Anita Berber: A Portrait of Excess and Intrigue in the Roaring Twenties
- Daniel Holland
- Aug 28, 2022
- 7 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
On a Berlin stage sometime in the early 1920s a young woman stood almost naked beneath harsh lights, her lips painted a solid black and her eyes ringed dark enough to look hollow. She moved slowly, deliberately, as if each gesture were being tested against the audience’s tolerance. This was Anita Berber, and by the time the music ended she had already become something more than a performer. She was a provocation a mirror and for many a warning about where modern life seemed to be heading.
Berber’s reputation has long rested on excess drugs sex scandal and early death. Yet when her life is examined closely she emerges as a far more revealing figure. Her story traces the pressures and freedoms of Weimar Germany with unusual clarity, from experimental dance and cabaret through early cinema queer subcultures, censorship moral panic and the physical cost of living at the edge of artistic possibility.
Childhood and artistic inheritance
Anita Berber was born in 1899 in Leipzig into a household already shaped by music and performance. Her father Felix Berber was a violinist and concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, a position that placed him within Germany’s respected musical establishment. Her mother Anna Lucie Thiem was a cabaret singer and dancer whose ambitions pulled her toward the stage, rather than domestic life.
The marriage did not last. When Anita was four her parents separated and she was sent to live primarily with her grandmother in Dresden. This early displacement mattered. Dresden at the turn of the century was both conservative and culturally rich and Berber grew up absorbing music theatre and visual art while lacking the emotional stability of a settled family.
From an early age she was drawn to movement. Dance for Berber was not simply decorative but expressive and physical in a way that aligned with emerging modernist ideas. In 1913 she enrolled at the school of Émile Jaques Dalcroze in Hellerau near Dresden. Dalcroze’s approach combined rhythmic gymnastics music harmony and bodily awareness. Students learned to feel music rather than merely follow it. This training would shape Berber’s later performances where movement often appeared instinctive even raw.
A year later she left Hellerau for Berlin to study ballet with Rita Sacchetto. Berlin in 1914 was already a magnet for artists, but the outbreak of war soon transformed the city. As traditional structures faltered new artistic languages emerged and young performers like Berber found opportunities that would not have existed before.
Berlin after the war and the rise of cabaret
Germany’s defeat in 1918 ushered in political instability economic hardship and social upheaval. At the same time censorship laws loosened and Berlin became one of Europe’s most permissive cities. Cabaret flourished. Small smoky venues offered satire sexual frankness political critique and experimental performance to audiences hungry for distraction and meaning.
By the age of sixteen Berber was already appearing as a cabaret dancer. In 1917 she also worked as a fashion model for the magazine Die Dame, projecting a modern image that blurred gender lines. Her look was striking even by Berlin standards. She wore her hair in a short bob often dyed a vivid red. Heavy makeup exaggerated her features so that in black and white photography her lipstick appeared jet black and her eyes almost mask like.
This cultivated androgyny was deliberate. Berber understood the power of appearance and used it to unsettle expectations. She did not present herself as a decorative dancer but as an unsettling presence. Critics and audiences struggled to categorise her and that ambiguity became central to her appeal.
Marlene Dietrich from the 1930 film Morocco directed by Josef von Sternberg. Anita Berber in a tuxedo for the 1921 film Bitte Zhalen.
Film work and early notoriety
Between 1918 and 1925 Berber appeared in around twenty five films an extraordinary output for such a short period. She worked frequently with the director Richard Oswald who was known for socially engaged cinema. One of her most significant roles was in Different from the Others, a groundbreaking film that portrayed homosexuality sympathetically at a time when it was criminalised under German law.
The film was both praised and condemned. For Berber it reinforced her association with sexual nonconformity. Later the Nazi regime would ban and largely destroy the film, but during the Weimar years it placed her at the centre of debates about morality art and freedom.
In 1920 she also appeared in the political cabaret Schall und Rauch alongside Dadaists and other avant garde performers. These venues blurred the line between performance and provocation. Berber thrived in this environment. She was not interested in pleasing audiences so much as confronting them.
Dances of transgression
Berber’s dances often carried titles such as Cocaine and Morphium. They were not metaphorical. They attempted to embody altered states despair euphoria and decay. Total nudity was not uncommon and for Berber it was not an erotic gesture but a statement of exposure and vulnerability.
The dance historian Karl Toepfer later wrote that no performer of the era was more closely associated with nude dancing than Berber. Yet contemporary accounts suggest audiences rarely understood what she was attempting. The choreographer Joe Jencik observed that the public fixated on her transgressions rather than her artistic intent, noting that she appeared to sacrifice herself in full view of the audience.
