She could have been just as big a star as Manuela on the German beat and pop music market of the 1960s. She had the voice and the musical talent. She was born with it. After all, her great-grandfather was an opera composer. It couldn't have been the choice of songs that made her successful. Well-known musicians such as Peter Maffay, Drafi Deutscher and Michael Holm wrote hits tailored to her. Marion also had no shortage of television appearances. She was a frequent and welcome guest not only on the ZDF Hitparade , but also on other entertainment shows on ARD and ZDF . Connections? In the mid-1970s, Marion was briefly in a relationship with Frank Elstner . This relationship produced a daughter, Masha.
Why Marion did not have a major, long-lasting career despite the best of circumstances will remain a mystery forever. She was born as Marion Litterscheid in August 1943 in Flensburg on the border with Denmark. After graduating from high school, she learned to be a secretary and secretly took singing lessons on the side. Secretly because her father Litterscheid thought singing was a dead-end art: "Any bird can sing, and what does a bird earn anyway?" ( BRAVO 1966 issue twelve )
She made her first major appearance at the Hanover Trade Fair in 1964. She worked at the stand of a tape recorder company in Hall 11 every day from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Her job was to sing a hit song every 15 minutes while shaking the tape recorder being advertised. This was to demonstrate that the device worked without loss even when shaken. The fee she received for this was gigantic for the time: 100 DM per day!
At the end of 1964, Marion took part in a Pepsi-Cola young talent competition and, after 76 evenings, came second against 800 other competitors. Her reward was a 12-day trip to America and a record deal with Polydor . She was allowed to release two singles; the first ( » Love at first sight « ) was written by a certain Joe Menke , father of the later NDW singer Fräulein Menke . The second single was the German version of the Twinkle hit »Terry« (number four in Great Britain).
Both singles flop, Polydor ends the collaboration, Marion moves to Hansa and receives the song "Er ist wieder da" written by Christian Bruhn and Günter Loose from producer Peter Meisel. Manuela was actually supposed to sing the song. Why this didn't happen is not known. The song comes at just the right time. More beat than pop, with a catchy bass line that underlines the individual verses, the song fits perfectly into the hype that beat music has triggered and that has stuck in the ears of enthusiastic young people.
Marion's hit (launched on December 13, 1965) was listed in BRAVO for 18 weeks and reached fifth place as its highest ranking. Together with her next Musicbox entry, "Ich hab' einen guten Freund gewesen," which reached 12th place, Marion was ranked 18th in the list of the most successful artists of the year. In the vote for the most popular singers of the year, Marion received the Bronze OTTO from BRAVO readers for third place behind Wencke Myhre and Manuela.
But then Marion 's career, which had started so brilliantly, was almost over. Over the years, she continued to release songs as Marion Maerz - solo and in various duets - but she was unable to repeat the success of "Er ist wieder da" with over 100,000 units sold.