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.

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.

Between 1918 and 1925, she appeared in twenty-five films.

Richard Oswald used her in a number of his films around this time.

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.

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.

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's second marriage, in 1922, was to Sebastian Droste.

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.

This lasted until 1923.

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.

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.

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

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.