Between 1918 and 1925, she appeared in twenty-five films.
[2] Richard Oswald used her in a number of his films around this time.
[1] In 1920 she appeared alongside
Dadaists in a political cabaret called
Schall und Rauch.
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.
[3] Berber's hair was fashionably cut into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter
Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled
Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber.
[4]
Her dancer, friend and sometime lover
Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film
Algol (1920), was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than lowslung
loincloths and Anita occasionally a
corsage, placed well below her breasts.
[3]
Berber and Droste collaborated on a book titled
Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy in 1923. Around 1,000 copies were published and even prominent artist
Hannah Höch owned a copy.
[1]
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.
[6] In addition to her addiction to cocaine,
opium and
morphine, one of Berber's favourite forms of inebriation was
chloroform and
ether mixed in a bowl.
[7] This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
[8]
Karl Toepfer contends that no one of this era was "more closely associated with nude dancing than Anita Berber".
[2] A contemporary of Berber, choreographer Joe Jencik, described how "The public never appreciated Anita's artistic expression, only her public transgressions in which she trespassed the untouchable line between the stage and the audience. . . . She sacrificed her person to a self-vivisection of her life."
[2]
Aside from her addiction to
narcotic drugs, Berber was also an
alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. According to Mel Gordon, in
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery,
[9] she had been diagnosed with severe
tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in
Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a
Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928, although rumour had it that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes.
[8] Berber was buried in a
pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in
Neukölln.
[10][11]
