Barber Perfect is too much the old Schule Prussian gentleman to give any more details than you need to know. But you could tell that Anita Berber had put the hook in deep. Barber's a good looking guy in a Götterdämmerung kind of way. Tall enough for the SS, broad shouldered, and evenly muscled. He's got scars - but then everyone connected with Kenny La Roche has scars. Jayne Hill has a delicious meander on the back of a thigh; it feels like a coastline when you're touching it with just the tips of two fingers. Barber's back is a cobweb of ancient lacerations. Whenever Anita rises in his memory his physical features slump. His face visibly lengthens. His voice falls an octave. She still fucks him up. And incredible as it is to seem - it's been the better part of a century. Up near Königsberg, on the Sambian Peninsula, Barber is restoring on old Schloss built by the Teutonic Knights in their Crusade for the "Conversion" of Prussia. He keeps a small photograph of Anita in a solid Silver frame on the mantle of the fireplace in the Library Room. The oak mantel is 10' long and nothing else is on it.
Anita Berber was a bad girl. And she was a bad girl in exactly the way that men love women to be wicked. Her Bio bills her as a Dancer first, and then also an Actress and a drug addled Whore. She was born at the dawn of the 20th Century and was dead before she was 30. Like Lucky, she was born into a Musical family: her father was a classical Violinist and her mother was a sultry singer in Leipzig Cabarets. As a precocious teen she studied dance and rhythmic gymnastics. By 18 she was modeling for fashion magazines and - like Fernande - doing a bit of Postcard Posing for ready cash. Weimer Germany was expensive - especially the things that you wanted at night - so a girl did what was necessary. In 1918 you could smell Death in every direction and nothing turns Eros up to a feverish thumping better than Old Shatterhand himself. Berlin throbbed. Berlin moaned. Berlin stank of Ficksaft the way some cities reek of urine. Nitetime in Berlin was as close as you could come to the Kenosis of Sin itself. Barber was horrified by it. And he was pulled into it. And he loved it with the deep loathing of a Serious Christian Criminal. So did Anita Berber - who was acting in Silent Movies and "Sex Education" films and learning how to hone her lithe gymnastics to Erotic Dancing. Some of the Etics will claim that Anita was the 1st Woman to dance completely naked onstage - but that treats history as a very narrow band of only those things recorded. Salomé was dancing 7 veils, not 8. Women have been coaxed onto a platform to dance nekid since there have been platforms or raised mud mounds. If there's a high spot where men can squat around there will soon be a girl earning supper in front of them. Dick Dawkins says that shit's Darwinian. Sexual Display is the engine which guides our Selections. Any young woman with the Graces will find a fashion to display them. Most men will follow the cues of fertility a long ways into Hell. Sex is first and foremost a Dance among animals with vertebrae. Anita Berber knew that in her genes. She and Berlin shared the same soul.
Her drugs were Cognac and Cocaine. Though her days often started with Marijuana, Hashish, Opium, Ether, or Sister Mary Morphine. She was a Connoisseur of Altered States and Somatic Stews where she swore she could feel her orgasms in her teeth. She was PanSexual and adored a good Gruppenfick - I heard Barber once, when he was piss-drunk, use the term 'Fahrstuhlnummer' - which means she would fuck you in an elevator. Anita was every man's dream and nightmare. Boyish, with small, perfect tits and impossibly long, thin legs - she had a wispy snatch that men and women worshipped and which she loved to show. Barber bought her a white baby-grand piano for her apartment she shared with the 175er Sebastian Droste. Droste was openly Gay and Anita was Open. So they got married and created their Opus: Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase. "Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy." Barber was helping them write the music while the 2 of them choreographed their dark, hallucinogenic fantasies. When several workmen delivered the huge piano to the 3rd floor apartment and stood panting and sweating from the work, Droste said to give them a few Marks for das Trinkgeld. Anita said no, they could buy their own drinks and that she'd give them what they came to see. Then she opened her white silk robe and stood naked in front of them so they could see her fickspalte. "Muschisaft?" she asked them. The 4 workers stood frozen in fear and wonder. She touched herself and then touched each of them lightly on their lips.
