I suppose I should feel sad about her tragic life but instead I am inspired by her bizarre courage and her incredible art. ( )

Déjà vu. A young person with some talent – but mostly a talent for notoriety – systematically destroys their life with alcohol, drugs and sex. Not Jean-Michel Basquiat or John Belushi or Brendan Behan or Lenny Bruce or Richard Burton, but (sticking with the “B”s) somebody I had never heard of –Anita Berber.

Mel Gordon’s biography of Berber, The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber, starts out with Ms. Berber (born 1899) as a Dresden schoolgirl – her violinist father left when she was one year old, and her torch singer mother dumped Anita on her own mother. Anita was sent to a school that stressed “psychophysical training and radical revolutionary movement exercise”. (See what I mean about déjà vu? Sounds like contemporary California, not fin de siècle Saxony). The students marched everywhere to music, and Anita must have had it drummed into her that she should be a dancer. She moved to Berlin and, at age 16, appeared in a modern dance troupe. However, Anita decided she needed something to distinguish her from the rest of the ballerinas – something a little scandalous - and settled on an older lover. She promptly turned up on the doorstep of one of her mother’s “acquaintances”, a 43-year-old bachelor, and seduced him – making him promise that he would appear publically with her. (She apparently dumped him as soon as the novelty wore off, as he makes no further appearances in her story). She moved through a series of modern dance performances, and appeared as an actress in some German and Austrian films. Although she received reasonable reviews for her work, she didn’t really hit her stride until the hyperinflationary post WWI era.

Berber began dancing with less and less clothing, and engaging in more and more notorious behavior offstage. She showed up at restaurants dressed in nothing but high heels and a live chimpanzee. She engaged – or spread the rumor she was engaged – in numerous affairs with both sexes (including, supposedly, Marlene Dietrich, Leni Reifenstahl, and a mother-daughter combo into BDSM). Her dances became increasingly over the top, especially when she picked up an equally androgynous short-term (16 months) husband and dance partner, Baron von Droste. Their performance was billed as The Dances of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy, with individual numbers titled Whip Dance, Cocaine, Morphine, Prostitution and Suicide. It’s probably just as well Dancing With The Stars hadn’t been thought of yet. Droste and Berber fueled themselves with cocaine, cognac, morphine, opium, absinthe, and rose petals soaked in a mixture of chloroform and ether (that’s the seven addictions). Their romantic idyll came to an end when Droste stole Berber’s furs and jewelry, bought a ticket on the Karlsruhe, and fled to New York City (more of Droste in a moment).

Berber worked through a succession of other partners (including, at one point, six teenage girls who were available to the audience after the performance). She turned tricks herself, charging 200 marks (that’s post-inflationary marks. I hope.) Her venues became increasingly tawdry, and her performances less artistic and more chaotic. She became enraged at hecklers, smashing bottles over their heads, knocking them off their chairs with roundhouse punches, or, in one case, urinating on them from the stage (Berber was also extremely nearsighted; sometimes she couldn’t identify her target and smashed the wrong bar patron). Persona non grata on German and Austrian stages, she moved her act to the Balkans (supposedly spending time in jail in Zagreb for insulting King Peter II of Yugoslavia, but see below), then Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, and finally Beirut, where she collapsed on stage during a veil dance. She made it back to Germany to die four months later of advanced tuberculosis. She was 29 year old.

Well, that’s the story at least. Author Gordon’s style tends to be florid and sensationalist. I am dubious of many of the accounts; the foibles of celebrities tend to get exaggerated, and a number of Gordon’s sources were written just after Berber’s death and may have been taking advantage her notoriety to sell a few “tell-all” stories. One example is Berber’s alleged encounter with Peter II of Yugoslavia; as Gordon narrates it:

“To amuse herself one Sunday morning, Anita casually strolled around Zagreb’s Upper Town. There, in front of the thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, St. Mark’s Church, she spied an entourage of military officers, who had attended pre-noon mass. The local gawkers stepped back in awe as the high-ranking soldiers sauntered down the ancient steps. Anita did not move.
The leading officer noticed the haughty monocle-wearing femme. Her other eye was practically crossed. In a gentlemanly manner, the man greeted her in Serbo-Croatian. Anita replied in French, “I don’t understand your barbaric tongue.” Her tone was savage. The man she insulted was utterly startled. He was Peter II, King of Yugoslavia...”

The problem here is that the alleged exchange took place in 1926. In 1926, the king of Yugoslavia was Alexander I. Crown Prince Peter, latter King Peter II, was three years old. Thus, this is either sloppy fact checking or just plain fiction. I expect some of the other anecdotes are similar; I don’t have the resources to check. Still, if Berber did half of the things she was accused of she’d definitely be one of the all-time celebrity weirdoes.

There are no movies of Anita Berber’s dances, so there’s no way to tell how talented she actually was. Contemporary reviews of her early career were generally favorable. There are plenty of still photographs and some artist drawings; she appears waifish and heavily made-up (have to be a little careful about that, too, the orthochromatic photographic film in use at the time tends to darken reds, and thus Berber’s lips and hair are always jet black). The only one of her theatrical movies I can find online is a 1919 German version of Around the World in 80 Days, where she appears as the Aouda, the Indian suttee victim that Phineas Fogg (Conrad Veidt) rescues. Something of a change from David Niven and Shirley Maclaine, I expect.

