Anita Berber

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Anita Berber (born June 10, 1899 in Leipzig , † November 10, 1928 in Berlin ) was a German dancer , actress and self-promoter .

Life

Your rise

Anita Berber with her grandmother Luise Thiem, 1901

Anita Berber was the daughter of the violin virtuoso Professor Felix Berber and the cabaret artist and chanson singer Lucie Berber, b. Thiem. As early as 1902, the parents divorced because of "irreconcilable character differences". In 1906 she moved to her grandmother Luise Thiem in Dresden , where she grew up in a middle-class family and attended the secondary school for girls there until 1913 . After she was confirmed in April 1914, she spent a few months in the boarding school of Curt Weiß's daughter education institute in Weimar . At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Berber moved to live with her mother in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , where she lived with her grandmother and her two unmarried aunts, Else and Margarete Thiem, in a shared apartment on Zähringerstraße. The mother had previously managed to get permanent engagements at Berlin cabarets such as Chat Noir. From 1915 Berber took acting lessons from Maria Moissi and later also dance lessons from Rita Sacchetto . Her first appearances with her dance school can be dated back to 1916. Already in 1917 she separated from her teacher Sacchetto because of differences over Berber's dance style. From then on she performed independently in variety theaters such as the Apollo Theater , the Wintergarten and the White Mouse . For her first solo dance evening in the Apollo Theater Berlin she showed her “Korean Dance”. Even before the end of the First World War , she was a star on Berlin's stages.

Dinah Nelken , with whom she attended dance school, described her as follows: “She was completely innocent and lovely. By nature she was a cheerful person [...] spontaneous and unrestrained ... Despite her love of flirting, she had an incredible charm without appearing vulgar. "The fashion journal Elegante Welt was looking for Berber's" peculiar charm "with her" boyish "stature and" bitter slimness ”to justify. But not only the fashion world noticed it, it also shaped the fashion of the time. She was the first woman to wear a tuxedo : “For a while, the sophisticated women in Berlin imitated everything. Except for the monocle . They went à la Berber. ”Reports Siegfried Geyer.

Pirelli became her new ballet master in 1918, who tried out a new dance style with her and put together the programs for the following guest tours. In the same year Berber went on her first trip abroad to Switzerland, Hungary and Austria. The Austrian sculptor Constantin Holzer-Defanti designed two Anita Berber figures ( Korean dance and Pierrette ) for the Rosenthal porcelain factory in Selb . After returning to Berlin in 1919, she married Eberhard von Nathusius (1895–1942), a wealthy officer and antiquarian, grandson of Philipp von Nathusius-Ludom . The marriage remained childless.

Scandals

Anita Berber (photography by Alexander Binder , 1920)

“Anita Berber was considered wicked, vamp and femme fatale , the symbol of pure excess and the new, desiring woman at the same time and as the embodiment of feminine bohemianism . Their excessive lifestyle repeatedly caused offense and sensation. She literally attracted scandals , she took morphine and cocaine , drank a bottle of cognac a day and fought everyone who crossed her path. Her lack of restraint embodied the wild urge of her generation to live without thinking about an already lost future. It has always been like the Germans only became through inflation : wasteful. But not out of gossip, but because she did n't care about the word future . This made her the idol of inflation, her goddess of death. In 1925 she was completely naked as a model for Otto Dix , who painted her as old as she never was: emaciated, sunken, wrinkled, her mouth blood red, her complexion pale and her eyes deathly dark. But she not only sold her body as a model, she also offered it for sale physically. Martha Dix: " Someone spoke to her and she said, 200 marks." I didn't find that terrible at all. Somehow she had to earn money ” . Her dances, often performed in the nude, repeatedly led to tumultuous scenes during the performances. Anita Berber put an end to all Prussian discipline and was notorious for her unpunctuality and unreliability. Sometimes a gig was canceled because she was drunk or foggy with morphine and cocaine. "

