Anita Berber – Icon of Scandal
Lothar Fischer:
“Anita Berber; Ein getanztes Leben” (“Anita Berber; A Danced Life”)
208 pages, plenty of color and b/w illustrations
Hendrik Bäßler Verlag Berlin, December 2014
ISBN: 3930388855
by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2015 by Ilona Landgraf
Anita Berber needed scandal like her daily bread, commented young Klaus Mann, who was trying to become as famous a German author as his father Thomas. Mann met her in Berlin in 1924 when Berber, just 25 years old, already had become a legend. She was a stage and movie actress, a fashion and hat model, and a danseuse whose nude performances created furors. Mann continues: “Debauched middle-class girls copied Berber’s style, every prostitute aiming to be a cut above the others wanted to look like her. Post-war eroticism, cocaine, Salomé, ultimate perversity – such were the terms the mirage of her glory was made of. Besides, connoisseurs knew that she was an excellent dancer.”
In December last year the German art historian and author Lothar Fischer published a biography of Berber. “Anita Berber; Ein getanztes Leben” (“Anita Berber; A Danced Life”) is his third book about this arguably scandalous woman, the two former publications dating from 1996 and 2006 being out of print. (more…)