Anita Berber 10 June — 10 November 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. 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. By the age of 16, she had made her debut as a cabaret dancer and in she was working as a fashion model for Die Dame. Between and , she appeared in twenty-five films. Scandalously androgynous , she quickly made a name for herself. She wore heavy dancer's make-up, which on the black-and-white photos and films of the time came across as jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes.
Her dancer, friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste , who performed in the film Algol , 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.
Berber's dances — which had names such as "Cocaine" and "Morphium" [ 5 ] — 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. Karl Toepfer contends that no one of this era was "more closely associated with nude dancing than Anita Berber". She sacrificed her person to a self-vivisection of her life. Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic.