Offstage her behaviour further blurred boundaries. Berber was openly bisexual at a time when such openness was rare. Her drug use was equally visible. In addition to cocaine opium and morphine she reportedly inhaled chloroform and ether from a bowl stirring the mixture with a white rose and eating its petals afterwards. Whether this ritual was embellished by gossip it became part of her legend.
In 1922 Berber married the dancer and poet Sebastian Droste. Their relationship was both creative and destructive. Together they produced the book Dances of Vice Horror and Ecstasy, a combination of poetry and stark photography that captured their aesthetic of beauty and ruin.
Only around one thousand copies were printed, yet the book circulated widely within avant garde circles. Even the artist Hannah Höch owned a copy. The pair also performed these dances in nightclubs, enacting the texts in front of live audiences. One poem associated with their cocaine themed work read:
“Cocaine
Outcry
Animals
Blood
Alcohol
Pains
Many pains
And the eyes.”
It was less a celebration than a warning. Both Berber and Droste were deep in addiction and their performances increasingly resembled public confessions. The marriage collapsed within a year. Droste would later be imprisoned for fraud accused of stealing Berber’s furs and jewellery before dying in poverty.
Marriage convenience and queer Berlin
Berber’s personal relationships reflected the fluidity of Berlin’s queer scene. In 1919 she entered into a marriage of convenience with Eberhard Phillipp Engelhard von Nathusins, a screenwriter of means. The arrangement offered financial security but little emotional connection. She soon left him to pursue a relationship with Susi Wanowski, a woman who ran a lesbian establishment, and became both Berber’s partner and manager.
Berlin in the early 1920s supported a visible lesbian and gay subculture with clubs publications and networks of support. Berber moved easily within this world. Gossip linked her romantically with Marlene Dietrich, whose later androgynous screen persona has often been compared to Berber’s earlier performances. Whether or not the relationship was real the comparison speaks to Berber’s influence on visual culture.
Arrest scandal and exile
In 1925 Berber married an American dancer Henri Chatin Hofmann. They embarked on an extended tour across Europe that ended dramatically in Zagreb, in the Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes. During a performance Berber’s nude dance offended Alexander I of Yugoslavia. She was arrested and imprisoned for several weeks.
The incident had lasting consequences. After her release the couple continued travelling through the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but Berber found herself effectively barred from many European stages. The very notoriety that had sustained her career now worked against her.
Otto Dix and the mask of performance
In 1925 Berber sat for the painter Otto Dix. The resulting portrait is one of the defining images of Weimar art. Unlike earlier representations that focused on her nudity Dix depicted her clothed in a tight red dress her body angular her stance assertive.
The makeup is heavy almost theatrical. Her face appears less human than constructed. Dix had seen Berber perform and understood her life as a continuous act. The painting captures that sense of performance as survival. It does not glamourise her but neither does it condemn. Instead it records the cost of turning one’s body into a site of constant expression.
Decline illness and death
By the late 1920s Berber’s health was failing. Years of addiction had taken their toll. In 1928 she abruptly gave up alcohol at the age of twenty nine but the damage was already severe. While performing abroad she collapsed in Damascus and was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis.
She returned to Germany and was admitted to a hospital in Kreuzberg where she died in November, 1928. She was twenty nine years old. Rumours circulated that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes but medical accounts point to tuberculosis as the primary cause.
Berber was buried in a pauper’s grave at St Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln. For a woman who had once been one of Berlin’s most talked about figures, her end was quiet and largely unattended.
Reassessment and legacy
For decades Berber was remembered as a cautionary tale, a symbol of Weimar decadence invoked by critics of modernity. Yet recent scholarship particularly within feminist and LGBTQ studies has reframed her life. Rather than a figure of excess alone, she is now understood as an early performance artist who used her body to question norms around gender sexuality and spectatorship.
Her work anticipated later developments in performance art where endurance exposure and self harm were used to communicate political and personal truths. In this light Berber appears less an anomaly and more a precursor. Comparisons to artists and performers such as Madonna or Lady Gaga are not entirely misplaced. Each uses persona and provocation to navigate fame power and identity.
Anita Berber lived fast and died young but her life offers more than scandal. It reveals the possibilities and dangers of artistic freedom in a society undergoing rapid change. In Weimar Berlin she found a stage large enough to contain her ambition but not a structure capable of protecting her from its consequences.
