boots for the 82nd Airborne Division and other U.S. units, absorbed a rugged version of colloquial American. Later he joined a two-bit traveling circus, where he led a two-man band, painted spots on garter snakes to turn them into "American rattlesnakes," had the job of poking a senile lion in the rump to make him roar.
The circus held him for only half a year; then his Wanderjahre began for fair. Naples, Tunis, Casablanca, Paris, Rotterdam, Hamburg—he hit them all, playing a guitar and singing the hillbilly songs he had learned from his U.S. Army buddies. Between 1951 and 1953 he rode a Finnish tanker from Odessa to Mexico to the Far East. Once, he remembers, his ship got to the U.S. where he won an amateur-night contest singing Spanish songs he had learned in Mexico. "I sang Mexican songs in the U.S. and hillbilly songs in Mexico," he explains. "No use pushing your luck."
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 mansion to show for it all—which makes it hard to keep the sound of loneliness authentic in his verbeulte Stimme (beat-up voice). Still, says he, "I'll go right on trying to sing natural—and to stay on key."