Anita Berber

Born in Leipzig in 1899 to a musician and an aspiring actress and singer, Anita Berber was raised mainly by her grandmother in Dresden. At 16, she moved to Berlin and made her debut as a cabaret dancer. By 1918 she was working in film, and she began dancing nude in 1919. Scandalously androgynous, she wore heavy dancer's make-up.

Berber consciously broke every social and theatrical convention of her time, and then proclaimed some theory to justify her provocative, outlaw behavior. She haunted the Friedrichstadt quarter of Berlin, appearing in nightclubs, casinos, and hotel-lobbies (like the Adlon hotel) radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap that shadowed her gaunt shoulders and a pair of patent-leather pumps. One year, Berber made her post-midnight entrances clad only in those heels, a frightened pet monkey hanging from her neck, and an heirloom silver brooch packed with cocaine.

On Berlin’s cabaret stages, Anita Berber danced out bizarre erotic fantasias—scenic displays, fueled by noxious concoctions of ether-and-chloroform, cognac, morphine injections, and a chic, pan-sexual disposition. Her dances had names such as « Cocaine » or « Morphium ». Satiated Berliners, after a few riotous seasons in the early Twenties, finally tired of Berber’s libidinous antics. The high priestess of choreographic decadence died a pauper’s death in 1928, the result, more or less, of a desperate attempt to quit cold-turkey from her most beloved of addictions, cognac.

Anita appeared in the ground-breaking Richard Oswald film ‘Different From The Others” (Anders als die Anderen), which deals with homosexuality. Besides her love affairs with men, she favoured also women. She is said to have dated the young Marlene Dietrich.

She appeared on stage not only in Berlin but also in Vienna, Belgrad, Cairo and Beirut. 

By Otto DIx, 1925

Some of the information comes from Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon.