Out of the crucible of humiliation emerged Cindy, crass and cagey, driven by appetites. She hides a bratwurst in a banana peel and asks the audience for chocolate, then eats what they throw onstage. “I have Alzheimer’s bulimia,” Cindy likes to say, stomach bulging under her pink sweatshirt, tiara perched atop her wig. “I eat everything in sight and then forget to throw up.”

Critics call her act offensive, lowbrow and worse, mixing high-minded attacks on her with patronizing depictions of her supposedly benighted fans. Those fans answer by buying her concert videos and turning out to her shows in droves, where they scream and applaud like mad, many wearing their own tiaras and pink sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “Alzheimer’s bulimia” on the front.

Cindy regales them with tales of her time as a member of the Socialist Children’s Television Ballet or her efforts to get adopted by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Her performances are marathons with musical numbers. Fans often bring her presents and handmade cards. She is a star but also a hero, one of them, one who made it.

“I win,” Cindy sings in one of her songs, “although I’m not a winner.”

Ms. Bessin said in the interview that her act was not about East and West, which are outdated concepts in her view. Cindy happened to come from the East because Ms. Bessin did too. Her memory of the end of Communism was typically understated. “My mother was in the living room. I was in the kitchen washing dishes. She said, ‘The Wall fell,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, O.K.,’ and went back to washing dishes.”

Over the next decade she worked a dozen jobs at hotels and restaurants, including Planet Hollywood Berlin, and even did a stint on a cruise ship. She was working as a restaurant manager in 2001 and went on sick leave. When she came back she had been fired and her job had been given to someone else.

A long, demoralizing stretch on welfare followed. Between her hundreds of job applications Ms. Bessin said she ate, lay in bed and watched television, gaining weight and losing motivation. She was slowly sliding into a growing German underclass best known to the rest of the country from talk shows about paternity tests and plastic surgery. Unbeknown to Ms. Bessin, she was researching a character that had not yet found her outlet. Ms. Bessin’s break was not just lucky, it was accidental. In 2004, she called up the Quatsch Comedy Club in Berlin looking for a job as a waitress. After listening to her for a while the man on the other end of the line announced that he was not the person responsible for hiring service personnel. He was in charge of booking the acts.

“Do you have any interest in doing stand-up?” she recalled him asking. He told her about a talent competition the club was hosting. She agreed and began writing a few minutes of material. When she read through her jokes at rehearsal, people told her there was no way her act was going to work.