Bodo Wartke German Singer With 708K Instagram Followers

Early life

Bodo Wartke was born on 21 May 1977 in Hamburg and grew up in Reinbek and Bad Schwartau. He finished school at the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Bad Schwartau in 1996 and then did his civilian service at a hospital in Lübeck. In 1997 he began studying physics in Berlin, but after two semesters he switched to music education at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1998 to 2004 he belonged to SAGO, an academy for poetry and music founded by Christof Stählin, and he is a graduate of the Celler Schule. He lives in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.

Career

Wartke gave his first full-length concert on 16 November 1996 at his former school. He became known as a musical cabaret artist who usually accompanies himself on a grand piano, and who also uses the ukulele, the cajón and the harmonica. His lyrics are mostly in German and rely on rhyme, humour, satire and wordplay. He performs in German-speaking countries and often keeps several programmes in his repertoire at once. His piano cabaret programmes include Ich denke, also sing ich, Achillesverse, Noah war ein Archetyp, Klaviersdelikte, Was, wenn doch?, Wandelmut and Wunderpunkt.

Love is a recurring subject, treated both humorously and seriously. One of his best-known pieces, Liebeslied, is a song made of short verses in many languages. By 2011 he had 88 language versions in his repertoire, including German dialects and constructed languages such as Esperanto, Klingon, Sindarin and Quenya. Some songs take on political topics: Nicht in meinem Namen criticises religious extremism, and Hambacher Wald opposes the clearing of the Hambach Forest.

Classical music appears often in his work. Noah war ein Archetyp includes Alla Turca Stomp, an adaptation of a rondo from Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11, and other programmes refer to Beethoven, Schoenberg, Schiller and Goethe. He has also written modern rhymed versions of Greek tragedies. His one-man play König Ödipus premiered in 2009. Antigone, written with Carmen Kalisch and the director Sven Schütze, premiered on 9 April 2018 at the Schmidt Theater in Hamburg, with Wartke and Melanie Haupt in the cast. A filmed version released in 2019 received the rating "besonders wertvoll" from the German film and media rating board, and the Westermann Gruppe later used the adaptation in teaching material.

In 2012 he began performing Swingende Notwendigkeit, a swing programme, with The Capital Dance Orchestra. In 2021 he performed Jetzt oder Sinfonie! with the WDR Funkhausorchester, and the concert was released as a live album. Since 2022 he has toured with the SchönenGutenA-Band, whose members have worked with him since the programme Noah war ein Archetyp.

In 2005 Wartke and his longtime collaborator Sven Schütze founded the publishing company Reimkultur Musikverlag, after several labels had declined to sign him. From 2006 to 2011 he hosted the songwriter festival Songs an einem Sommerabend, which was broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk, and he later hosted its successor, Lieder auf Banz, at Banz Abbey. He has worked as a composer and musical director on a Hamburg production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, written a German libretto for Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, and contributed lyrics to Roger Cicero's song "Der Anruf".

In 2023 he reached a new audience on social media with Zungenbrecher 4.0, a rap-like series of German tongue twisters, which had reportedly reached 84 million views by October 2023. Late that year he and the producer Marti Fischer created the novelty song "Barbaras Rhabarberbar", known in English as "Barbara's Rhubarb Bar", based on a German tongue twister. Wartke wrote the lyrics and Fischer produced the music. The song spread internationally on TikTok in 2024, and the New York Times reported more than 47 million views of its video on that platform within a few months. It reached number 16 on the German Single Trending Charts on 24 May 2024. In May 2024 and May 2025 Wartke appeared on the ZDF satire programme Die Anstalt. His published works include sheet-music books for several programmes, a book of tongue-twister stories published by Carlsen in 2025, and the printed text of Antigone.

Recognition

Wartke has won many cabaret, chanson and songwriting prizes. In 1998 he received first prize and the audience award at the St. Ingberter Pfanne, and in 2001 the first prize of Das Schwarze Schaf. He won the Deutscher Kleinkunstpreis in 2004, the Deutscher Sprachpreis of the Henning-Kaufmann-Stiftung in 2023, the music award of the Bayerischer Kabarettpreis in 2024, the Fred Jay Preis in 2025 and the Salzburger Stier in 2026.