Sigrid Grajek and Hans-Jürgen Schatz: WHY SHOULDN’T HE BE WITH HER…? – ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF CLAIRE WALDOFF’S DEATH

Born in the Ruhr region, she enjoyed a distinguished career on the cabaret and musical theatre stages of Berlin, was banned from performing under the Nazis, died in Bad Reichenhall and was buried in Stuttgart – and remains unforgotten to this day: Claire Waldoff.

She was laid to rest at the Pragfriedhof cemetery in Stuttgart 70 years ago and has remained as much a part of the public consciousness as almost any other prominent figure from the so-called Golden Twenties.

Whether she’s launching into a chanson about ‘Emil’s indecent desires’, claiming that ‘all of Berlin is mad about my legs’, or raving about her adopted home of Berlin with ‘Our Havel is our Rhine’, by the time she gets to ‘Who’s throwing mud there?’, the whole audience is still singing along to this day. Her cabaret performances were a smash hit. The radio played her songs, which became evergreens. Her record sales reached record heights.

The writer Kurt Tucholsky expressed his enthusiasm for her in his feature articles and became one of her friends; the illustrator and painter Heinrich Zille adored her and roamed ‘his milieu’ with her. She later sang of this companion in Willi Kollo’s ‘Zille-Lied’: ‘As you yourself described it, I am a picture from your pictures’.

In their touching and light-hearted programme of original musical and spoken recordings, the singer and Waldoff specialist Sigrid Grajek and the Berlin actor Hans-Jürgen Schatz (known, amongst other things, from the hit TV series ‘Heimat’, ‘Der Fahnder’ and ‘Salto Postale’), together with pianist Stefanie Rediske, bring Waldoff’s happy Berlin years back to life.