While the second dance sequence is known, I believe that the first has never been noticed before. And it is this first performance that takes us a little nearer to the extraordinarily extreme Berber of the decadent 'Die Weisse Maus' [‘White Mouse’] cabaret in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.
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| Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber in 1922 |
Finally, there is a single dance sequence by Sebastian Droste, Anita Berber’s husband and collaborator, extreme dancer, gay poet and actor. It is a performance that seems to capture something of one of the kinds of perfume exuded in Berlin cabaret clubs during the Wiemar Republic. The fragment comes Hans Werckmeister’s 1920 'Algol - Tragödie der Macht' ('Tragedy of Power'), a film thought lost until a print was discovered in 2010.
Anita Berber, more than almost anyone, epitomises for me the excesses and decadences of the German Roaring Twenties, with its fascination with addiction, morbidity, narcissism, ecstasy and horror.
Addicted to cocaine and morphine, the bisexual Berber's drug of choice was equal parts of chloroform and ether. She would dip a white rose into the potentially lethal concoction and slowly chew off each of the petals. She later segued into a cocktail of cocaine, opium and cognac.
As a stage performer, Berber gave extreme erotic fantasy pieces with dancer, poet and husband Sebastian Droste - 'Suicide', 'Morphium' and 'Mad House'.
She famously appeared, often naked, at 'Die Weisse Maus' ('The White Mouse') cabaret in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. This was a small exclusive cabaret club of ninety-nine seats, where the audience wore masks for anonymity.
Of her performances there, it has been written:
"After midnight, the guests were ready for the apocalyptic moment when the blouse-less girls pranced up the stage ramp. Anita's girls were powdered in deadly pallid shades and appeared like figures of death incarnate.
But Anita performed with bitter sincerity. Each intrusion annoyed her. She responded to the audience's heckling with show-stopping obscenities and indecent provocations.
Berber had been known to spit brandy on them or stand naked on their tables, dousing herself in wine whilst simultaneously urinating. It was not long before the entire cabaret one night sank into a groundswell of shouting, screams and laughter. Anita jumped off the stage in fuming rage, grabbed the nearest champagne bottle and smashed it over a businessman's head.'
It was Anita's last evening, she was sacked without notice.'
Berber's relationships were as unconventional and complicated as her stage endeavours.
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| Berber in the 1920s |
She married wealthy young screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusiu in 1919, but soon after began a series of lesbian affairs, including one with the young Marlene Dietrich. At the same time, she explored the world of free-lancing S and M sex. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1921.
In the following year, Berber met dancer and poet Sebastian Droste and understood that together they could create something theatrically bold, new and shocking, such as their production 'The Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy'. They married in 1923. However, the pair drifted into greater cocaine use and the relationship failed.
Then in 1924, she married American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman, whom she'd met at Berlin's Blüthne-Saal. They began performing through Europe and the Middle East with their new production 'Dances of Sex and Ecstasy'. But in Zagreb, Berber publicly insulted the King of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned for six weeks. Returning to Berlin, the pair returned to the cabaret circuit.
Almost appropriately Anita Berber died in 1928, surrounded by statues of the Virgin Mary and empty morphine syringes. Or so the myth went -- in fact she collapsed while performing at a Beirut nightclub. She was diagnosed with a state of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and died four months later in Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg.
There is not a large visual record of this extraordinary Wiemar Republic icon.
While in Düsseldorf in 1925, Otto Dix painted her portrait 'The Dancer Anita Berber', unofficially known as 'The Scarlet Whore of Babylon'.
Berber also appeared in nine silent films in the teens and twenties.
She played Else (with Conrad Veidt) in the 1919 Richard Oswald film 'Anders als die Anderen' ('Different From The Others'), a film based on the work of famed pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirshfeldt.
She also appeared briefly and uncredited as the tuxedo-ed dancer in Fritz Lang's 1922 four hour silent epic 'Doktor Mabuse Der Spieler' ('The Gambler').
In 1925 in New York City, dancer Sebastian Droste met Francis Bruguière (1879 – 1945) a photographer from San Francisco, and together they composed over 60 photographs for a project they titled The Way, part of the promotional material for a proposed Expressionist film starring Droste.
The film never got made, but Droste sent a handful of the stills to Die Dame magazine with an article titled Photography As Art: Remarks on Recent Photographs by Francis Bruguière. Bruguière made his living photographing for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and as the official photographer of the New York Theatre Guild.
Droste is rarely remembered anymore except in the context of his brief collaboration with Weimar, Berlin’s most notorious cabaret performer.
He was born Willy Knobloch in Hamburg in 1898. His father owned a silk-stocking factory in Chemnitz, and Droste lived a privileged life growing-up. As a teenager he attended an art school where he excelled in languages and dance. He was drafted into the army in 1915 and fought on the Western Front. When he turned 27-years-old in 1919, he moved to Berlin and changed his name to Sebastian Droste.
He was hired by Celly De Rheidt as a lead dancer in her cabaret show Dance Of Beauty. He became a moderately successful ”naked” dancer, choreographer and poet. His first poem appeared in Der Sturm magazine in 1919, which published 15 more of his pieces in the following years.
He took the name of the near-naked, arrow-pierced saint whose martyrdom he burlesqued in his stage act. In costume or as a civilian, he embodied a dark, calculated glamour inspired the nightmarish contemporary expressionistic German cinema. His drug taking was the greatest factor in the success or failure of a any given night’s performance of his stage act.
In the summer of 1922, he met the decadent, androgynous Anita Berber; both were fame hungry cocaine addicts. Berber’s hair was fashionably cut into a short bob and was frequently bright red, seen in the 1925 portrait of her by the German painter Otto Dix. Droste was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls that looked like sideburns. In their act neither of them wore much more than G-strings, or even that, and Berber occasionally wore a corsage, placed below her boobs. She wore heavy make-up with jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes.
Their dances, with titles such as Cocaine and Morphium, broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was their public appearances that really challenged the social taboos of the era. Their bisexuality was much gossiped about. In addition to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of the pair’s favorite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl, stirred with a white rose, the petals of which they would then eat.
Droste was the perfect partner for Berber. He became her manager and together they produced The Dances Of Depravity, Horror And Ecstasy which was staged in a theatre in Vienna and then toured in 1922 and 1923.
Droste and Berber were combustible in combination. He was as much a hustler as an artist, finding a way to repackage Expressionism and other avant-garde trends in a way that could be absorbed by the club-hopping bourgeoisie. The 1920s were a decade whose excesses were reflected, exaggerated, and grotesqued in the clubs and cabarets of Germany.
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, 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. Berber was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.
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