The word Dada was accidentally discovered by Hugo Ball and myself in a German-French dictionary, as we were looking for a name for Madame le Roy, the chanteuse at our cabaret. Dada is French for a wooden horse. It is impressive in its brevity and suggestiveness. Soon Dada became the signboard for all the art that we launched in the Cabaret Voltaire. (Richard Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” [1920], in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets)
I was standing behind Ball looking into the dictionary. Ball’s finger pointed to the first letter of each word descending the page. Suddenly I cried halt. I was struck by a word I had never heard before, the word dada.
“Dada,” Ball read, and added: “It is a children’s word meaning hobby-horse.”
At that moment I understood what advantages the word held for us.
“Let’s take the word dada,” I said. “It’s just made for our purpose. The child’s first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at zero, the new in our art. We could find no better word. …”
And so it happened that it was I who pronounced the word Dada for the first time. (Richard Heulsenbeck, “Dada Lives!” [1936], in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets)
Hans Richter is drafted into the German military on September 15, 1914. Several friends, including the two poets Ferdinand Hardekopf and Albert Ehrenstein, throw a farewell party. Not knowing when they will meet again, Ehrenstein suggests the following: “If the three of us are still alive, let us meet at the Café de la Terrasse in Zürich in exactly two years from now, on 15th September 1916, at three in the afternoon” (Richter, Dada). Richter is not familiar with either Zürich or the Café de la Terrasse. Eighteen months later, he is severely wounded, discharged, and married to the nurse who saves him in the military hospital. They spend their honeymoon in Zürich. On September 15, at three in the afternoon, Richter is at the Café de la Terrasse, and there waiting for him are Hardekopf and Ehrenstein. He is introduced to Tristan Tzara, and to Marcel and Georges Janco, sitting just a few tables away. A few days later, he is taken to the Cabaret Voltaire, where he remembers having met Hennings, Hardekopf’s former girlfriend.
In 1918, in the Hotel Limmatquai, Tzara introduces Richter to a Swedish painter, Viking Eggeling, with whom Richter will make the first abstract films.
In 1918 Francis Picabia, also in a Zürich hotel room, smashes an alarm clock, dips its inner workings into ink, and presses them onto paper.
I hereby declare that Tristan Tzara found the word on 8 February 1916 at six o’clock in the afternoon: I was present with my twelve children when Tzara for the first time uttered this word which filled us with justified enthusiasm. This occurred at the Café de Terrasse in Zürich and I was wearing a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word is of no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can take an interest in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before Dada came into existence. (Jean Arp, “Dada-au-grand-air” [1921], in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets)
Hans Arp speaks Alsatian with his boyhood friends, German in school, and French with his parents. His first poems are written in Alsatian, but as an artist he dreams of going to Paris. When his father is forced to close his cigar and cigarette factory in Strasbourg, they move to Weggis, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. When Arp returns to Paris in 1914, Germany has declared war. His money has become worthless, and he is forced to return to Switzerland. The draft board at the German consulate in Zürich wants to send him back to Germany. When asked to tell his age, he writes the date of his birth several times in a column:
16 September 1887
16 September 1887
16 September 1887
16 September 1887
Then he draws a line underneath, adds up the numbers, and puts down the figure. They reject him for medical reasons. They think he is insane.
Five men. Five venues. The Cabaret Voltaire opens in the Holländische Meierei Café on Spiegelgasse 1 from February to June 1916. Jan Ephraid is losing money, and Ball and Hennings move to the Tessin, ostensibly for medical reasons. Ball returns to direct the first Dada soirée, which takes place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag (Münsterhof 8) on July 14, 1916, on the bourgeois or commercial side of the Limmat, with music, dance, poems, paintings, and masks. Ball’s manifesto, or the “First Dada Manifesto,” announces his final break with Dadaism. The First Dada Exhibition opens in January 1917 at the Galerie Corray in the Sprüngli-Haus on the Paradeplatz (Bahnhofstrasse 19/Tiefenhöfe 12), followed by the Galerie Dada on March 29. According to Ball: “The gallery has three faces. By day it is a kind of teaching body for schoolgirls and upper-class ladies. In the evenings the candlelit Kandinsky room is a club for the most esoteric philosophies. At the soirées, however, the parties have a brilliance and frenzy such as Zürich has never seen” (Ball, Flight Out of Time). Ten weeks and three exhibitions later, their landlord, the famous chocolatier, forces them to close. On July 23, 1918, Tzara stages his own Dada soirée (the seventh) in the Zunfthaus zur Meise (Münsterhof 20) reading from his own works, including his “Dada Manifesto 1918,” which becomes the most widely distributed Dada text. The eighth, final, and most successful Dada soirée is held at the Kaufleuten Saal (Pelikanstrasse 18) on April 9, 1919. This is where in 2006 I am introduced to the Swiss author Robert Walser by a group of panelists whose discussion I am invited to by my friend C., a writer whom I met in an obligatory Latin class at the university and now works in the theater.
