(Almost) everything by and about Zarah Leander’s songwriter Bruno Balz
Everyone knows songs such as ‘Ich brech’ die Herzen der stolzesten Frau’n’, ‘Der Wind hat mit ein Lied erzählt’ and ‘Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’, and the singers who performed them.
Image gallery
Wunder, Wind und Waldemar
Who was Bruno Balz, the man behind these lyrics?
The man who wrote one of the first gay pop songs, penned hundreds of lyrics for UFA films, and continued to produce hits such as ‘Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh’n’ and ‘Mama’ even after 1945?
Enno Kraus sings songs for which Balz wrote the lyrics for Zarah Leander and others, accompanied by Alba Gentili-Tedeschi on the piano, whilst Judith Kessler reveals, from her book *‘Kann denn Liebe Sünde sein? In the Footsteps of Lyricist Bruno Balz’, what’s the truth behind the stories told about him – how Balz managed to write many of the best-known schmaltzy, but also cheeky and ambiguous, pop songs of the 1930s and 1940s, and how the image of a tragic hero emerged, who, as a gay man mistreated by the Nazis, is said to have written his songs under duress.
An evening of songs, vices and legends.
Dates
October 2026
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