Zarah Leander - Return To Sweden

Return To Sweden

Her last film in Nazi Germany premiered on 3 March 1943. Her villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Grunewald was hit in an air raid, and the increasingly desperate Nazis pressured her to apply for German citizenship. At this point she decided to break her contract with Ufa, leave Germany, and retreat to Sweden, where she had bought a mansion at Lönö, not far from Stockholm.

After the Wehrmacht's defeat in the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad, public opinion in Sweden (the government of which remained officially neutral throughout the war, though ideologically aligned with the Allies, but also supplying the Nazis with strategic war materials), was more free to display outward hostility toward the Nazis, especially as news of the Holocaust became widespread (public opinion was mainly anti-Nazi from the start, but was censored in the press by the government, to avoid severe repercussions from Germany). Leander had been far too extensively associated with Nazi propaganda, and as a result was shunned. Gradually she managed to land engagements on the Swedish stage. After the war she did eventually return to tour Germany and Austria, giving concerts, making new records and acting in musicals. Her comeback found an eager audience among pre-war generations who had never forgotten her. She appeared in a number of films and television shows, but she would never regain the popularity she had enjoyed before and into the first years of World War II. In 1981, after having retired from show business, she died in Stockholm of a stroke.

After the war, Zarah Leander was often questioned about her years in Nazi Germany. Though she would willingly talk about her past, she stubbornly rejected allegations of her having had sympathy for the Nazi regime. She claimed that her position as a German film actress merely had been that of an entertainer working to please an enthusiastic audience in a difficult time. She repeatedly described herself as a political idiot.

Zarah Leander continued to be very popular in Germany for many decades after WWII. She was interviewed several times in German television until she died.

In 1987 two Swedish musicals were written about Zarah Leander.

In 2003 a bronze statue was placed in Zarah Leander's home town Karlstad, by the Opera house of Värmland where she first began her career. After many years of discussions, the town government accepted this statue on behalf of the first Swedish local Zarah Leander Society. A Zarah Leander museum is open near her mansion outside Norrköping. Every year a scholarship is given to a creative artist in Zarah's tradition. The performer Mattias Enn received the prize in 2010, the female impersonator Jörgen Mulligan in 2009 and Zarah's friend and creator of the museum Brigitte Pettersson in 2008.