The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber
Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity
By Mel Gordon

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of the notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s.

In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber’s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.

Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine.

• This illustrated biography includes nearly two hundred photographs and illustrations, including some that recreate Berber’s salacious and enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.”
• Berber was a lover of Marlene Dietrich and influenced and associated with Leni Riefenstahl, Lawrence Durrell, Klaus Mann, and the founder of modern sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld.
• An early movie star, Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and the silent epic Lucifer.
  
  

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber
Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity
By Mel Gordon

7 x 10, 213 pages, color and B&W photos and illustrations, ISBN 1-932595-12-0, $22.95

Pub Date: July 2006