Thursday would have been her 100th birthday, but you could easily miss the fact.
The Germans love their anniversaries yet the singer and actress Zarah Leander's centenary is being marked only in the most understated way - with a few analytical newspaper features, the re-release of some of her song recordings and films on DVD and a few select cinema showings. There are no tribute concerts at the Friedrichstadt Palast or unveilings of monuments planned. This probably has a lot to do with the ambivalent attitude the Germans have towards their biggest wartime star.
"She has been slandered as a Nazi siren, as well as being steadfastly loved," wrote Manuel Brug in a portrait in Die Welt this week.
From the start she was an unlikely heroine for the Third Reich. Firstly she was not German. She was born Sara Stina Hedberg in Karlstad, Sweden, but her name could have been Jewish and so had to be changed to the more stage-friendly Zarah. Neither did she live up to the blonde haired, blue-eyed Aryan ideal. She once described the colour of her locks as being an "astonishing nuance between beetroot and carrot".
The advantage of that on the screen however, was that "the Swede" could be bedded by Nazi officers - thus in one fell swoop soldiers were portrayed as being manly while the reputation of the good German housewife remained intact.
Cruel though it might sound to those who treasure her legacy, Leander only really made it in Germany at all because others refused to become part of the Nazi propaganda machine. Much to the Nazis' disgust, Marlene Dietrich and the "other Swede" - Greta Garbo - fled to Hollywood. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels made it his personal quest to fill the gap. But replacements were hard to find.
The singer Sybille Schmitz was a candidate but was ruled out for being too much of a depressive. The half-English Lilian Harvey was not German enough and anyway, politically unreliable. And the Hungarian Marika Rökk was not thought to be on enough of a par with the goddesses that Hollywood had to offer its public. So Zarah got the job.
She was arguably one of the first gay icons of the screen - thanks to her vamp-like qualities, a deep voice and heavy make-up, her tendency to overdo the emotions and her dramatic wardrobe and not least her penchant for fancy hats. Indeed, she remains an icon for gays even today with an exhibition dedicated to her in the gay museum in Berlin.
And so until 1943, she sang the German public through the war, with numbers such as "Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh'n" (I know a miracle is going to happen), or "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" (the world isn't going to end) - from the 1942 propaganda film The Great Love - in its day the biggest-grossing film ever, which was seen by 28 million people. They became known as the "Durchhaltelieder" or "staying-power songs" - ballads to get the German burgers through the war. (A small footnote: her songs were recorded in the Hansa studios near Potsdamer Platz where David Bowie recorded "Heroes").
It was a row with Goebbels - over money and citizenship (he was desperate for her to become German) which finally made her decide to leave. The money she had earned enabled her to buy a huge property in Sweden - the Lönö estate, which included 22 islands and a 24-room house. Such a hideaway was probably just as well, as she didn't receive much of a homecoming.
Of course, the Nazis sought to spin the story of her departure as best they could. "Now we're spared from having to see any more of her films," the Political Service of the SS and Police commented. "And German woman can breathe once again".
