The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Decadence

This book is very well illustrated, and that alone is probably worth the five stars, but it also contains some narrative-style history about Anita Berber and her role in the volatile world of Weimar-era Berlin. It is not exceedingly deep history, so if you are seeking a very scholarly monograph this may not meet your needs, but as a general guide and a way to place Anita Berber in the general context of Berlin in the 1920s, this is a good book.

This is a quick read: most of it is double-spaced; there are a lot of pictures; there are pages of expressionist poetry by Berber or one of her husbands; there are descriptions of her dance routines. It's an interesting book just the same and I enjoyed reading it. It took me two days. Gordon put together a pleasing biographical narrative from a number of foreign sources, including non-English autobiographies, German magazines, and newspapers of the day. He neither extols Anita as a liberated woman nor labels her self-destruction as the death of a reprobate. He doesn't psychoanalyze her post facto but recounts her actions--many of which were seriously outrageous--in a matter-of-fact manner. Consequently the narrative may strike some as remote and indifferent or, on the other hand, as an attempt not to get in the way of a good story that is absurd in its own right. Berber was an expressionist dancer in Weimar Berlin as Germany changed from a self-assured, tightly controlled, buttoned-down society to one awash with cynicism, war guilt, debt and anxiety. The smart urban set who could still afford a nightlife cast their sentiments with avant-garde artistes who had protested Wilhelmian sexual and lifestyle repression through dance and graphic art for years. This became the "in" thing. Turning nineteen in this atmosphere the red-haired Ms. Berber, daughter of a dancer and trained as a dancer herself, ran wholly amuck with help from her bohemian friends. Pronouncedly narcissistic (she was a teen-ager after all), stoned continuously on cocaine and brandy, paid well to titillate audiences with nude dancing, there was little she would not do. Gordon quotes accounts of the day that she had a beautiful, boyish body and genuine talent as an experimental dancer. Her sexual paramours included the young, the old, men, women, and children. She enjoyed appearing nude in public places like restaurants and hotel lobbies to cause a stirr. Within a few years fickle popular trends shifted away from uninhibited dances that celebrated sex and drugs. Added to this, Ms. Berber's young body was slowly breaking down under a nightly onslaught of drugs and alcohol coupled with strenuous physical demands of dancing. Her cocaine habit turned her impulsively angry; she lashed out at critics in the audience with empty Champaign bottles; her bookings at nightclubs dried up. By the age of twenty-eight she was no longer avant-garde and was forced to tour. The next year she developed fatal tuberculosis and came home to Berlin to die. She was buried, according to Gordon, in a pauper's grave. The reader may make of that what he or she will--as Gordon would have it. Either she was a beautiful spark of liberation or a young girl living her short life out in a fool's paradise of her own and other's making.

This book is less about Anita Berber than it is about the decadent social scene of Weimar Germany and Berlin in particular. Anyone who thinks the 60s were the decade of sex, drugs and rock and roll should read this book and get some history. Sex, drugs and jazz dominated the Weimer "club scene". Nude dancing, drinking and druggging, homosexuality, S/M/B/D...how like the Nazis to come in and ruin a good thing.