- German exotic dancer, cabaret artiste and actress, the daughter of a violin virtuoso. She studied acting under Maria Moissi (1915) and dancing under Rita Sacchetto. Berber began on stage in Berlin in 1917 and quickly made headlines, as much for being the first sexually explicit nude dancer of the silent screen, as for her dissolute and scandal-ridden private life. Addicted to alcohol and cocaine, she died aged 29 of consumption.
- By the latter stages of her career, she was banned from most European venues, expelled from Vienna and rejected by her father.
- Captured in a 1925 painting by Otto Dix, wearing a tomato-red "Morphine" costume, on exhibit at the 2006-07 "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s" show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
- Often seen wandering the streets of Berlin with a pet monkey around her neck.
- A 1987 film by Rosa von Praunheim titled Anita - Tänze des Lasters centers around the life of Anita Berber.
- The band Death in Vegas named a song after her, which is on the album Satan's Circus. It is frequently used on the NPR radio show This American Life.
- Her second marriage-in 1922-was to Sebastian Droste. This lasted until 1923. In 1925, she married a gay American dancer named Henri Chatin-Hofmann.
- In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber's favorites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
- After an acting and dance education in 1915 she made her debut as a dancer one year later in Berlin. She soon became a wicked star of the Berlin night life because of her nude dances and behavior.
- By 1918 she was working in film, and she began dancing nude in 1919. 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.
- Her hair was cut fashionably into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled "The Dancer Anita Berber".
- Cocaine, morphine and alcohol were her companions.
- 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 low slung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage worn well below her small breasts.
- Her performances broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged taboos.
- The actress and dancer Anita Berber is the epitome of the Roaring 20's which she lived up till to excess.
- According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery, she was 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. She was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.
- Berber's overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter.
- Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, she was also a heavy alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. She was said to be surrounded by empty morphine syringes.
- In 1919, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a man with the surname Nathusius. She later left him in order to pursue a relationship with a woman named Susi Wanowski, and became part of the Berlin lesbian scene.
- She was also an example of the world of fashion as well as for contemporary women who liked to copy her appearance. Anita Berber wore pants as the first woman and they called this fashion trend "à la Berber".
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