Dark Angels VI: Anita Berber
Reverently, truly,We are blessed to dance
All that withers the songs of men.
So arises our revelry
From vices – ecstasy and horror
Unconscious and superior, our steps before vanity’s mirror
Not a dance of reason, but the sharpest, refined shattering,
Divine, insensate steps to the sounds of this alien world.
-Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste
(translation by Drake)
So you think we have celebrity bad girls now? Brittany, Paris, and their sisters are amateurs compared to Anita Berber.
In Weimar Berlin in the 20s, where modern vice was practically invented, Anita was the most scandalous dancer and cabaret performer in a world that worshipped excess. Androgynous and hypersexual, Anita gained fame for her frequently naked performances on German stages in dances celebrating drug addiction, madness, and debauchery. She counted among her lovers Marlene Dietrich, the novelist Lawrence Durrell, Magnus Hirschfeld (the father of sexology), actor Conrad Veidt, and the king of Yugoslavia. She made a few films, notably playing a dancer in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Mabuse der Spieler.
For her, the world was a stage and her presence upon it depended upon her ability to shock her peers out of the depressing lethargyof everyday existence. In Berlin in the 20s, anything was possible, sex was celebrated, and the only sin was mundanity. Anita was the dark goddess of a society striving desperately to invent the new morality of a damned century. She sometimes appeared in public nude under fur, carrying a pet monkey, out of her senses on cocaine or hashish, open to propositions of any kind.
As is so often the case, this goddess came to a wicked end. Anita’s downfall was her primary lover, dance partner, and nemesis, Sebastian Droste, effeminate, bisexual, and monstrous in his abilities to lie, cheat, and steal. She seems to have loved him, though perhaps that love was only another embrace of destruction. Droste’s craziness surpassed hers and he effectively guided her career into ruin.
A world like Weimar Berlin cannot last and, as the decade of the 20s danced to its globally depressing conclusion, Anita Berber found herself unable to work, addicted to drink and drugs, her girlish appeal turning coarse and exhausted.
She died at 29 in 1928 and is largely forgotten today, but somewhere, in the place the darkest angels dance, I hope Anita Berber has found her ecstasy and, if it pleases her, her horror.
Posted by Angela Caperton at 8/19/2009 2:08 PM 
Categories: Dark Angels
Tags: Anita Berber 1920s Berlin dancer Weimar vice
Categories: Dark Angels
Tags: Anita Berber 1920s Berlin dancer Weimar vice
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