In 1906 Bergman and Company, a maker of perfume and soaps, patents the label “Dada” and launches its Dada products, the most popular of which is lily-milk soap.
By 1921, the year my parents are born, one in Zürich and the other in Moscow, Dada has ended. In 1951, the year I am born in New York City, the origins of “Dada,” as a word that only later acquires content, become a source of controversy.
A word was born no one knows how DADADADA we took an oath of friendship on the new transmutation that signifies nothing, and was the most formidable protest, the most intense armed affirmation of salvation liberty blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquility private guerilla negation and chocolate of the desperate. (Tristan Tzara, “Zürich Chronicle” [1915–19], in Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets)
With so many languages in such a small space during such a troubled time, it only makes sense that the word to describe what is happening makes no sense. Or has too many meanings. Or a different one in every language. Or is just a meaningless sound. A word found in a dictionary. A word borrowed from a brand name, or from a Romanian saint. A word born “no one knows how,” signifying nothing. A word that reminds people of what they said before they entered a national language. Before the nation conscripted them, rejected them, and failed to discharge them, or sent them into exile, or changed their nationality. They speak each other’s languages only imperfectly. Their common denominator: the sound of the languages of the countries at war spoken simultaneously.
Poetry beyond paper, paintings without objects, dance without music, collage without glue. The ephemeral, the suggestive, the simultaneous, the spontaneous. Religious incantation and ecstasy. Potential ego disintegration, in the case of Ball. Protest without a program. War waged against the intoxication with death, against personality, against sentimentality. War in art as opposed to art as an antidote to war. A world in disorder, international and antinational, cloistered in Zürich. Individuality against the masses, against the cannon, against the Kaiser, against the mechanized, the commercialized. The trauma of noncombatants: improvisation, intoxication, cultivated and feigned insanity. Leave it to chance, the words in a poem, the squares on a grid. It refuses; it confuses via disorder. It rejects social illusions; it rejects art as illusionistic. It mistrusts traditional community and refuses an alternative community of consensus. It mistrusts the collective. Except for the cabaret, where the time is now, the performer is himself or herself and the stage is no-place. The cabaret destroys the ideological potential for spee
ch through semantic overload. It relies on masks and the shots of revolvers. The human form disappears from painting, reappears in dance, the face hidden behind a mask, absurd, perishable, unattractive. Outrage the public through diversion; reject both contemplation and commercial transaction. Displacement and dissonance. Make the passive spectator a hostile participant. Dada requires poverty. It never grows old. It has no adepts in England. Its critique flaunts its own futility. It fosters mistaken ideas about itself. It becomes a historian’s nightmare.
Dada cannot understand itself until it is over, or at least moves on to other venues: Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris, New York. The last manifesto is written at the end of the next world war. The same anecdotes are circulated and recirculated. They repeat themselves in a way that Dada endlessly repeats the same sound, the same shape, the same story: how Walter Serner places artificial flowers at the foot of the dressmaker’s dummy to which he recites his poems with his back toward the audience at the Kaufleute; how Auguste Giacometti, no longer young, but wearing a bearskin cap supposedly concealing a fat bankbook, makes the rounds of the bars on the Limmatquai, carefully opening and closing each door and saying, “Long live Dada!” a false report submitted to the newspapers by Serner of a duel between Tzara and Arp on the Realp, with the Swiss poet J. C. Heer as second, although both fire in the same direction and Heer has spent the day in St. Gallen. Anxious that they will become historically incomprehensible, they are eager to self-historicize.
