Bert Kaempfert, who composed the melody, recorded it as an instrumental, in 1959 and later in 1962, under the title "Candlelight Cafe".
The song gained international fame in 1963 when singer Wayne Newton recorded an American version, with English lyrics by Milt Gabler.
It has been featured in many television commercials and motion pictures, such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Meet the Parents, Matchstick Men, Vegas Vacation, Fools Rush In as well as the French-American comedy Crime Spree.
In 2015 it was used in a television commercial for Bank of America, and in 2017 in a trailer for the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
In the song, Newton pronounces the words as "dunke shane", rather than "danke schön", and it has been postulated that this is a regional accent variation that may have been prevalent in communities of German immigrants to the USA.