Anita Berber (10 June 1899 – 10 November 1928) was a German dancer, actress, and writer who was the subject of an Otto Dix painting.

In 1913 Berber studied dance at Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's school in Hellerau, which included training in rhythmic gymnastics, harmony, and music.

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.

[4] Her dancer, friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was thin and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns.

[1] Berber's dances – which had names such as "Cocaine" and "Morphium"[5] – broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged social taboos.

[6] In addition to her addictions to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber's favourite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl.

According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Debauchery,[9] she had been diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad.

She later left him in order to pursue a relationship with a woman named Susi Wanowski, and became part of the Berlin lesbian scene.