Anita Berber

Anita Berber (10 June 1899 – 10 November 1928) was a German dancer, actress, and writer who was the subject of an Otto Dix painting. She lived during the time of the Weimar Republic.
Early life
Born in Leipzig to Felix Berber, First Violinist with the Municipal Orchestra, and his wife, Anna Lucie Thiem, a cabaret singer and dancer, who later divorced when Berber was four. Berber was raised mainly by her grandmother in Dresden. In 1913 Berber studied dance at Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's school in Hellerau, which included trainings in rhythmic gymnastics, harmony, and music. The next year she had left to study ballet in Berlin with Rita Sacchetto. By the age of 16, she had made her debut as a cabaret dancer and in 1917 she was working as a fashion model for Die Dame.
Notoriety in Berlin
Between 1918 and 1925, she appeared in twenty-five films. Richard Oswald used her in a number of his films around this time. In 1920 she appeared alongside Dadaists in a political cabaret called Schall und Rauch.
Scandalously androgynous, she quickly made a name for herself. She wore heavy dancer's make-up, which on the black-and-white photos and films of the time came across as jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes. Berber's hair was fashionably cut into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber.
Her dancer, friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was thin and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than low-slung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage, placed well below her breasts.
Berber and Droste collaborated on a book titled Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy in 1923. Around 1,000 copies were published and even prominent artist Hannah Höch owned a copy.
Berber's dances – which had names such as "Cocaine" and "Morphium" – broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged social taboos. Berber's overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public gossip. In addition to her addictions to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber's favourite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
Karl Toepfer contends that no one of this era was "more closely associated with nude dancing than Anita Berber". A contemporary of Berber, choreographer Joe Jencik, described how "The public never appreciated Anita's artistic expression, only her public transgressions in which she trespassed the untouchable line between the stage and the audience. . . . She sacrificed her person to a self-vivisection of her life."
Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery, she had been diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928, although rumour had it that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes. Berber was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.
Marriages
In 1919, Berber entered into a marriage of convenience with a man named Eberhard Phillipp Engelhard von Nathusins. She later left him in order to pursue a relationship with a woman named Susi Wanowski, and became part of the Berlin lesbian scene.
Berber's second marriage, in 1922, was to Sebastian Droste. This lasted until 1923. In 1925, she married an American dancer named Henri Châtin Hofmann. They embarked on a tour round Europe ending in Zagreb after Berber was arrested for insulting the King. After Hofmann managed to secure her release, they continued around the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Selected filmography
The Story of Dida Ibsen (1918)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1919)
Different from the Others (1919)
Prostitution (1919)
The Skull of Pharaoh's Daughter (1920)
The Hustler (1920)
Figures of the Night (1920)
The Count of Cagliostro (1920)
The Golden Plague (1921)
Lucifer (1921)
Circus People (1922)
Lucrezia Borgia (1922)
The Three Marys (1923)
Vienna, City of Song (1923)
A Waltz by Strauss (1925)
In popular culture
A 1987 film by Rosa von Praunheim, Anita - Tänze des Lasters ("Anita - Dances of Vice") focuses on Berber's life.
The band Death in Vegas named a song on the album Satan's Circus after her. It is frequently used on the NPR radio show This American Life.
A new Weimar-era musical Fury and Elysium contains a portrayal of Berber, played by Iz Hesketh.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Capovilla, Andrea (2001) "Berber, Anita" in: Aldrich, Robert & Wotherspoon, Garry (eds.) Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II. New York: Routledge; pp. 50–51
Gordon, Mel (2006) The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery. Los Angeles, California: Feral House
Further reading
Berber, Anita & Droste, Sebastian (2012) Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy. Translated by Merrill Cole. Newcastle upon Tyne: Side Real Press.
A full translation from the German
Fischer, Lothar (1996) Tanz zwischen Rausch und Tod: Anita Berber, 1918-1928 in Berlin. Berlin: Haude und Spener
Funkenstein, Susan Laikin (2005) "Anita Berber: Imaging a Weimar Performance Artist" in: Woman's Art Journal 26.1 (Spring/Summer 2005); pp. 26–31
Gill, Anton (1993) A Dance between the Flames: Berlin between the Wars. New York: Carroll & Graf
Jarrett, Lucinda (1997) Stripping in Time: A History of Erotic Dancing. London: Pandora (HarperCollins); pp. 112–135
Kolb, Alexandra (2009) Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Richie, Alexandra (1998) Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin. New York: Carroll and Graf
Toepfer, Karl Eric (1997) Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press
External links
Legendary Sin Cities (CBC series -- "Berlin: Metropolis of Vice")
Photographs of Anita Berber
1899 births
1928 deaths
Bisexual actresses
Bisexual women writers
Bisexual dancers
German female erotic dancers
German film actresses
German silent film actresses
German bisexual people
German LGBT actors
German LGBT writers
German LGBT dancers
Actors from Dresden
20th-century German actresses
20th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Dancers from Berlin
Tuberculosis deaths in Germany
20th-century German LGBT people
Androgynous people