Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  Mixed marriages raise the question of affective or virtual citizenship, one based on socialization, environment, and daily influence, something not just given, but acquired. Swiss law should grant ius sanguinis not just through the father, but also the mother, at least for those mothers who continue to reside in Switzerland. Dual citizenship, my mother claims, is not an ideal solution: “Besitzt er aber ständig beide Nationalitäten, wird er viel eher hin- und hergezerrt, und es fällt ihm am Ende schwer, sich zu entscheiden.” (Should he be in constant possession of both nationalities, he will be torn two ways, and in the end will find it difficult to choose.)

  My mother will marry a man born to a Swiss mother and a non-Swiss father who remains stateless for eight years because his mother refuses to acquire her husband’s Russian citizenship and is unable to confer Swiss citizenship on her son. Together my parents will immigrate to America and become naturalized citizens. With their two children, they will inhabit the very dual citizenship my mother initially argued against. Their son will eventually renounce his U.S. citizenship, but not before he provides each of his children, who have a Norwegian mother and reside in Switzerland, with an American passport.

  After college, I attend the University of Zürich to find out how Swiss I am. For my Licentiat, I am required to pass a Latin exam by translating passages into German, not the Swiss-German I speak at home or on the street, but the written German I have never mastered because all of my schooling has been in English. The first time, I fail the exam; the second time, the examiner takes pity on me. I become credentialed in English to teach it as a foreign language, even as my so-called native proficiency is deteriorating daily.

  By the time I sit for my final exam in comparative literature, I no longer remember the ending to Madame Bovary. In answer to the question “What do you think it means?” I remain silent. My mother is dying of cancer in a hospital on the other side of the Limmat, and I have not reread the novel since I was in high school. By the time I complete my exam, she will have passed away, and I will be dressed in a black skirt, black tights, and black clogs with white socks. After a brief graduation ceremony, I walk alone in the nighttime fog down the Freiestrasse from the university to my grandmother’s apartment, which I have been sharing with my brother. “You’re absolutely right,” the examiner says. “The meaning of the ending is undecidable.” I will come to understand the meaning of undecidability only once I return to America to complete a PhD.

  My mother, who was never able to practice law, is afraid that, like her, I will return to America with a degree that will end up useless. She hoped to use her languages for work in international organizations, only to land a job in New York translating for Hanover Bank and Trust Company, into English, the one language she never studied; she hoped to practice law, only to teach German and French at a two-year college in a midwestern university town because of nepotism rules; she hoped to continue teaching in a German department, only to be replaced by the German mistress of the department chair.

  I return to America in order to find a home in the one language no one in my family has comfortably inhabited.

  Dada in Zürich, Continued

  * * *

  I always have loved this city for its beautiful location on the lake in the shadow of the mountains, and not less for its distinguished, a bit conservative culture. But owing to Switzerland’s peaceful setting among belligerent countries Zürich had emerged from its reserve and in a trice had become the most important city of Europe, a meeting place of all intellectual trends, to be sure, it had become equally a center for every sort of trafficker, speculators, spies, propagandists who, for their sudden affection, were eyed by the native population with quite justifiable suspicion. Every language was to be heard in restaurants, cafés, streetcars and on the street. Everywhere one ran into acquaintances, desirable and undesirable ones, and whether or no, one was caught in a stream of excited argument.

  Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (1943)

  In Zürich, in 1915, disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts. Despite the remote booming of artillery we sang, painted, pasted, and wrote poetry with all our might and mania. We were seeking an elementary art to cure man of the frenzy of the times and a new world order to restore the balance between heaven and hell.

  Jean Arp, Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories (1969)

  When I arrived in Zürich in August 1916, the artists and intellectuals used to meet in the Café de la Terrasse. Only a few months later, we moved to the Café Odéon [opened in 1911]. The waiters at the Terrasse had gone on strike. In sympathy with them, because they often let us sit for hours over one cup of coffee, we punished the Terrasse by permanently withdrawing our custom, although we had been much more comfortable in the big room at the Terrasse than we were in the cramped, ill-lit Odéon.

  Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1965)

  Zürich in 1916 … : orderly but tolerant; hospitable but not overly indulgent; cultured but not pretentious; a university hub renowned for its libraries; the home of Carl Jung; the temporary home of Albert Einstein; a city that kept suspicious foreigners under discreet surveillance; a haven for homeless exiles, but not a charity center. The weather: breezy and pleasant in June and September; blustery, cold and wet in Fall and Winter; hopeful and suicidal (owing to the föhn wind) in the Spring.

  Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide:

  Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (2009)

  “In this house on February 5, 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire opened and Dadaism was founded” appears in a circle, gold letters on white marble. The plaque was placed there in 1966 when Hans Arp was asked to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of dadaism. He calls it a Gedenknabel, or “commemorative navel,” to commemorate what had been an art historical navel of the world. Dadaism had become the city’s most important cultural heritage since Zwingli’s Reformation (1519). The plaque still hangs on the Spiegelgasse, where Goethe visited Lavater, Georg Büchner died of brain fever, and Lenin waited until it was time to board the sealed train that would take him back to Russia and the revolution. I return to it like a pilgrim in search of a holy site, although the entrance has returned to Münstergasse 26. An empty room that became the Cabaret Voltaire has been reopened as the Dada-Haus.

  Five men and two women, eventually married to two of the men, meet in Zürich in 1916. Sometimes there are only four men—two Germans (Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck), one Romanian (Tristan Tzara), and one Alsatian (Hans Arp), which in 1916 means German; after the war, as Jean Arp, he opts for France. Sometimes there are two Romanians, Tzara, who has escaped growing up in the shadow of German humanism, and Marcel Janco. Sometimes there are three brothers, Marcel, Georges, and Jules, formerly Iancu, now Janco, to make it sound more French. The two Germans are friends. They have known each other since they met in Munich in 1912. When Ball leaves, first Berlin and then Zürich, Huelsenbeck follows. The two Romanians are also friends, raised in wealthy Jewish families in Bucharest, the “Paris of the Balkans,” now strolling down the Balkanstrasse, nickname for the Bahnhofstrasse. “Tzara, whose real name was Sami Rosenstock, had only lived with this name for a year, having previously tried S. Samyro, Tristan Ruia, and Tristan. ‘Tristan’ was taken from Wagner’s opera, and ‘Tzara’ or ‘tarra’ in Romanian meant ‘land’ or ‘country’” (Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance). Trist en tara, then, means “sad in his own country.” Was he sad or just bored? Rosenstock wasn’t his real name either, since Jews had been ordered to take German names in eighteenth-century Austria-Hungary. As soon as he arrives in Zürich, he begins to write in French.

  The two women become friends. Sophie Taeuber-Arp is born in Davos-Platz, to a German pharmacist who dies of lung disease when she is two and a mother from Appenzell who subsequently advertises “lessons in embroidery” to the English colony. Sophie is the only native of Switzerland and the only one to earn a steady income. She is professor of textiles at the Kun
stgewerbeschule; her sister is secretary to C. G. Jung. She lives on the outskirts of the city with Arp, whom she meets at his first exhibit in Zürich in 1915. She makes pillowcases and purses as well as paintings, their titles always in French. Emmy Hennings is a cabaret singer who sometimes sings in Danish and writes poetry and eventually a book about her life with Hugo Ball. She is the star of the Cabaret Voltaire: “Years ago she stood by the rustling yellow curtain of a Berlin cabaret, hands on hips, as exuberant as a flowering shrub; today too she presents the same bold front and performs the same songs with a body that had since then been only slightly ravaged by grief” (Ball, Flight Out of Time). When Sophie Taueber-Arp has her first retrospective in North America in 1982, my godmother, who also attended the Kunstgewerbeschule, will write an article, also in French, to announce its arrival in Montreal.

