Eva Busch

Eva Busch (born Eva Zimmermann: 22 May 1912 – 20 July 2001) was a German-born singer and cabaret artist.

Life Family provenance and early years Eva Senta Elisabeth Zimmermann was born in Berlin: on the same day of the year as Richard Wagner. She was the daughter of the opera singer Emmy Zimmermann whose admirers had included Claude Debussy.

A year before the publication of her autobiography in 1991 she disclosed the identity of her father in an interview. Franz Beidler was a Swiss orchestral conductor and, perhaps even more significantly, a son in law to Richard Wagner whose musical reputation was by the time of Eva's birth sky high. He was another of Emmy Zimmermann's admirers. Later Eva's mother, Emmy Zimmermann married: as a result Eva's name changed and she was known until her own marriage as Eva Klein. Her first singing teacher was her mother. She also took lessons at the Reinhardt academy. There is little, if any, documentation of her political views in English.

Exile from Nazi Germany The Nazis took power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Ernst Busch, who had a reputation from his cabaret appearances as a singer of political songs, received a tip-off that he was about to be arrested and on 9 March 1933, anticipating and avoiding the arresting officers by a few hours, he escaped to the Netherlands. He was accompanied or quickly followed by Eva. In or before 1938 Eva and Ernst Busch were divorced. Eva explained, "the divorce did not reflect any shortage of love, but our marriage was simply impossible" ("Die Scheidung war kein Mangel an Liebe, sondern unsere Ehe war einfach unmöglich.") Sources differ over whether it was her mother's efforts on her behalf that shifted government opinion, or whether she benefitted from a growing awareness that one of the singers whose records were most popular with the troops fighting the war was being held in a concentration camp. Closer to home she toured in the Netherlands and France and also made brief trips across the Rhine, appearing in the radio and television studios back in West Germany where she was perceived as exotic, francophile and "very literary", and thereby outside the mainstream of contemporary German singers in the chanson genre.

In 1984, following Sinclair's death, she moved back to Germany, making her home in Munich. She continued to make media appearances in both France and Germany. Eva Busch died in Munich on 20 July 2001.