Forever [antikvár]

Berlin, West Germany, 1950world had never seen anything like it. Kir^Ly From across the sundered nation and beyond, the hordes converged upon the city to pay their last respects to the woman they had loved. By bicycle and train and car and boat they came; a privileged few even arrived at Tempelhof Airport by plane. Many had walked for days, carrying their children on their shoulders. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor, priests and sinners they came.Lili Schneider was dead. She would sing no more.She lay in state at Schloss Bellevue like a queen, in a closed, curvaceous black coffin mounted with ormolu. The viewing line stretched around the Tiergarten for nearly three kilometers, and for four days it never grew shorter.They were drab mourners in that bleak postwar year, but even in death Lili Schneider infused the people with color and filled their hearts with joy. Radios played nothing but her acclaimed recordings of Wagner and Smetana and Beethoven and Schubert. Millions wept from grief, and millions more at the sheer beauty of that matchless voice.And so they came:Mothers clutching their hungry babies . . .Grandmothers who had lost everyone in the war, for whom Lili's songs brought the ghosts momentarily back to life . . .Soldiers back from distant fronts, who had been given courage and kept homesickness at bay listening to her recordings . . .Widows whose husbands, in happier times, had once taken them to see Lili in operas and operettas . . .And now young frauleins holding hands with their GI sweethearts.Lili Schneider had been an enchantress. A dream-weaver. A siren. She had cast her spell over an entire nation, and even death itself could not break it.Lili with the face of an angel. Lili with the voice of a nightingale. Lili with the body of a whore.Men had worshipped her, women had adored her. She had ruled the stages of the greatest opera houses in Europenot to mention the bedrooms of the most powerful men of her day.She belonged to Germany. And now, after an absence of five years.