  Switzerland is a birdcage, surrounded by roaring lions. (Ball, Flight Out of Time)

  Ball and Hennings arrive in Zürich in 1915, having met at the Café Simplizissimus in Munich in 1913. Hennings sings and sells postcards of herself to supplement her income. When she refuses to sing songs considered patriotic, she loses her job. Ball volunteers three times for military service and is rejected three times on medical grounds but never discharged. He secretly visits the war in Belgium; he openly protests the war in Berlin. His close friend Hans Leybold commits suicide in 1914 after being diagnosed with syphilis, although officially he died of a war wound. Hennings has been accused of forging passports for those seeking to avoid military service, and she spends time in prison. They escape to Zürich under assumed names. Ball is caught receiving mail under two names, including that of John Höxler, a painter from Hannover. They flee to Geneva. On their return to Zürich, Ball spends time in prison. The Swiss authorities only seek to establish his true identity. Avoiding German military service does not concern them. Pimping and prostitution are a different matter.

  The Balls came to Zürich without a cent and left their fate to chance. They had nothing to eat and sat on the shores of Lake Zürich, envying the well-fed swans for their feed. (Heulsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer)

  According to Heulsenbeck: Ball would like to work as a waiter, given that he has a black suit and white shirt. Failing to find a job, he considers throwing his suit into the Lake of Zürich. Hennings thinks it might be better to sell it, perhaps to a waiter in the Niederdorf. The main arterial street of this Vergnügungsviertel is the Niederdorfstrasse, which has twenty-three bars in one hundred houses. In the side alleys, the concentration is even higher: seven out of ten buildings house a public bar. Known as Animierkneipen, they were essentially “drinking clubs in which the waitresses provided female company and encouraged the (male) customers to buy as many drinks as possible. Prostitution was common in these establishments, which had flourished since the criminalization of brothels” (Pichon and Riha, Dada Zurich). When Hennings enters one of the bars, they ask if she sings. She will sing and Ball will play the piano, sometimes dance music, sometimes Brahms and Bach.

  According to Hennings: She and Ball are sitting on the banks of the Limmat, enjoying the sight of the other shore. One evening they decide to sell Ball’s suit, which they have been carrying everywhere in a cardboard box. They look for a shop in the Niederdorf, and enter one with, among other things, a broken typewriter, several umbrellas, and a musical clock, but no clothes. Emma will buy the musical clock if the shop owner buys the suit. Will he take it on commission? Will he put the clock aside if she leaves a deposit? They hear the sounds of a varieté escape from a neighboring building. Maybe one of the performers needs a suit. Ball waits for Hennings outside, until he hears her voice. She is auditioning, agrees to accept an advance, and Ball is hired as pianist, for which he needs a suit.

  They approach Jan Ephraim, the owner of the Holländische Meierei Café, and apply for a permit to open a Künstlerkneipe at Spiegelgasse 1. In the Holländische Stübli behind the restaurant, in what was briefly the Cabaret Pantagruel, Zürich’s first literary cabaret, they open the Cabaret Voltaire. The room has a small stage and a piano. The walls are painted black and the ceiling blue. Fifteen or twenty round tables seat forty to fifty people. It will be good for his business. It will be good for their morale. There is no admission charge, only a coat-check fee. There is no dressing room, only a canvas with holes as big as fists. There are readings, including texts by Wassily Kandinsky and Blaise Cendrars, French chansons, a balalaika orchestra, and Gottfried Keller anecdotes. Every night except Friday, and then, later, including Friday. There are French evenings and Russian evenings and poèmes simultanés in French, German, and English and Verse ohne Worte, or “poems without words.”

  There were almost no women in the cabaret. It was too wild, too smoky, too way out. (Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer)

  The Laban school for modern or “New German” dance moves to the Seegartenstrasse in Zürich. Rudolph von Laban, born in Bulgaria and brought up in Bosnia, where he was inspired by the dances of the dervishes, summers with his students from Munich on a dance-farm in Ascona, in the Tessin, between 1912 and 1914. There they live collectively and dance in the open air. Shoes are discarded, storytelling is discarded, limbs are exposed. Dancers move to the beat of a gong rather than to a piece of music. Sketching lessons are obligatory, and dance notations resemble the patterns of abstract art. When Laban opens a school in Zürich in 1916, Sophie Taeuber becomes one of his pupils. She performs abstract dances set to poems by Ball and masks by Marcel Janco, at the opening of the Galerie Dada in 1917. She has been asked to do so under a pseudonym, G. Thäuber, to mask her professorial identity. Mary Wigman will become Laban’s most famous student, dancing to Nietzsche at the Café des Banques on the Bahnhofstrasse. Eventually, Laban’s school moves to Mainaustrasse 32. This is the house where my mother grew up in an apartment on the third floor. This is where I now stay, in a hotel originally just for women, one block closer to the lake.

