The internet is terrible but also our knowledge repository and our legacy: "Herr Lehmann, Herr Lehmann, " part 4

This is the fourth and last post in a series centered around the swing-era hit "Herr Lehmann, Herr Lehmann," recorded in 1931 by British bandleader Jack Hylton. If you'd like to see the rest of this little series, start HERE.

The German-language song was a hit in Europe and was recorded in Berlin, around the time of the imaginary Kit-Kat Club invented for the Broadway hit "Cabaret." (That musical of course became a film starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey.)

Because there's a revival of everything that was ever on Broadway, there's been a new version of "Cabaret."  In the video clip below, the star of that production, Amy Lennox, sings the title song. 

 

 

As I began looking online for more information about "Herr Lehamnn, Herr Lehmann," I found that this surname is common and used a lot in German literature and song. I know little about German culture; I don't know if Lehmann is like Smith or Jones. Or perhaps it has a connotation? In a 1930s American film, Mr. Perkins would be a stern boss, while in a 19th century British novel, Mr Spritely would be a comic character. Maybe there's a reason the name Lehmann comes up so often, but if so, I don't know what it is. 

I'm the kind of person who just keeps researching, so over a couples of weeks' time, I continued to type new search terms into the little box and hit Enter. Wondering if Herr Lehmann's name came from a book, I did find a novel with is name as the title, but it was written decades after the song was recording. A modern German musician and writer named Sven Regener, the internet old me, wrote a novel called Herr Lehmann (just once this time), which was made into a film.

The English language of the novel, said Google, was titled Berlin Blues. 

 

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I checked the network of linked libraries in my state, and bingo! One of the college libraries had a copy of Berlin Blues I could borrow. 

 "Well, Google was wrong," thought I, when I went to the library desk to collect my reserved copy, as the book title was in English but the text was in German. But I was the one who was wrong, because when I looked more carefully at the cover, I saw that this book was by another author.

 

I came home to figure out which author I was really looking for, and stumbled into a third book by another writer, with the same title, this time with "The" at the beginning. 

 

 

This book title confusion was a bit easier to understand than the "Herr Lehmann" musical thing, because there's a song called "Berlin Blues."  Not surprising that authors would think of using it as a book title. Here's a version by the Climax Blues Band.

I confess that after so much Googling, the internet started making me a little crazy. My daughter is a fan of the band The Violent Femmes, so I kept noticing that when I searched the web for "Herr Lehmann," I would get a reference to the Violent Femmes' song "Blister in the Sun."

This, it turned out, was because the highly recognizable tune is on the soundtrack of the film version of Berlin Blues, aka Herr Lehmann, by Sven Regener.

While trying -- unsuccessfully -- to find an English-language trailer for "Herr Lehmann," uI bumped into an entirely different movie called "Herr Lehmann Goes Around the World," a documentary about tow German guys who drive around the planet in a four-wheeler, 

 

 So this is where buckwheat, the stuff they make pancakes out of, comes into the picture. A few years ago, buckwheat, as a food crop, really interested me. I began trying to find out about it via the internet. I ran into two problems over and over: 

1. There are two kinds of buckwheat that are really different from each other, and almost no one posting anything seemed to know that, or if they did, they didn't see why they should say which kind they were talking about.  2. Lazy people grabbed wrong information over and over without verifying it, and so I'd find article after article in which someone had plagiarized incorrect sources. 

I wish I could say that I can't understand why these mistakes happen, but sadly I totally get it. In doing this series of posts, I needed to go back at one point to put the correct video in, I'd figured out -- eventually -- that were was one 78 rpm record on YouTube called "Herr Lehmann, Herr Lehmann" and another one called just "Herr Lehmann" and then some other words in German. Things were confusing, and by the time I'd written the post with the wrong thing included in it, was I both tired and starting to get a little lazy?  You bet.

To finish this series, here's something funny I never would have known about except for the internet. The flip side to the 45 rpm version of "Herr Lehmmnn, Herr Lehmann" is a song with a title which means in English "My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo." The lyrics are about how Mr. and Mrs. Gorilla find marriage difficult because their "villa" at the zoo offers no privacy.

 

 
The best-known version of "Mein Gorilla" was by comic singer Hans Albans, who looks, in one of these slideshow images, like Burgess Meredith costumed as The Penguin.

And hey, also courtesy of the internet, here's a syncopated version of "Mein Gorilla" It features tubas making gorilla sounds while other instruments make noises like various other zoo animals.

Next week: A shift in schedule! There's been a bit of shuffle at the Consortium of Seven blog, and a week from today, weekly installments of my audio suspense story "Freedom Island" will begin on Tuesdays. My regular blog entries will now alternate with the book reviews by Elleanore Vance, on Wednesdays.