Transcript
Matt Frei
The woman’s name was Anita Berber. She was a movie actress and a dancer, famed for her erotic modern dance numbers. She danced at the notorious Eldorado club. In what is now an organic supermarket, people would once sit in sweaty thrall to Berber’s gyrations.
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Berber was a bisexual, addicted to cocaine, morphine and heroin.
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Someone who wouldn’t shy at stooping to prostitution to fund her habits. Hard to believe, but this place was once the centre of Berlin’s creative scene.
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Another artist, Otto Dix, captured the mood in a stunning portrait of Berber.
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And his rendering of the club’s transvestite clientele. The sexual underworld of Berlin in the 1920s represented not just a way of life, or, for that matter, a good night out. Like everything else in this city at that time, it embodied a political idea. The Eldorado club was closed down. Soon it would be a Nazi Party local office.