The downfall of Berlin’s Queen of the Night

She named her shows after the typical drugs of the 1920s: “cocaine”, “morphine” and “dances of vice, horror and ecstasy”. Anita Berber danced and lived the excess, the escapades, the escape from a bourgeois life like hardly any other woman of that time. Berlin loved and loved the wicked queen of nightlife. The audience ran to her performances and then spoke up about the sexual desire of this non-conformist woman. Armin Fuhrer dedicated himself to the rise and fall of Berlin’s first queer icon in his book “Sextropolis”, published by Berlin’s Bebra-Verlag.

Anita Berber becomes famous as a dancer, actress and scandal figure. The end of her career (and therefore her life) is heralded by, of all people, a colleague. Josephine Baker, a dancer from Paris, heats up tempers in Berlin and immediately creates a packed theater. She took the hearts of Berliners by storm – she is humorous, friendly, and open to life. Completely different from Anita Berber, who was always surrounded by a dark aura in a whirlpool of drugs, depression and abysses. Baker celebrated great success in Berlin from 1926; Anita Berber has to painfully learn that her time is over. It is no longer “state of the art,” is how guide Anita Berber describes the end of her career.

Josephine Baker is also bisexual and begins an affair with the It girl of the Weimar Republic: Ruth Landshoff. But unlike Anita Berber, Baker is courted by the big names in Berlin’s urban society.

Sex, drugs, scandal: Anita Berber is loved by the press

Berber enters into a scandalous liaison with the drug-addicted dandy Sebastian Droste. As a dancing couple, they caused scandals and headlines in Vienna in the winter of 1922 with their dark-sexual program “Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy”. After this relationship ended, her collaboration with the dancer Henri Châtin Hofmann, her third husband, was a hit with the German-speaking tabloid press. In Berlin they caused a stir with a live dance performance in a film screening of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” in the Capitol cinema, in which they appeared completely naked.

Their dance program “Dances of Eroticism and Ecstasy” involves both of them in scandals at almost every venue: fights, canceled performances, drug use. In Zagreb, Anita Berber was imprisoned for six weeks because she first refused to avoid a group of officers in front of a church, including, unfortunately for her, King Peter II of Yugoslavia, and then snapped at the king that she was “his barbaric “Language” cannot be understood.

Further “scandals surrounding the Berbers” followed in Berlin. The capital’s press pounces on the dancer who doesn’t adhere to social norms. Sometimes her breasts are not properly covered, sometimes the Berlin police chief demands that her pieces be taken down.

Cover: Bebra-Verlag

Armin Führer: Sextropolis

Anita Berber and the wild Berlin of the 1920s

Published by Bebra-Verlag.
Hardcover, 300 pages, 20 illustrations,
24 euros.

According to author Armin Fuhrer, the pastor of her childhood and youth, with whom she had a trusting relationship for many years, spontaneously and unrecognized attended one of her performances. He later writes: “Then she appeared; Tears came to my eyes because all the make-up and tinsel couldn’t hide how sick she was.” Pastor Johannes Kessler leaves the hall and later writes her a card: “My dear confirmation child, you are dancing into the abyss!” He offers help. Anita doesn’t answer. Neither with him nor with others. She is heavily dependent on alcohol and cocaine. Before most performances, she is said to have drunk an entire bottle of cognac without anyone noticing the quantities she was drinking.

Magnus Hirschfeld takes Anita Berger into the institute

After the hotels no longer give her credit, the Berlin sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld takes her into his institute. Her health is already at rock bottom. In her last major interview, which she gave to the Hungarian newspaper Pesti Napló in August 1927, 15 months before her death, she marveled that after the high doses of morphine she “never fell asleep for eternity.” She wants a quiet life, unable to lead one like that, “a little dance once a week at five o’clock tea at the Bristol or Adlon.” This remains pure fiction.

The last attempt to get around the corner also fails. She is embarking on a tour through southern Europe and the Middle East with her dance, spouse and life partner Henri Châtin Hofmann, Athens, Cairo and Beirut. In Damascus she collapses and becomes delirious. The couple returns to Berlin. It takes them four long months to get back, in between which Anita Berber sold her jewelry to be able to buy tickets for the Orient Express. They sleep in tents in the cold desert. Anita Berber is broke and the trip is expensive. After her return, she was taken to the Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg in terrible health, where she died on November 10, 1928.

The great achievement of the author Armin Fuhrer is that he unearths authentic treasures from the archives. Contemporary witness reports such as theater reviews, interviews with the actress and dancer, portraits in the popular magazines of the 1920s. Anita Berber was at the height of the times and was portrayed by Otto Dix in 1925.

Fuhrer, who has also written books about the 1920s, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and the year 1968, tells Anita Berber’s life very approachably, lively, truthfully and as dramatically as she, the Queen of the Night, lived it.