Happy birthday to the Ur-Berlinerin, the epitome of the Berliner Schnauze1, the woman who made the world a wittier and better place: born on October 21, 1884 in - no, not Berlin - in Gelsenkirchen: Clara Wortmann!
If your Berlin-fan brain is frantically searching through its files, trying to locate the Clara Wortmann name-card - here’s a hint: by the time the girl from the Province of Westphalia (despite being located in the Ruhr Area, for a long time part of Prussia) conquered Berlin cabaret stages, she became the legendary Claire Waldoff.
In Berlin, where she arrived in 1906 after small acting stints in Breslau (Wrocław), Kattowitz (Katowice) and Bad Pyrmont, Waldoff evolved into the Berlin chanteuse and cabaret entertainer par excellence. Thanks to her masterful use of (acquired!) Berlinerisch dialect as well as the unique singing style and voice, she became a living cabaret legend. Even Kurt Tucholsky wrote songs for her. Lyrics, obviously - a man can have only as many talents, even if he has five different names2.
Songs performed by Waldoff - most of them in the style of a Berlin Gassenhauer (lit. a lane stroller), popular tunes - were often set to the music by some of the best Berlin composers of the time: Walter Kollo or Friedrich Hollaender (better known as the author of Marlene Dietrich’s first big hit, Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt (English title: “Falling in Love Again”) from her breakthrough film “Der Blaue Angel”.
Speaking of Dietrich: the future über-diva spent her early years on Berlin stages with Claire Waldoff as the queen of the show.
One of Waldoff‘s most famous songs was the 1913 tune “Hermann heeßt er” (They call him Hermann) by Ludwig Mendelssohn: in the 1930s someone developed its lyrics by adding four extra lines - lines which unmistakably referred to the then biggest Hermann in town, Hermann Göring.
The extra lines in the famous “Hermann heeßt er!” song went as follows: »Rechts Lametta*, links Lametta / Und der Bauch wird imma fetta / Und in Preußen ist er Meester / Hermann heeßt er!« 3
Unsurprisingly, in 1933 Claire Waldoff began to pay the price of not taking the brittle egos of the new rulers’ seriously enough. First, she was banned from producing records. The next blow soon followed on Goebbels’s (a man famously unable or unwilling to understand wit and/or irony) order: Claire Waldoff could no longer perform at the “Scala”.
But it wasn’t so much Waldoff’s choice of topics that thwarted her career under the Nazis as her overall style. And her open relationship with Olga von Roeder, with whom she held a lively and popular political and cultural salon.
Eventually Claire and Olga left Berlin and settled in the south of Germany. Klara Wortmann aka Claire Waldoff died there in 1957. Olga followed her six years later.
In Berlin Claire Waldoff is an icon until today. A small and rather insignificant street in Berlin-Mitte, just off Friedrichstraße close to Berlin’s greatest revue-theatre, Friedrichstadtpalast, was named in her honour. The fact that it is small and insignificant is not born out of lack of respect: the street’s fate was not unlike that of the artist. Construction plans were different but the world had changed and these had to be abandoned. However, a memorial plaque on the house in Regensburger Straße 33 in Berlin-Schöneberg honours Waldoff, as does another rather unimpressive little street in Berlin-Moabit, Claire-Waldoff-Promenade
To round off today’s Berlin Calendar page, a quote from - whom else? - Tucholsky: “Pseudonyms are like little people; it’s risky to invent them, to pretend that you are someone else, to take on a new name - names have a life of their own.” Claire Waldoff’s most certainly did.
Berliner Schnauze - literally, “Berlin snout” it stands for the kind smart-Alec’y, tongue-in-cheek, direct manner of speaking traditionally to be found in born-and-bred Berliners.
Kurt Tucholsky published under the following noms de plume: Peter Panter, Kaspar Hauser, Theobald Tiger, Ignatz Wrobel. Those five pseudonyms inspired Tucholsky in 1928 to produce a book of some of his collected works and call it “Mit 5 PS” - a title which can be read as “five pseudonyms” or as “five kilometres per hour”.
Lametta = “gongs” (medals): “Gongs on the right, Gongs on the left / And the belly’s getting fatter and fatter / And in Prussia he’s the master / His name is Hermann”; the whole is sang in Berlinerisch.
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Love this piece, especially the parts about Tucholsky and his pseudonyms, as well as the reference to Goering, whom people called "der Dicke" -- the fat one.
"The biggest Hermann in town," lol.