Claire Waldoff - Es gibt nur ein Berlin

.From the mid-20s, Claire Waldoff celebrated her greatest successes, performed one-woman shows in the two largest Berlin Varietés, the Scala and the Wintergarten, and on all other renowned stages in Germany. The socially active artists became popular all over Germany through radio and disk recordings with record circulations. The coming into power of the Nazi regime meant a significant turning-point for Waldoff, however, not an abrupt ending of her career. Her living and working conditions in the Third Reich are surrounded by mystery.

Actually, the singer was subjected to a “political stage ban“ at the beginning of 1933 because she participated in events of the communist Red Aid. However, she returned to the stage after having presented her “Aryan proof“ and having joined Goebbel’s Reich’s culture chamber. The audience still loved her despite - or just because - her hallmarks - neck tie, shirt, and “bronze-red crackling page-boy cut" and sometimes “smoking and swearing like a dustman“ as declared her friend Heinrich Zille - she did not meet the type of women propagandised by the regime. Her cohabitation with Olga von Roeder also did not comply with the “popular sentiment“ of the Nazis. Her songs, to the extent known, also lacked anything nationalist and racist.

“I danced on the brink but nobody dared to throw me in", she states in her autobiography. Sometimes, however, much less frequent, she also performed in other German cities and in Berlin she amused her audience together with the dancer Lene Ludwig whom she got to know in the mid-30s. Lene Ludwigs performed parodist dances with masks of popular personalities, among them also Claire. Lene Ludwig told in 1992: ”This was a double success“. First, Claire came on stage with her songs and then I with the mask. The audience got wild and clapped. Claire was no beauty in the common sense, but she was amusing, she was full of ideas, and when she came on stage, she had an enormous charisma.“

There is proof of Claire Waldoff still performing at the beginning of 1943; in January 1942 even in Paris which had been occupied for one and a half year at that time. This served to spread high spirits among the soldiers. While Waldoff sang before the armed forces, Marlene Dietrich, her former friend and the "love of her life“, who turned her back on Nazi Germany and sang before American soldiers, soon was to move into the liberated Paris together with the allied forces..Arrests and stage bans are again and again implied.

Claire Waldoff - Es gibt nur ein Berlin (192 kbps)