Sigrid Grajek & Hans-Jürgen Schatz (am Piano: Stefanie Rediske)

Sigrid Grajek and Hans-Jürgen Schatz take a stroll through the 1920s with Claire Waldoff.

Born in the Ruhr region, she enjoyed a distinguished career on the cabaret and musical theater stages in Berlin; she 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 70 years ago at the Pragfriedhof cemetery in Stuttgart and has remained as present in the public consciousness as hardly any other prominent figure from the so-called Golden Twenties.
Whether she’s belting out a chanson against “Emil’s indecent desires,” claiming that “All of Berlin is crazy 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 entire audience still sings along to this day. Her cabaret performances were a smash hit. The radio played her songs, which became evergreens. Her record sales reached record highs.
The writer Kurt Tucholsky expressed his enthusiasm for her in his literary columns and became one of her friends; the illustrator and painter Heinrich Zille admired her and roamed “his milieu” with her. She later sang about this companion in Willi Kollo’s “Zille Song”: “As you yourself described it, I am a picture from your pictures.”

In their touching and lighthearted program featuring original musical and spoken recordings, singer and Waldoff specialist Sigrid Grajek and Berlin actor Hans-Jürgen Schatz (known for his roles in the hit TV series “Heimat,” “Der Fahnder,” and “Salto Postale”), together with pianist Stefanie Rediske, bring Waldoff’s happy Berlin years back to life.

www.sigridgrajek.de
www.hans-juergen-schatz.de