The German Genius

had become a proliferation of “isms,” when science had discredited both the notion of an immutable reality and the concept of a wholly rational and self-conscious man. In such a world, the Dadaists felt they had to transform radically the whole concept of art and the artist.
    Among the other regulars at the Café Odeon were Franz Werfel, Alexei Jawlensky, and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher. There was also an unknown German writer, a “Catholic anarchist” named Hugo Ball (1886–1927), and his girlfriend, Emmy Hennings (1885–1948). 34 Hennings was a journalist but also performed as a cabaret actress, accompanied by Ball on the piano. In February 1916 they opened a review or cabaret with a literary bent. It was ironically called the Café Voltaire (ironic because Dada eschewed the very reason for which Voltaire was celebrated) and occupied premises on the Spiegelgasse, a steep and narrow alley where Lenin lived. 35 Among the first to appear at Voltaire were two Romanians, the painter Marcel Janco and a young poet, Sami Rosenstock, who adopted the pen name of Tristan Tzara. 36 The only Swiss among the early group was Sophie Taeuber, Hans Arp’s wife (he was from Alsace). Others included Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter from Germany.
    For a review in June 1916, Ball produced a program and it was in his introduction to the performance that the word “Dada” was first used. Ball’s journal records the kind of entertainment at Café Voltaire: “Rowdy provocateurs, primitivist dance, cacophony and Cubist theatricals.” Tzara always claimed to have found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, but whether the term ever had any intrinsic meaning, it soon acquired one, best summed up by Hans Richter. He said it had some connection “with the joyous Slavonic affirmative ‘Da, da’…‘yes, yes’ to life.” In a time of war it lauded play as the most cherished human activity. Dada was designed to rescue the sick mind that had brought mankind to catastrophe and restore its health. Dada questioned whether, in the light of scientific and political developments, art—in the broadest sense—was possible. Rather than follow any of the “isms” they derided, Dada turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity—all as a way to probe the unconscious.
    No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp (1886–1966) and Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948). Arp produced two types of image. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; as children do, he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colors. 37 At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Kurt Schwitters made collages too, but he found poetry in rubbish. 38 A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial.
    Toward the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino and the center of gravity shifted to Germany. It was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place. In November 1918, the month of the armistice, there was a general uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.
    It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported “the Dada virus” to Berlin. 39 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hanna Höch. 40 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. 41 Their depiction of the prostheses with which these people were fitted made them seem half-human, half-machine, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in