Returning briefly to Baron von Droste, Berber’s short-time dance partner and husband: also a piece of work. Droste was born Willy Knoblach, from a middle-class family in Hamburg. Contemporary accounts say he was not as talented a dancer as Berber, but equally wacko. After absconding to New York with Berber’s resources, Droste attempted to return to the dance stage; Gordon shows a poster advertising a dance evening with “Baron Willy Sebastian von Droste, “Countess Jeanette Mlodecki”, and “The Mummy of Amenophis IV”. No reviews of the spectacle exist, although it’s safe to assume Amenophis IV’s performance was stiff. Droste then hooked up with an equally strange performer/con artist, former barber, and former fruit picker Peter Coons, alias Perry Baker, alias Pierre Bernard, alias The Omnipotent Oom. Coons/Baker/Bernard/Oom had somehow talked several wealthy backers, included members of the Goodrich and Vanderbilt families, into financing a Tantric Yoga sex resort in Nyack, New York. The lavishly equipped site included a theater, a lecture hall, meeting rooms, an indoor swimming pool, an airstrip, and an elephant stables. Oom’s wife, ex-showgirl Blanche DeVries, acted as Kama Sutra instructor. Prefiguring the political activities of the Rajneeshis in Oregon, Oom campaigned and won office as a county commissioner. Droste (now Baron Droste von Knoblach) seems to have acted as sort of an event arranger for Oom; he is credited as the designer for The Tantrik [sic] Ceremony of Mystic Love, celebrating the renewal of marriage vows for a Pittsburg stockbroker and his wife. The affair is illustrated with a couple of blurry newspaper photographs and a drawing; the photographs show a personage seated on a throne, a couple of thinly clad female dancers, two arguably East Indians engaged in a sword fight, and some attendants standing around with peacocks on their shoulders. The drawing shows a procession; leading things off are a tuxedoed man and a much younger woman in white (presumably the Pittsburg broker and wife in their original wedding garb) followed by a procession of men and women carrying torches and shouldering a pair of coffins. The men are dressed in black as monks; the women are in white nun’s habits, slit to the hip. I hope the couple had a good time.

As mentioned, I’m not at all sure of the historicity here, but Anita Berber’s life can be seen as a reminder that most of the eccentricities of modern celebrities have precedents. I want to find out more about the Nyack sex cult. ( )

Why would anyone want to read Mel Gordon’s The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber? Why indeed! George Santayana, the American philosopher whose most significant contribution to his discipline, Aesthetics, might well have been The Sense of Beauty, once famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This copiously illustrated, non-fiction treatise is as much about the Weimar Republik, pre-war Berlin, hyper-inflationary Germany, and the lengths—or depths—to which the human spirit and body can go—or descend—as it is about the dancer, Anita Berber. I stumbled upon it almost by accident. I’m glad I did. You may well stumble upon this review by accident. If so, call it ‘serendipity’—and consider reading this book (or any other you can find about Anita Berber) if for no other reason than to get a sense of the time and times. Those we live in now are a distant cousin—related, to be sure, but not yet living under the same roof. We might well want to find a way to ensure that that cousin never comes to visit, much less stay.

Allow me to quote the entire last paragraph on p. 164, just opposite the magnificent full-length portrait of Anita Berber by the German Expressionist, Otto Dix.

“Hans Feld, in the Film-Kurier (November 13, 1928), wrote that although Anita was condemned as ‘an incarnation of the perverse,’ she represented an entire generation. Anita had led the fight between bourgeois parents and their freethinking offspring, protested against the rigidity of authoritarian teachers, embodied the thoughts and desires of an unfettered, liberated world. The details of her life and career could be forgotten, but her overall influence could not be so easily put to rest.”

“(C)ould not be so easily put to rest”? In the decade leading up to the Third Reich and WWII, Anita Berber may well have been her generation’s foremost performance artist — much like a Madonna or a Lady Gaga today. In any event, her body was likely the best-known in Europe; her mores, possibly unsurpassed in depravity by anyone of any note.

Would I, from these Puritan United States of America, condemn such a woman — or at least her behavior? Not on your life! The only aspect of that behavior I would roundly condemn is Anita Berber’s almost rampant—not to say ‘obsessive’ — consumerism. I understand her drug addiction—particularly under the circumstances I briefly mention in the second paragraph of this review. I sympathize with her art — with or without clothes, with or without a snake as partner. What I don’t understand and can’t sympathize with, however, is her mad love affair with expensive jewels and clothes (when she chose to wear any at all). This, too, has parallels in our own times and with many of our so-called ‘artistes.’ It is a sad, sad commentary on so-called “free choice” when those who would otherwise create and invent have to resort to obsessive binges on “bling” to fill the void in their lives.

RRB
12/08/12
Brooklyn, NY
( )

Although the life of the notorious Weimar Berlin dancer Anita Berber is full of enough drama, eroticism, depravity and conflict to fill a dozen books, Mr. Gordon's treatment is oddly flat, even sterile. The facts are all there, but none of the emotion. Sadly, this book did not engage this reader. ( )

Not particularly well-written, but with such a life why would you care? ( )