Anita Berber: Dance Hard, Die Young
Unlike the “Blond Hans,” who made regular appearances in Sigrid Schultz’s letters and memoirs, Schultz mentioned Expressionist dancer, cabaret artist, and actress Anita Berber (1899-1928) only once. A year after Berber’s death, Schultz described Berber as “the wild woman of inflation days—who burned away her great dancing talent with dope and wild parties, portraying her feverish time in a mask of green and purple make-up.”*
Berber made her debut at the Blüthnersaal, one of Berlin’s major performance venues, on February 24, 1916, at the age of sixteen, as a part of a performance by Rita Sacchetto’s dancing school.** Sacchero’s pieces alluded to classical antiquity in their titles and relied on a modern movement vocabulary and scanted costumes.
She quickly made a name for herself in Berlin and was working in movies by 1918. Dancing on her own, or with her second husband and dance partner, Sebastian Droste, Berber’s work moved beyond the mild titillation of Sacchero’s choreography, creating works that were overtly sexual and often transgressive. She appeared as a dancer and actress in at least twenty-four silent films between 1918 and 1925, occasionally nude and always provocative.
Berber’s costumes ranged from cross-dressing tuxedos*** to complete nudity. She wore heavy dancer’s make-up, which appears as jet-black lipstick and charcoal-circled eyes in the black and white photographs of the period, though Schultz’s description suggests a more colorful palette.
She was as famous for being a wild child as she was for her art. According to her contemporary, actor and choreographer Joe Jencik, “The public never appreciated Anita’s artistic expression, only her public transgressions in which she trespassed the untouchable line between the stage and the audience.” Her bisexuality, heavy alcohol consumption, and drug use were the fodder for gossip columns, as was her generally scandalous behavior. In addition to taking cocaine, opium and morphine, she reportedly combined chloroform and ether in a bowl, stirred them with a white rose, and then ate the rose petals. It is hard to know which details are true, or what they meant. Berber was a proto-performance artist who often fused her life and art in dramatic gestures on and off stage.
Berber was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1928 at the age of 29 while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany, where she died.
She is best known today because expressionist Otto Dix painted her portrait as a sensuous lady in red.
* Hyperinflation hit Germany in 1923, creating an economic frenzy that paralleled the social frenzy of Germany’s Jazz Age. In the summer of 1922, the exchange rate was 400 marks per dollar. By January 1, 1923, the mark’s value had dropped to 7,000 marks per dollar and sank at an increasing speed thereafter. By mid-November, the rate was 1.3 trillion marks to the dollar. It was 1925 before the economy settled into a brief golden age before the Great Depression.
**Rita Sacchetto (1880-1959), whose work was inspired by that of American dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, was a leader of the expressive dance style that [bloomed] in Germany during this period.
***Well before Marlene Dietrich did the same.
***
I don’t know whether Sigrid Schultz met Anita Berber, or even saw her perform.
And speaking of Sigrid Schultz, The Dragon From Chicago is available for pre-order wherever you buy your books. You can get a signed copy for yourself or your favorite wild child from my neighborhood bookstore, the Seminary Coop: https://www.semcoop.com/dragon-chicago-untold-story-american-reporter-nazi-germany . Use the special instructions box to tell me how you want it signed.
From the Archives: Rival Queens
Nancy Goldstone has made a career of telling the often forgotten and always dramatic stories of powerful women in medieval Europe.* In The Rival Queens: Catherine de' Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom, Goldstone turns her attention to Renaissance France and its role in the growing struggle between Catholics and Protestants across Europe.
The betrayal to which the title refers is the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of French Huguenots were killed when they gathered in Paris to attend the unwilling Marguerite's wedding to her Protestant cousin, Henry of Navarre. In fact, the massacre is only the most extreme of the betrayals--personal and political alike--which Goldstone describes.
Goldstone overturns the ruling historical evaluation of Catherine as an able, if Machiavellian, ruler and Marguerite as a sensual dilettante. Instead, she shows Catherine manipulating her children in order to maintain her power in France. Marguerite stands in counterpoint to her, growing into a woman of courage and integrity. Goldstone makes a compelling case for both portrayals, using first-hand accounts from the period, including Marguerite's memoir.
Firmly rooted in history, The Rival Queens combines the pageantry and passion of a Philippa Gregory novel with the Byzantine plot and violence of A Game of Thrones. It is a story of intra-family rivalry taken to the level of "scheming and conspiracy, treason and treachery". Religion is its battlefield; sex, tale bearing and the withholding of maternal love its primary weapons.
*Including The Maid and the Queen, yet another contemporary retelling of Joan of Arc's story.
Ellen Church: “Sky Girl”
Ellen Church was born in 1904, a year after the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. As a young girl, she saw airplanes perform at the country fair near her hometown of Cesco, Iowa. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly.
After graduating from high school, she moved to the Twin Cities, where she earned a degree in nursing. From there, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a hospital nurse and finally earned her pilot’s license.*
In 1930, she decided to try to turn her love of flying into a career. She applied for a job at Boeing Air Transport,** which had the contract to fly the mail between San Francisco and Chicago. They turned her down—like other airlines B.A.T. only hired male pilots. During her “interview,”the manager at the San Francisco office, Steve Simpson, told her that the airline planned to hire male stewards—a new idea that some European airlines were testing.
Airlines in the United States had begun offering passenger service only a few years earlier, in 1926. The planes carried a pilot, a co-pilot and twelve passengers. The co-pilot had the job of handing out box lunches and taking care of passengers who were frightened or airsick—both common conditions at the time because plane rides were bumpy. The addition of a steward as a third crew member meant that the co-pilot could concentrate on his primary job and passengers could received more attention.
Church argued that women with nursing degrees would make passengers more comfortable than a male steward. Simpson agreed to give her a three month trial, and the authority to hire seven other nurses to work on the planes. B.A.T. called them “Sky Girls.”
The trial was a great success and other airlines began to hire young nurses to work as stewardesses, or air hostesses. By 1933, 100 women worked as stewardesses.
In addition to being nurses,*** stewardesses had to be single. They could weigh no more than 115 pounds and be no taller than 5’ 4” tall. The upper age limit was 25. In addition to caring for sick or frightened passengers, their duties included taking tickets, handling luggage, passing out lunches, cleaning the inside of the plane, and tightening the bolts that held the seats to the floor.
Church’s career as a Sky Girl only lasted eighteen months, due to an automobile accident. But she entered a second stage in her aviation career in World War II. When the United States entered the war, she joined the Army Nurse Corps. She helped evacuate wounded soldiers from Africa and Italy by air and trained other evacuation nurses in preparation for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Captain Ellen Church received the Air Medal,in recognition of her “meritorious achievement in aerial flight,” the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with seven bronze service stars, the American Theater Campaign Medal, and the Victory Medal.
*A generation after the first American women pilots got their licenses.
**A predecessor of United Air Lines
***The requirement that stewardesses have a nursing degree ended with the beginning of World War II, when the military’s need for nurses was more important than the airlines desire to hire nurses as stewardesses.In fact, the military’s need for nurses was so great that Congress debated whether or not to draft nurses in 1945.