- Ricarda D. Herbrand : goddess and idol

In 1922 Berber left her husband and moved in with her friend Susi Wanowsky, with whom she had a lesbian relationship. After her first guest appearance at the Wiener Konzerthaus in November and December 1920, she and her dance partner and second husband Sebastian Droste (bourgeois: Willy Knobloch) gave another guest appearance in Vienna in 1922, the first appearance also taking place in November at the Wiener Konzerthaus. Their joint dance production, Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, was completely sold out and covered in scandals. The press reports made everyone want to see the couple dance. In 1923, Berber and Droste published a bibliophile book under the title Dance Production at Gloriette Verlag in Vienna, in which poems, texts, drawings and photographs are presented for their choreographies. At Madame d'Ora , a series of expressive recordings were made, which were also published in Berlin magazine and Die Dame at the time. The artist was asked several times by the police to leave the city. In the weeks after the performance, there were repeated disputes over non-compliance with contracts. Droste was arrested in Austria for attempted fraud and expelled on January 5, 1923. Berber's expulsion to Hungary took place on January 13, 1923. In Budapest , she met Droste again, with whom she went back to Berlin. In June 1923 Droste left Berber with her jewelry and went to New York , where he worked as America correspondent for the BZ am Mittag . After returning from the USA, he died on June 27, 1927 in Hamburg .

Film career

Anita Berber in the film Eerie Tales , 1919

Anita Berber appeared as a film actress from 1918 to 1925. It was discovered by Richard Oswald . She worked with Conrad Veidt , Paul Wegener , Reinhold Schünzel , Hans Albers , Emil Jannings , Alexander Granach , Albert Bassermann and Wilhelm Dieterle .

Last years of life and death

Memorial plaque in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Zähringerstraße 13

In 1924 Berber met the American dancer Henri Châtin Hofmann , whom she married on September 10th of that year. Both appeared together in the cabarets “Die Rakete”, “White Mouse” and “Die Rampe”. This was followed by tours in Europe and Germany in 1925, which were repeatedly overshadowed by scandals. In 1926 Hofmann was temporarily arrested in the “Sect Pavilion” in Prague for a fight. Later he and Berber performed a new program in Hamburg at the “Alkazar”. In the mid-1920s, Berber frequented the Original Eldorado on Martin-Luther-Strasse , where she consumed plenty of alcohol and cocaine.

In 1927 there was a break between Berber and her father. She turned her back on Germany and went on an extensive tour of the Middle East with Hofmann . On June 13, 1928, she collapsed on stage in Damascus . Weakened by long-term drug use, she became terminally ill with tuberculosis . The disease brought her back to Europe. In Prague , the couple ran out of money to continue their journey. Both came back to Berlin only with the help of donations from Berlin artists' circles. On November 10, 1928, Anita Berber died at the age of 29 in the Bethanien Hospital there of complications from her tuberculosis.

She found her final resting place in the old cemetery of the St. Thomas Parish in Berlin east of Hermannstrasse .

Honors

Anita Berber Park in Berlin

The new St. Thomas cemetery west of Hermannstrasse was acquired by the federal government in 2015 and converted into a natural green area ; it was reopened to the public as Anita Berber Park on July 10, 2017.

A bar is named after her in the Gesundbrunnen district of Berlin .

The portrait of the dancer Anita Berber by Otto Dix

In 1925, Anita Berber was "completely naked as a model for Otto Dix , who painted her as old as she never was: emaciated, sunken, wrinkled, her mouth blood-red, her complexion pale and her eyes dead-dark."

The picture was purchased by the city of Nuremberg for the municipal art collection in the Dürer year 1928 . After 1933 it was removed as degenerate . Today it can be seen in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart . It shows the actress in a red, tight-fitting, high-necked silk dress with long sleeves against a red background.

On November 5, 1991, the Deutsche Bundespost issued the picture of the dancer Anita Berber as a special stamp with an edition of 26,032,500 . The postage of the stamp was 60 pfennigs and has the Michel number 1572.

