Claire Waldoff - Biography

Claire Waldoff (née Clara Wortmann), born October 21, 1884 in Gelsenkirchen, died January 22, 1957 in Bad Reichenhall, was a German cabaret singer.
Claire originally wanted to be a doctor, but for financial reasons that did not work out and she switched to acting and singing, changing her name to Claire Waldoff in the process.
Waldoff's musical repertoire consisted of cabaret songs in the Berlin dialect. It grew to include up to 300 titles. She appeared in revues and operettas and also sang soldiers' songs and folk tunes. Her external trademarks were a tie, a white shirt blouse and her red-brown hair in a bob hairstyle.
Around 1906 Waldoff debuted as an actress and singer in Berlin. Her artistic peak in Germany was during the 1920s and early 1930s when she could frequently be heard on the radio.
In 1917, she met her life partner, Olga von Roeder. The two were not only a focal point of lesbian nightlife in Berlin in the 1920s, they even ran a cultural and political salon for the exchange of ideas between lesbians. The two remained together unitl Waldoff's death in 1957. Another one of Waldoff's friends during the Weimar Republic was the satirical writer Kurt Tucholsky.
In 1933, the Nazis briefly banned Waldoff from performing, but later she joined the Reichskulturkammer and continued singing. In 1939 she and von Roeder retired to Bayerisch Gmain in the Alps, but she occasionally sang in Wunschkonzert broadcasts on the radio and at Wehrmacht concerts.
Waldoff displayed a special kind of self-confidence for a woman of that time. She smoked and cursed on stage. She once described her charisma as follows: "My simple manner, without gestures, only based on facial expressions, only on the facial expressions of the eyes, was something new on the cabaret stage. I was and remained the big number in my simplicity".

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