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Anita Berber (10 June 1899 – 10 November 1928) 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. Born in Leipzig to Felix Berber, First Violinist with the Municipal Orchestra, 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. In 1913 Berber studied dance at Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's school in Hellerau, which included trainings in rhythmic gymnastics, harmony, and music. The next year she had left to study ballet in Berlin with Rita Sacchetto. By the age of 16, she had made her debut as a cabaret dancer and in 1917 she was working as a fashion model for Die Dame. Between 1918 and 1925, she appeared in twenty-five films. 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. 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. Berber's dances – which had names such as "Cocaine" and "Morphium" – 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. 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. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat. 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.
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