Zarah Leander - Cabaret Paris

“Zarah Leander, film star and singer in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. Although herself female, Leander continued after the war to function as a source of identification for gays and transsexuals – primarily through the medium of her baritone voice. As Leander aged, she deliberately performed the ambiguity that her voice seems to have conjured up from the start, playing to her transgendered image among those audiences.” (from “The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film” by Brigitte Peucker) “Leander’s particular transgender appeal resided, of course, in her voice. Described as baritone, even bass, it entered an unnatural, inadmissible range. The German filmmaker Helma Sanders-Brahms, in an essay entitled “Zarah,” repeatedly refers to the actress’s “hermaphroditic voice, half man, half woman.” This phantasmic voice indeed recreates, by transgendering, the body that speaks it. It is then no wonder that Leander’s own transgendered apparition would inspire other dreams and fantasies of transforming the body, particularly to have it imitate her model, only in reverse, now male-to-female.” “She was at the time and continues to be the most important gay icon Germany has ever known. What motivated her gay fans to so completely identify with her? Wherein lies the pleasure of seeing oneself in someone else across gender lines? And what is so powerful in this mirroring that it also takes the form of multiple Zarah-impersonators who still entertain today on cabaret stages and in the transvestite revues that are popular – in another bizarre twist – among an older, heterosexual crowd in Germany? She also had, although to a much lesser extent, a lesbian following.” “When Zarah Leander opened her mouth a rich, sultry, mellifluous, and extraordinarily deep voice escaped that left Marlene Dietrich sounding like a scratched record.” (from “Transgender Specularity in Zarah Leander” in “The Queer German Cinema” by Alice A. Kuzniar)