Dadaismus

Dadaismus (Dada), the etymology of which has been alternatively attributed to inarticulate childish sounds and to the French ‘dada’ (hobby-horse), was an exaggerated form of revolutionary Expressionismus, originating about 1916 in reaction against the 1914-18 War and continuing until about 1922. In February 1916 H. Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Its name was meant to be provocative and it was conceived as an international centre. Dada's principal German exponents were H. Arp, W. Mehring, K. Schwitters, R. Huelsenbeck, and G. Grosz. The use of colour by W. Kandinsky influenced the favoured Klanggedicht, sound-poems to which he himself contributed. After the war groups were formed in Germany, notably in Berlin and Cologne. The Dadaists were in principle against aesthetic systems and produced none, but they adopted the technique of simultanism and bruitism as an expression of revolt against bourgeois attitudes to art, including Expressionism as they saw it. The aim was a poetry ‘Ohne-Sinn’ (H. Arp) designed to create a new consciousness of (primitive) life with vague notions of a new beginning; their orientation was psychoanalytical and political, though the radical Berlin Bolshevik Dadaists, including R. Huelsenbeck and W. Mehring, were not committed to Activist meliorism (J. C. Middleton).

Huelsenbeck is the author of Erste Dada-Rede in Deutschland (1918), Dadaistisches Manifest, En avant Dada and Dada siegt, and Die dadaistische Bewegung, and editor of the Dada-Almanach (all 1920) and of Dada; eine literarische Dokumentation (1964, reissued 1984). In 1957 he published Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze. Auf den Spuren des Dadaismus. H. Ball reflects on his association with Dada in Die Flucht aus der Zeit (1927). In 1957 Huelsenbeck, Arp, and Tristan Tzara published Die Geburt des Dada and in 1961 (Arp and Tzara) Dada Gedichte. Dichtungen der Gründer. Am Anfang war Dada by Raoul Hausmann, ed. G. Kämpf and K. Riha, appeared in 1972. (See also Konkrete Poesie.)