Dancing decadence: Anita Berber
Dr Adam Alston (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Fig. 1: Anita Berber, Berlin, 1921-25. Unknown photographer, reproduced by Michael Setzpfandt. Courtesy of Stadtmuseum Berlin – Archiv Deutsche Staatsoper.
The pejorative connotations of decadence as a moral failing or degenerate or degenerative state have often played into the pathologisation and criminalisation of specific bodies and practices. This is especially the case when these bodies and practices come to be seen as a threat to the health and integrity of a nation. Some of the most interesting examples can be found in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, when the city itself was subject to charges of miasmic contagion. ‘Even the alkaline air around the Prussian capital (Berliner Luft)’, writes performance scholar Mel Gordon in characteristically hyperbolic style, ‘was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the central nervous system, stimulating long suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity’.[1]
Dance was regarded as a vector of transmission in spreading this toxic ether. Social dancing (Tanztaumel) swept Berlin in the year following the armistice, offering writers and cultural commentators a rich repository of tropes and metaphors for describing a social, economic and political situation that appeared to be spinning out of control. In the eyes of the writer and dissident Klaus Mann,
[m]illions of helpless, impoverished, bewildered people capered and swung in a delirium of hunger and hysteria. Dance was a mania, a religion, a racket. The stock market danced. The members of the Reichstag hopped about as if mad. The poets were convulsed with rhythmic spasms. […] Small wonder that the pulsating heart of the country, the capital, was affected most perturbingly.[2]
Small wonder, then, that the associations of dance with depravity subjected the Tanztaumel to increasing scrutiny. Censorship may have been abolished with the founding of the Republic,[3] but in 1919 – alongside fishing by hand grenade – the city authorities forbade social dancing in an ill-conceived and short-lived measure to curb vice. As Gordon notes, ‘[o]n a single day in January 1919, five dance halls were raided by Berlin vice squads while frumpy streetwalkers and cocaine-Schleppers watched in bemused stupefaction’.[4] In words immortalized in a public service poster: ‘Berlin, stop and think! Your dance partner is Death’ (Berlin, halt ein! Besinne Dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod) (fig. 2).[5] Dance was legal again by the winter, tinged with a frisson of degeneracy, and the eroticized choreographic body fast became a paragon of moral decay, just as it became an emblem of liberating excess in the years following the 1921 Reparation Act and national bankruptcy.[6]
Fig. 2: ‘Berlin, halt ein! Besinne Dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod’, 1919. Unknown artist, reproduced by Oliver Ziebe. Courtesy of Stadtmuseum Berlin.
Anita Berber – ‘the high priestess of choreographic decadence’[7] – was just such a paragon, although she drew the rhetoric of toxicity surrounding social dancing toward (or rather back to) the stage. In January 1919, at the Blüthner-Saal (a performance and concert venue in Berlin), Berber presented a series of short dances that included ‘[a] pantomimic glorification of the decadent Roman emperor’ Heliogabalus that was ‘enacted with perverse ambiguity […] in a bizarre cultish ceremony […] of demonic sacrifice and ecstatic defilement’.[8] In tune with this piece, the night was rounded off with a gender queer ‘Caprice Espagnol’: a dance that would set the tone for Berber’s later appearances on stage and in public as a male dandy (fig. 2).
Fig. 3: Anita Berber in the Rudolf Nelson Revue Bitte zahlen!, 1921. Photo by Ernst Schneider, reproduced by Michael Setzpfandt. Courtesy of Stadtmuseum Berlin.
A little over a year later, and she would reprise performances from the same night at Max Reinhardt’s re-launched Berlin cabaret, the Schall und Rauch, including the ‘Caprice Espagnol’. Her celebrity was growing, helped along by appearance in films like Richard Oswald’s Lucrezia Borgia (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit (The great gambler: an image of the age, 1922), as well as sensational reports of her affairs in popular magazines. Her Nackttanz – nude dancing, a form introduced and popularized by Celly de Rheidt (Cäcilie Funk) – performed at cabarets like the Weiss Maus (White Mouse), also helped to cement her reputation as an audacious icon of the era, as well as her collaborations with her fellow enfants terribles Sebastian Droste (Willÿ Knobloch).[9] In a sequence of eleven dances gathered under the title Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauen und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy, 1922), Berber and Droste explored icons of the decadent canon like St. Sebastian, Lucrezia Borgia and Astarte (an obscure goddess of sex and war worshipped by several ancient cults, and vaunted by decadent writers like Jean Lorrain), as well as their own narcotic addictions and ailing mental and physical health. Both would reprise these themes and roles throughout their short careers, with some additional decadent favorites to boot, including Berber’s ‘Salomé, Princess of Judah’, which featured as part of a nine-part revue at Max van Gelder’s Centraal-Theater in Amsterdam in October 1926 (she may well have been inspired by the ‘Salome’ dance of Ballet Celly de Rheidt, which was essentially a Nackttanz; the company ended up fighting a legal battle in 1922 over the alleged obscenity of the dance, and was required to pay a 37,000 mark fine. Not only had Droste previously worked with Celly de Rheidt, but her Salome was also performed at the Weiss Maus, which was to become one of Berber’s haunts).[10]
Fig. 4: Anita Berber, 1921. Unknown photographer, reproduced by Michael Setzpfandt. Courtesy of Stadtmuseum Berlin – Archiv Deutsche Staatsoper.
