The life and early death of avant-garde dancer Anita Berber is supposedly the perfect example of Weimar Berlin’s decadent culture of unfettered drugs, sexuality, and artistic experimentation, but you wouldn’t know it from reading The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber.  Instead of attempting to make meaning from the sublime chaos of Berber’s life, Mel Gordon opts for dry summary.  This book also feels like it was padded out; a full chapter on Sebastian Droste seems out of place in a book that is nominally about Anita Berber.  Worse yet, Gordon waffles between open admiration for his subject and denigrating her as the worst kind of ”slut.”  The problem is that Gordon is good at providing a sweeping overview, but not so skilled at crafting an insightful close examination.  His general study of Weimar decadence, Voluptuous Panic, presents a sturdy picture of pre-war Germany and his volume on the Theatre du Grand Guignol is a succinct effort, but this book just has too little going for it; it’s telling that the two most compelling paragraphs in the book are extended quotes from other sources.  However, the photographs included in the text might be worth the price of admission for Berber fanatics.

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