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 Berber was born in Leipzig to the violinist Felix Berber, concertmaster of the Gewandhausorchester, 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 training in rhythmic gymnastics, harmony, and music. The next year she 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. 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. – 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." 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.

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 Chatin-Hofmann. 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.