For dance and theater scholar Karl Toepfer, Berber’s aestheticization of her addictions to a plethora of narcotics presented ‘an almost satiric critique of the pretensions to a healthy, modern identity’.[11] Sickness formed the basis of a carefully stage-managed persona in the public eye that was to manifest in equally carefully choreographed routines. For instance, in one of the better-known dances from the Tänze des Lasters series, Kokain (Cocaine, 1922), Berber stages an embattled, spasmodic body torn between a will to live and the delirious effects of a narcotic. One reviewer described the dance as ‘a product of decay’ and a ‘style of degeneracy’,[12] suggesting that her embodiment of Berlin’s ‘toxic ether’ landed with her audiences (ether was also one of Berber’s drugs of choice, particularly once mixed with chloroform and white rose petals). That this piece was set to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874) makes it tempting to position it as the epitome of Berlin’s own ‘dance of death’ in which death and sexuality perform a pas de deux across Berber’s performing body – a body that was to succumb to tuberculosis aged only twenty-nine.
Berber’s dances have been read as ‘jejune’ and derivative;[13] however, this does a disservice to what Susan Laikin Funkenstein describes as ‘a more profound understanding of her contributions’ to modern dance history that were ahead of their time.[14] Although Funkenstein is looking to put some distance between Berber’s perception as a ‘depraved vamp’ and her innovativeness as a dancer, I argue that these are mutually enriching considerations in the development of her decadent choreographies. Berber’s ‘sickness’ as an addict, her perceived corruption as a sexual libertine, and (later) her physical sickness after contracting tuberculosis were not adjacent to her work as a dancer. She danced as she lived – which is to say, decadently – just as her bohemian aestheticism makes it difficult to distinguish where her choreographies begin and end.
The decadence of Berber’s choreographies is not defined by the ‘fact’ of her addictions, or the ‘fact’ of her tuberculosis; they were decadent because of how she dealt in metaphors and choreographies of illness associated with addiction and consumption (poverty, disintegration, feverish sexual desire). Where, in Susan Sontag’s analysis, the consumptive subject is generally seen to be relieved of ‘responsibility for libertarianism, which is blamed on a state of objective, physiological decadence or deliquescence’,[15] Berber embraced that responsibility in ways that were both choreographed and theatricalized on and off the stage. She used dance as a medium for subverting the containment of desiring bodies, and the repression of how desire might find itself attached to that which eludes or undermines the ‘health’ of a physically and morally normative subject. Her performances certainly courted an appropriative, male and touristic gaze, but in ways that refused to conform with the beautified and submissive figure of the sickly tubercular or addicted victim. Hers was an art that forced confrontation with the sickness of a desiring woman who strove to define and control her own representation.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Stadtmuseum Berlin for their help in sourcing images and approving permissions.
Notes
[1] Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, 2nd edition (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2006), p. 1.
[2] Klaus Mann, The Turning Point: Thirty-Five Years in this Century (London: Victor Gollanz, Ltd., 1944), pp. 75-76.
[3] Even after the abolition of censorship, the public prosecutor could still ‘bring producers and performers to trial for violating articles 183 or 184 of the Penal Code, which prohibited public obscenity, or article 166, concerning blasphemy’. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Ma., and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 155.
[4] Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, p. 19.
[5] See Kate Elswit, ‘Berlin … Your Dance Partner Is Death’, TDR/The Drama Review, 53 (1) (Spring 2009): pp. 73-92.
[6] Between January 2021 and the summer of 1922, the exchange rate for a single US dollar fell from 7 to 7,500 marks. By the autumn of 1923, the mark was essentially worthless by comparison. See Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 126.
[7] Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, p. ix.
[8] Mel Gordon, The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006), pp. 50-51.
[9] For more on Berber’s nude dancing, see Alexandra Kolb, Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).
[10] Laurence Senelick, ed., Cabaret Performance Volume II: Europe 1920-1940: Sketches, Songs, Monologues, Memoirs (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 7-8.
[11] Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 91.
[12] Qtd. in Gordon, Seven Addictions, p. 103.
[13] Laurence Senelick, ‘The Mythical Decadence of Weimar Cabaret’, Staging Decadence Blog, 7 January 2021, accessed 3 January 2023. https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/the-mythical-decadence-of-weimar-cabaret.
[14] Susan Laikin Funkenstein, ‘Anita Berber: Imaging a Weimar Performance Artist’, Woman’s Art Journal, 26 (1) (Spring-Summer 2005): pp. 26-31 (p. 26).
[15] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 26.