ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Berlin underwent a period of rapid growth. Censuses from the 1870s on generally revealed that Berlin’s population consisted of 60 percent non-natives, which made it difficult to answer the question: What does it mean to be a Berliner? One person who attempted to find out was the immensely popular cabaret singer Claire Waldoff (1884–1957). Like all ‘true Berliners’ she came from elsewhere, but in the course of her career Waldoff became synonymous with Berlin identity due to her repertoire of up-beat songs representing lower-class everyday life, loves and leisure-time activities in vernacular Berlinerisch. Waldoff’s humorous songs, which were popular nationwide, transcended the strict class boundaries of Wilhelminian culture as well as the genre conventions of cabaret at the time. Waldoff came to be identified with Heimat (homeland) by the soldiers on the front during the First World War; meanwhile in Berlin, she performed patriotic soldiers’ songs (Soldatenlieder) along with some of her most popular pre-war hits, to entertain the people as well as returned soldiers during the war. Only later did she come to regret having been a ‘believing artist’. ‘Too believing, I understand now’ as she states in her autobiography. In this chapter I will trace the tension between Waldoff’s simultaneous transcendence of cultural norms on the one hand and veridical representation of Berlin’s ‘common folk’ on the other – in her music, performance and life in Imperial Germany and during the Great War in particular. I will argue that cabaret provided the perfect setting for Waldoff’s ‘progressive compliancy’, as I will elaborate, and Berlin’s national heterogeneity and international melting pot of influences functioned as rich breeding ground for the post-war Weimar culture.
