a love song to a person, a love song to a country, a love song to all that is swept up in the phrase “way of life”

Thanks for that line — an evocative way of putting it.

This is of course also what the Nazis claimed to be fighting for in their own propaganda, films, and music.

The Wehrmacht, at least, kept up traditional pre-Nazi — or at least period but non-Nazi — marching songs, as well, many of which were about the natural wonders of Germany, its girls in particular. Or which combined girls and nature as metaphors for one another.

Some prominent such songs were called:

“Erika”, or “Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein” (“On the Heath a Little Flower Blooms”) — its composer also did a 1941 song on the subject of the edelweiss, and it too was about both natural beauty and a girl left behind.

“Lore” (sometimes anglicised as “Laura”) aka “Im wald, im grunen wald” — a ballad combining love of the German forest with a paean to the forester’s daughter, and 18-year-old German girls in general

“Dark brown is the hazelnut” — an early modern folk song about a poor peasant girl.

“Beautiful bloom the wild roses” (“Schohn blumen die heckenrosen”, more or less)

There are a few others, like “Heidemarie” and “Wenn wir marschieren”, but I’m not counting those since they actually mention soldiers going off to war. The aforementioned don’t even go that far.

Apropos of nothing, I suppose, except that in writing “Edelweiss”, R & H tapped into a deep vein of central European or even explicitly German romanticism. It is one of the most beautiful and timeless pieces to come out of postwar American musicals.

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