Anita Berber and the frenzy
It is dark in the auditorium. There are almost only gentlemen present, some wear masks to hide their faces. The air is heavy with perfume, cigarette smoke and the breath of many people. When the spotlight comes on, a many-voiced murmur can be heard. A cloaked figure enters the stage, a naked female body is visible under the veils. The murmuring grows louder, interrupted by whistles from the particularly eager ones. The figure begins to loll about, to bend. Sometimes following the rhythm of the music, sometimes another, inner beat. Whirling around like mad, only to fall back into gentle swaying in the next moment. Slowly the movements of the figure increase, the veils fall to the ground. As if in a frenzy, she contorts her features, laughs, cries and screams silently. She writhes on the floor, spreads her legs obscenely. The audience goes wild. Still wanting more. One last twitch and the dance is over. The figure lies on the floor and doesn't move any more. The music is off. The curtain closes.
If you don't know where your head is after this frivolous, wickedly ecstatic performance, dear audience: the mysterious dancer under the veils is of course none other than Anita Berber. She was born in Berlin in 1899, her father Felix Berber a violin virtuoso, her mother Lucie a cabaret artist and chanson singer. Just three years later her parents divorced due to irreconcilable differences and Anita was sent to live with her grandmother in Dresden, where she remained until the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914 she returns to her mother in Berlin and begins acting and dancing lessons, among others with Maria Moissi and Rita Sacchetto. From 1916 she performed regularly with Sacchetto and her group, but only a year later they parted ways because Anita wanted to try her hand as a soloist. In 1918 she was already celebrating successes in Switzerland, Hungary and Austria. Two years later she joined Celly de Rheidt's group, the first known nude ballet. Anita's career continued to grow. In addition to her dance performances, she also gets smaller film roles, among others in Richard Oswald's Eerie Tales (1919) or in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922). But it remained with the smaller roles, because Anita's reputation was not necessarily the best. Cocaine, morphine and alcohol are the faithful companions of her everyday life and often the reason why performances or other dates have to be cancelled spontaneously because the dancer is indisposed - not exactly to the delight of directors or directors.
Dancer, Actress, Poet and Style Icon
When Anita is not on stage at the Wintergarten, the Apollo Theatre or the White Mouse, she can also be found in Berlin's nightlife, at the Adlon, where she lets admiring gentlemen buy her champagne, or in such relevant establishments as the Toppkeller, where ladies can meet other ladies, because the dancer does not like to commit herself. There she appears either in a dinner jacket with a monocle or in a sable coat with a trained monkey in the collar. It is precisely her appearance in a dinner jacket that triggers a trend among the fashion-conscious ladies of Berlin, so that her style is imitated by many, "they went à la Berber" is how journalist Siegfried Geyer describes the phenomenon in the magazine Die Bühne.
But Anita can find great happiness neither in her private nor in her professional life. Two marriages end in divorce after a short time, and the relationship with her friend Susi Wanowsky does not last either. Her father, whom she wants to visit after one of his performances, refuses to speak to her, a slight that hits her hard. The dancer also suffers from the incomprehension of the audience, who are often not interested in her art, but only want to see her naked. In an interview with the journalist Fred Hildenbrandt she complains: "We dance death, illness, pregnancy, syphilis, madness, death, infirmity, suicide, and no one takes us seriously. They just stare at our veils to see if they can see anything underneath, the pigs."
Dead, decayed, and beautiful a million times - so beautiful*
With her lover and dance partner Sebastian Droste, Anita develops the famous program Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy in 1922, which includes dances called Cocaine, Morphine or The Corpse at the Dissecting Table. The dances are also written down, together with poems by Berber and Droste. But although the performances are always sold out, the couple often receive only mockery and rude interjections, which Anita sometimes counters with insults, sometimes with fisticuffs. She is even said to have hit a guest over the head with a champagne bottle, an incident that led to her own expulsion. Soon, however, she was no longer able to perform with Sebastian Droste for other reasons. He left for America in 1924 (together with her jewellery), as he was wanted for fraud. With her last partner Henri Châtin-Hofmann, she attempts another tour abroad, but it ends with her collapsing on a stage in Damascus. Weakened by years of drug and alcohol addiction, doctors diagnosed her with "galloping consumption", and her return home was delayed for several months due to her precarious state of health. In 1928, Anita Berber died at the age of only 29.
Life on the edge
Drug excesses, scandals, dance performances that broke all taboos: constant intoxication was the driving force behind Anita's art, which could perhaps only have been created in a time like the Weimar Republic, which was marked by post-war suffering, inflation and compulsive pleasure-seeking. But like many other artists before and after her, the dancer was not granted the recognition she craved during her lifetime. The permissiveness of her performances were too stark a contrast to the staid imperial era. After the years of privation during the war, many people just wanted to have fun in the lightest possible way. So it is not surprising that Anita's performances were quickly categorised by the audience as cheap entertainment erotica, and her furious reactions to inappropriate interjections did the rest to ignore the artistic aspect behind them. Anita always tried to find an outlet through her dance, to express all the horrors of the time and to hold up a mirror to society, even if it fought tooth and nail against it. Horror, vice, a life on the edge - the emblematic "dance on the volcano": Anita Berber danced it like no other.
* from Anita Berber's poem "I" (German: Ich) for Sebastian Droste
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