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Anita Berber

Wild Child

Anita Berber was born in Dresden on June 10th 1899 to Felix and Lucie Berber. Felix was First Violinist with the Municipal Orchestra and Lucie, an aspiring actress and singer.

She was mostly raised by her grandmother in her early years and then exclusively so after her parents divorced in 1901. Four years later, her mother left for Berlin and Rudolph Nelson’s Chat Noir cabaret stage.

At the age of 10 she was enrolled at the Jacque-Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau and thrived on its strict regime of physical training and Eurythmics. At 14, she re-joined her mother, now in Weimar, and studied French and Confectionary at an expensive girls’ boarding school. This was rapidly curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War that summer.

In 1915, Anita moved with her mother to an apartment in Zähringer Strasse in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district. She enrolled in acting classes and was soon spotted by the Avant-garde choreographer Rita Sacchetto. She made her debut with the dance-troupe in February 1916, alongside the young performance artist Valeska Gert.

Through 1916/17, Anita’s star was rising and she not only toured throughout Germany and Austria with the Sacchetto Troupe but also performed solo at the Berlin Wintergarten. During this time she was featured twice on the front cover of glossy women’s magazine Die Dame. By 1918 she had made her first of nine silent films, was becoming a sought-after model and was touring her own solo programme.

(image: Atelier Alex Binder)

( Die Dame magazine 1917)

(Die Dame magazine 1918)

It was during an after-show party at a Vienna hotel, that a drunk Anita Berber danced naked in public for the first time.

In January of 1919, Anita married the wealthy young screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusius. Her film career was blossoming and in the spring of that year she appeared, alongside rising-star Conrad Veidt, as Else in the ground-breaking Richard Oswald film Anders als die Anderen (Different From The Others).

Her personal life, meanwhile, was spiralling out of control. Tales of lesbian affairs and S&M sex were reaching the daily newspapers of Berlin.

Back in Berlin in the winter of 1919, Anita occupied a suite at the Adlon Hotel. She spent wildly on furs, shoes and jewellery and indulged heavily in cocaine, cognac and all-manner of illicit narcotics smuggled from around Europe. She spent her nights touring the hotels and elegant restaurants of the city, often wearing nothing but a sable coat with an antique brooch packed full of cocaine. Her pet monkey was usually by her side.

Her cabaret career was flourishing alongside her growing reputation. She was performing regularly at Max Rheinhardt’s literary Schall und Rauch stage, but her film career was not so stellar as her behaviour and addictions were making her a liability to work with.

By 1921 her sham marriage had collapsed completely. Eberhard Von Nathusius divorced her and she went on to date a string of beautiful women including, allegedly, the young Marlene Dietrich. It was stylish bar-owner Susi Wanowski who won her heart and very quickly became her lover, manager and secretary.

Cabaret and film appearances continued unabated: in Rudolph Nelson’s revue Bitte Zahlen (Please Pay); in Fritz Lang’s film Mabuse and regular midnight shows at the tiny Weisse Maus cabaret in Friedrichstrasse.

(Bitte Zahlen 1921 image: Ernst Schneider)

In June 1922, during a particularly wild night out at a Berlin casino, Anita met the dancer and poet Sebastian Droste. It was to be a life-changing encounter.

Anita and Sebastian were immediately drawn to one another and convinced they could create something bold, new and shocking.

Rehearsals began immediately with a fervour only matched by the pairs’ cocaine consumption. Droste very quickly replaced Susi as Anita’s manager and by July of 1922, a series of performances of their new joint production was booked for Vienna in November.

(image: Atelier D’ora)

The next few months were filled with incident. Five weeks into rehearsals, the schedule and drug consumption took its toll and Anita checked into a Vienna Sanitorium. At the beginning of October her latest film with Richard Oswald Lucrezia Borgia was released to huge acclaim and a whistle-stop two week warm-up tour took her and Sebastian to Italy, Spain and France before their grand production opened in Vienna on November 14th.

(image: Atelier D’ora)

Droste’s less-than honest dealings with theatre promoters and the huge depts they had both run up were soon to cause them huge problems. Multiple bookings of ‘exclusive’ performances and several breaches of contracts with promoters soon got them both expelled from the International Artists Union. As a result, no variety stage in Europe, Britain or Turkey could book them for the next two years. By the end of the year, Anita had violated the ban several times, been arrested for assault and theft, and was expelled from Vienna.

(image: Atelier Eberth)

In January 1923, Anita and Sebastian were married.

The IAU ban severely restricted their work, and so in March 1923 they undertook a five-month nightclub tour of Italy and Yugoslavia. They returned to Berlin in September but their relationship had reached a low and both were now hopelessly dependant on cocaine. A month later, Sebastian stole Anita’s furs and jewellery, sold them and fled to New York.

By early 1924, a rested and rejuvenated Anita was back living at Zähringer Strasse with her mother and ready to work again. In August, she attended a performance by the American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman at Berlin’s Blüthne-Saal. She fell instantly in love with him and two weeks later, they were married.

Although working regularly at the Rampe, Schall und Rauch, and Cafe Grössenwahn, Anita and Henri premiered their first collaboration Shipwrecked in Stuttgart in April 1925.

In October, the duo began a nationwide tour and it was whilst they were in Düsseldorf that the artist Otto Dix painted his, now iconic, portrait The Dancer Anita Berber.

The Dancer Anita Berber – Otto Dix 1925

In June 1926, Anita and Henri were on tour with their new production Dances of Sex and Ecstasy. In Zagreb, Anita publicly insulted the King of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned for six weeks. When they got back to Berlin, they were both broke and so Anita returned to the cabaret circuit.

(image: Atelier Alex Binder)

Friends urged them to come to the Netherlands to perform in a new revue which opened that October and lead to them both undertaking a considerable tour. They were away from Berlin for nearly all of the next two years. A Middle Eastern tour began in Athens and took them to Cairo, Beirut and Damascus where Henri pleaded with Anita to give up drinking.

On the night of July 13th 1928, Anita collapsed whilst performing at a Beirut nightclub, and was diagnosed with an advanced state of pulmonary tuberculosis. She desperately wanted to go home.

The journey home took four months, with Anita needing time to recuperate at each stage. Their money had been swallowed by the costs of transport, and in Berlin collections were being made backstage at cabaret venues to fund the last stages of the journey. When she finally arrived in Berlin from Prague, Anita was taken straight to the Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg.

Four months later, on November 10th 1928, she died and was buried in a paupers grave at St. Thomas Friedhof in Neuköln. Twelve people came to her funeral.

In 2018 the graveyard, which has gone unused for decades, was repurposed into a public space and named the Anita Berber Park.