Anita Berber
- Berlin 1933 -B33- Wizards & Witches
Sobriquet: Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery
Appearance: Scandalously androgynous, she quickly made a name for herself. She wore heavy dancer's make-up, which on the black-and-white photos and films of the time came across as jet black lipstick painted across the heart-shaped part of her skinny lips, and charcoaled eyes. Her hair was cut fashionably into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled "The Dancer Anita Berber". Her dancer friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than lowslung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage worn well below her small breasts.
Behavior: Her performances broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged taboos. Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, she was also a heavy alcoholic. Berber's overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter. In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber's favorites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.
History: Born in Leipzig to Felix Berber, First Violinist with the Municipal Orchestra, and Lucie Berber, an aspiring actress and singer, who later divorced, she was raised mainly by her grandmother in Dresden. By the age of 16, she had moved to Berlin and made her debut as a cabaret dancer. By 1918 she was working in film, and she began dancing nude in 1919. That same year, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a man with the surname Nathusius. She later left him in order to pursue a relationship with a woman named Susi Wanowski, and became part of the Berlin lesbian scene. She married a second time in 1922 to Sebastian Droste. This lasted until 1923. In 1925, she married a gay American dancer named Henri Chatin-Hofmann.
In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. She was said to be surrounded by empty morphine syringes. According to Mel Gordon, in "The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery", she was diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928. She was buried in a pauper's grave in St. Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln.
Secrets: In late 1928, Anita suffered some form of attack, although her physician observed a host of symptoms belonging to a variety of very serious diseases, all tests proved inconclusive. For days after her return from Damascus, she suffered in a state of unconscious agony. When she finally awoke, she awoke completely, in the wake of her illness a small group of Ecstatics made their way to her bedside where they held vigil for her, even against the wishes of her physician and hospital administrators. After her awakening, she was taken in by the Cabal of Sensuality and she was purified of her addictions and venereal diseases. They taught her their secret history, traditions, rites and rituals. When her Avatar fully manifested, she was deemed prepared to care for herself and she was left to her own devices. The last few years, she has created a secret gathering spot, called the Theatre of the Unamed, for the Awakened denizens of Berlin and she is known to many of them as a friend.
Recent Events: Having sensed a conglomeration of temporal rifts that opened in the city shortly after Adolf Hitler's assumption of the Chancellorship, she called upon bother her mundane patrons and awakened allies to aid her in finding the source of this temporal disruption. While doing so, she remains carefully ensconced in her sanctum within the Theatre of the Unnamed, safe from the variety of new supernatural forces that have erupted in Berlin of late. Secretly she fears that these temporal manifestations may be connected to the string of grisly arcane murders that her allies in the Berlin police force have brought to her in the hopes that macabre pattern of killings can finally be broken. The arrival in Berlin of the ancient Euthanatos Senex, has only confirmed her growing fears and at his request, she has opened the doors of her sanctum to a newly awakened woman who he claims as his apprentice. While the woman, Liselotte appears to be of a similar age, Anita has detected a fading nimbus of temporal paradox surrounding her and suspects, rightly, that she is one of several temporal travelers in Berlin.