Quotes

"If the Gert the incarnate caricature of all reality, the Berber is the incarnation of parodied figures. Demonic woman through and through who was still in fashion yesterday. Vicious mouth, evil eyes, spoiled down to the hair. So she slides along. Belted around something imaginary masculine. Jerks back, beckons and acts like a bad, oppressive nightmare.
Nothing is real. Do everything with a push button. The slender hand, the snake's body whisper: Look what I can do.
Perhaps the woman from the day before yesterday was like that. Refined, fake and naively seductive. Female! And the Berbers dances all of this, or rather: they would like to. "

- Pem

Fonts

  • with Sebastian Droste: The dances of vice, horror and ecstasy . Gloriette Verlag, Vienna 1923.
    • English edition: Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy. Translated by Merrill Cole. Side Real Press, Newcastle upon Tyne 2012, ISBN 978-0-9542953-7-0 .

literature

Art portfolio

Monographs

  • Léo Lania : The dance into the dark. Anita Berber, a biographical novel. Adalbert Schultz Verlag, Berlin 1929.
  • Joe Jencík: Anita Berberová. Study . Jan Reimoser Verlag, Prague 1930.
  • Joe Jencík: Anita Berber study-new edition in German translation: K. Kieser Verlag eK, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-935456-30-2 .
  • Lothar Fischer : Anita Berber. Dance between intoxication and death. Haude & Spener, Berlin 1984; 3rd improved edition 1996, ISBN 3-7759-0410-7 .
  • Lothar Fischer: Anita Berber. Goddess of the night. Edition Ebersbach, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-938740-23-X .
  • Mel Gordon: The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Decadence. Feral House, Los Angeles 2006, ISBN 1-932595-12-0 .
  • Lothar Fischer: Anita Berber, a danced life. A biography. Hendrik Bäßler Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-930388-85-1 .

Articles (selection)

  • Klaus Mann : Memories of Anita Berber. With a photo of Madame d'Ora . In: The stage . Year 1930, issue 275. Vienna 1930, pp. 43 - 44 .
  • Ralf Georg Czapla : Danced poetry - poetic dance. Anita Berbers and Sebastian Droste's “Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy” between poetic reflection and dance improvisation. In: Johannes Birringer, Josephine Fenger (Eds.): Tanz im Kopf - Dance and Cognition. (= Yearbook of Dance Research. Volume 15). Lit, Münster et al. 2005, ISBN 3-8258-8712-X , pp. 63–79.
  • Johannes Strempel: Tomorrow morning is the end of the world. In: Michael Schaper (Ed.): The Weimar Republic. (= GEO epoch. No. 27). Gruner + Jahr, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-570-19780-6 , pp. 44-53 ( audio file at SoundCloud).

Movie

Web links

Commons : Anita Berber  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joachim Kronsbein: Sin personally . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 2007, p. 212 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b c Ricarda D. Herbrand: Goddess and Idol. Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich . Dawn of Modernity - Drugs in the Twenties (script) ( Memento from October 16, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) 2003.
  3. ↑ Berber's dances had titles such as "cocaine" or "dances of vice, horror and ecstasy"
  4. ↑ Hamburg Foreign Journal . No. 91, April 1926.
  5. ↑ Ludwig Levy-Lenz : Discrete and Indiscreet . Wadi-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1953, p. 62.
  6. ^ Willi Wohlberedt: Directory of the graves of well-known and famous personalities in Greater Berlin and Potsdam and the surrounding area . Self-published, Berlin 1932, Part IV, p. 377: Wahlstelle 2/21, no memorial, name is on the back of the bank .
  7. ↑ Anita Berber's final resting place. In: Knerger.de. Retrieved January 29, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Anita-Berber-Park formerly St. Thomas Friedhof , accessed on June 2, 2017
  9. ↑ Otto Dix: Anita Berber. Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, illustration.
  10. ^ Postage stamp 1991
  11. ↑ Paul Marcus [di Pem ]: Die vom Brettl . In: The Bachelor . No. 24, June 3, 1926, p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Berber, Anita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dancer and actress
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH November 10, 1928
Place of death Berlin