  If the Odéon was our terrestrial base, our celestial headquarters was Laban’s ballet school. (Richter, Dada)

  The Dada men discover the “ladies of Laban.” They are frequent visitors to the school in the Seefeld, allowed into “this nunnery” only at fixed times. With few exceptions, they develop emotional ties, some fleeting, some permanent. One of the dancers, Maja Kruscek, becomes Tzara’s girlfriend, although their rows are frequent and noisy; Maria Venselov is often seen with Georges Janco and later marries Hans Richer; Marcel Janco, an architecture student at the ETH, marries Lily Ackermann, a Laban dancer and impoverished Catholic. Four years later, he marries Clara Goldschlager, then returns to Bucharest, and eventually lands in Tel Aviv. Sophie Taeuber “danced to the ‘Song of the Flying Fish and the Sea Horses,’ an anomatopoetic lament. It was a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity. The lines of her body broke up, each gesture decomposed into a hundred precise, angular and sharp movements” (Arp, Arp on Arp). While Hennings’s “little voice was so meager and boyish that we sometimes had the feeling it might break at any moment” and “the light of our dim cabaret lamps shone through her thin dress, revealing her boyish figure” (Huelsenbeck qtd. in Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance), “Sophie was as quiet as we were garrulous, boastful, rowdy and provocative” (Richter, Dada). Hennings, a professional cabaret performer, a melancholic poet, converts to Catholicism the day she marries Ball. Taeuber, committed to abstraction in art and dance, explores the limitless expression of a body not necessarily beautiful, not necessarily feminine, even if Hennings remembers it as both. The men’s observations outnumber the reminiscences of the women. Sophie’s modesty and independence, her calm temperament and pure forms are preferred to the restlessness of Emmy, a vagabond, an artist’s model, never financially secure. The two women are reunited the year of Sophie’s death. Emmy remembers the walk they had taken together, to Salerno, holding hands. Sophie is trained in art and dance; Emmy retains her connection to the popular, the folksong, the mystics.

  Tzara keeps o
n worrying about the periodical. My proposal to call it “Dada” is accepted. We could take turns editing, and a general editorial staff could assign one member the job of selection and layout for each issue. Dada is “yes, yes” in Rumanian, “rocking horse” and “hobby-horse” in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish naïveté, joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage. (Ball, Flight Out of Time)

  Richard Huelsenbeck will be drafted into the German military any day now. He tells his parents he wants to study medicine in Zürich. He tells himself he wants to join the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball having summoned him via postcard. He tells his draft board he wants to go to Switzerland. Why does he want to go to Switzerland? To study and to rest. He has a certificate from a doctor claiming mental exhaustion. How long does he plan to stay in Switzerland? Three months, even though a semester lasts six. The first official is called away. An hour passes, and a second official appears. He grants permission for a six-month stay. The official has a brother-in-law in Switzerland and tells Huelsenbeck to look him up.

  Huelsenbeck arrives in Zürich by train, asks for directions to the Spiegelgasse, and enters the cabaret for the first time. When later he appears on stage, he recites his “Negro poems,” the ones that met with such success at the “Expressionist evening” in the Harmoniumsaal in 1915 in Berlin. He is told by Ephraim, the landlord who has traveled to Africa and the South Seas, that they are not authentic. Ball encourages something authentic, which Ephraim provides. But “the dada drummer” insists on ending each refrain with “Umba, umba,” just as he has always done, much to the disapproval of the seafarer. At one in the morning Huelsenbeck and Ball step out onto the Spiegelgasse. Huelsenbeck has not given a thought to where he will sleep. Ball puts him up in his old room, up a steep set of stairs, in a garret looking down on the city Heulsenbeck has fallen in love with at first sight.