The 'Dances of Depravity' was composed of 11 dance and tableau vignettes. They had names like: Byzantine Whip, Cocaine, Martyr, Suicide, Vision, Morphine, and Lunatic Asylum. The 11th in the cycle was called Night of the Borgias and ended with Anita as Lucrezia fully naked and standing pale white against the blackened set. Her body was elongated by the shadowless wash of the Cabaret's lights and you could see something of El Greco in the Akt. Droste is in the pose of Caesar Borgia, her father. The dance ends as the nude daughter crosses the stage and pulls her equally naked father down on top of her as the stage dims to blackout. Goddamn it! The Angst and Concupiscence! The erotic mingling of revulsion and pure joy! Incest! Yes, yes, yes! The Berliner's could not get enough of it. The Churches bemoaned the 'filth' and the 'rot' of it all. But filth and rot are the Nigredo and the Nigredo is Gravity and pulls everything towards the Athanor. Everything pulled towards the furnace. So Anita danced on and she got kinkier and kinkier and there were rumors of orgies and bestiality and sex with Negroes and other Jazz Giants. Otto Dix immortalized her in his painting as the "Scarlet Whore of Berlin." He painted her as a Vampire, ravaged by drugs and a 'tausendmeilen die schwanz' - and because he knew that she would never live to grow old, Dix painted her as she would have been at 60 - ravaged and destroyed - like her entire generation. In 1928 Anita Berber got a bad cough and died in November. She was 29. Faggots, transvestites, hookers, pimps, drug addicts, thieves, murderers, con-men, counts, judges, preachers, and priests were at the funeral which was more a long, last bender for the age than a solemn Catholic sacrament. When the stock market crashed less than a year later the orgy was over and suddenly - with the Nazis - Sex went back inside into the private dark where it had always been. It would be 40 years before Anita's blatant sexuality would peek up from under again in the Psychedelic 60s - it would be different then - but oddly the same.
That's Anita as Lucrezia Borgia to the right. She gives new meaning to the adjective 'Willowy.' She has perhaps rightly been called the 1st Postmodern Woman. Hitler once called her the "Devil's Spawn." But then the Führer got off by having his niece squat naked over him and defecate while he jerked off and twitched - so the Family Values question is blurry. One critic remarked on Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase : "Anita's 'Dance' unveils the primal elements of our era: horror, fright, decadence, and waves of desire." Barber once told me that living in Berlin in the 1920s was masochistic ecstasy and that he would live it all again if he could - even with the endpoint still the shell-pocked bunker and the Russians raping their way across the Fatherland. What were the millions of dead? They were the Dance. Then he got conspiratorial and hushed: there had been an event unrecorded in Anita's official Bio - now there were only rumors. She had loved dancing to the pocket symphonies of Camille Saint-Saëns - she had used his 'Valse Mignonne' for the 'Cocaine' segment in her 'Dances of Depravity' cycle. And there were stories of her and another male dancer, not Droste, and their 'Tanz Macabre' set to Saint-Saën's symphony of the same name. Apocalyptic stories of a very private performance for some very important men - men of the future - men a young woman who was living right on the weather edge of the sycthe's long curved blade might need to know. The performance was said to have been photographed by a man whose fortune had been rising with that of his Führer - a drunk photographer named Heinrich Hoffmann. It was a summer solstice party and the new pagans were besotted and drugged as Anita Berber began her tryst with Death to the discordant screech of the Tritone as the Tanz Macabre began. Death was danced that night by an evenly muscled man tall enough for the SS and broad shouldered. He was virtually naked but had been painted totally black and then a white gleaming skeleton - bones and skull - were painted over that. In the dark - the stage lighted only with candles - you could see only the bones. Death grabbed the Young Maiden - also naked but with Sigils of Fallen Angels painted on her long thin body in bright red bloodlike paint - and he drew her to him. It wasn't really much of a dance. It ended with thunderous applause as Barber mounted Anita from behind as if she were a bitch in heat and finished within 6 or 7 thrusts. As he came he withdrew so the crowd could witness and see the Ficksaft for themselves. When Hitler found out that his photographer and friend had filmed an orgy he made Hoffmann destroy all the copies and all the film. Which Hoffmann said he did. He promised. Barber winked and said that the Dance happened but that Hoffmann was not in attendance and that the Sex had not been photographed. Not even Carl Zeiss could make a lens combination in 1926 which could capture 2 monkeys fucking by candlelight in anything else but a warm blur. But that was the Hole in History that we needed - the story of the Hoffmann portfolio of Barber and Berber Bump bumb bumping was a legend among the top tiers of Collectors who had the off-taste and the means to own some of history's great stains. It didn't matter that it wasn't filmed and that there were no actual photos. It was much better that it hadn't happened - less to clean up. It was, after all, the Family Bidnez and Barber Perfect and his 'brother' Pooler Jones, and Jayne Hill, and Kenny - and Lucky - they were the best at that bidnez. Kultur to Go. Art for Sale. Relics on Request. Objéts d'Intérêt - dark things from the dark past, connected with Horrors, Fright, Decadence, and Waves of Desire.
Both Spengler and Skippy agree that Anita Berber was probably the 1st Postmodern Woman. Fernande, in Paris, is more the end of the Modern than the beginning of anything. But Anita was a Scandal done consciously to create a Scandal. That's Über baby! That's Marilyn Manson's Mother. Anita was a dark, dark Yoko Ono/Larry Flynt Hybrid. She was the essence of her age and place - the Zeitgeist - tickle her picture above and see what that gets you.
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