Dada never really existed in America. This is true despite the many references to it in books and magazine articles. Dada, the laughing, weeping, half-cynical, half-blustering theorem, devoid of system and even substance, a mixture of clownery and religion, half writing, half art, dada, which wants to destroy itself in order to survive, this last bon mot that was sucked up along with leftover coffee in Zürich’s Odeon and Bellevue—has pathetically little to do with a way of life that aims at material perfection. (Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer)
Dada returns to New York in the summer of 2006, “the most comprehensive museum exhibition of Dada art ever mounted in the US.” It arrives from Washington, D.C., and before that Paris. The global network of artists and the use they make of new media makes it seem timely. I return to New York, alone, for the first time since I have moved to the Midwest. I eat lunch on the balcony that looks down on the sculpture garden I remember from my childhood visits from Leonia, a suburb across the George Washington Bridge.
Once exposed to film footage from World War I, visitors to MOMA are invited to enter one of two doors, leading to one of two cities, Zürich or New York. Dada may have begun simultaneously in two places, just as the word “Dada” may have been invented by two or more people. But only in Zürich are the conditions right in 1916 for the birth of a movement that extends itself beyond this city, whether those conditions are attributed to the claustrophobic atmosphere of a neutral country in the middle of Europe at war, to Lenin at the other end of the Spiegelgasse, or to the Swiss who are in particular need of épatement of their bourgeosie.
New York is where I was born and Zürich is where I grew up. Zürich is the city whose dialect I speak, whose streets I know better than any other, whose university I attended. It is the city I inhabited while growing up in suburbs and university towns outside of New York, Chicago, San Francisco. New York is where I was born, and yet I never say I am from there, in part because after I was born we moved to New Jersey; in part because Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital no longer exists; in part because friends with whom I stayed moved to the other coast, and for the longest time I didn’t return. When I tell people I’m from New Jersey, they don’t believe me. They wonder whether they detect an accent. When I tell them I in part grew up in Switzerland, they wonder whether the accent they detect is foreign.
The choice is simple, not because the etiological or ontological conundrum has a simple solution, but because I am never in a position to choose.
I choose Zürich. Not because I know it best, but because I barely know it at all. I know so little of its history, have read so little of its literature. I was taught how to live there, but I was never taught where that there is, except as the birthplace of my mother, the place that perfectly coincided with that of her upbringing, which is what made her so homesick. She has no interest in a plaque on a seedy side street, no need to know that a dance school once resided in the building she long ago vacated. Which is why I have no fellow pilgrims. I want to know that this city has a history other than a personal one.
What a contrast between the Marcel Janco masks, made of paper, board, burlap, paint and twine, including a portrait of Tzara, and the Dada heads by Sophie Taeuber, oil on turned wood, smooth oval shapes without holes or protrusions, including portraits of Arp. The first inspire movement; the second serve as hat stands. Are the masks reminiscent of gas masks, hiding deeply convulsed faces? Are they based on masks from Romanian folk celebrations? Are they symbolic of the hide-and-seek assumed of the assimilated Jew? Or do they simply serve to separate the performer from the audience, in a space too small for so many patrons? In her self-portrait with the Dada head, Taeuber is wearing the hat she might later place on the hat stand. She is using the head as a mask, masking the side of her face not already hidden by a veil. The photographic self-portrait of the female artist with two heads, herself and her art, as opposed to the female artist, Hennings, who sells images of herself on postcards.
I walk by the plaque that says this is the birthplace of Dada, knowing that Zürich is neither my birthplace nor my place of citizenship, which should be my father’s birthplace, although even he was not born in Basel. What, then, is Dada but a here here for those for whom there is no longer a there there? This was true for me, who didn’t know that anything had been born in Zürich, apart from my mother.
What was once a seedy, smoky bar has been reopened as a brightly lit café, a Graceland, a Goethe-Haus to Dada. In 2000 an insurance company buys the house, with the intent of creating luxury apartments on the upper floors and a gallery on the street level. It is left empty until 2002; squatters occupy the building, an artist’s collective that seeks to commune with the genius loci in the hope that it might be recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. Although the city council fails to raise the funds, and gentrification begins, the insurance company eventually agrees to a work-stoppage and the CEO of Swatch Group offers to sponsor a Dada-Haus for five years. The city of Zürich and Swatch create a joint company, and in July 2003 four architectural firms are invited to submit plans within three weeks for a project not exceeding CHF750,000 to be completed by September 30, 2004. The idea is to create a space that commemorates historical Dada (documentation), supports contemporary art influenced by Dada (transformation) and includes a café-bar (experimentation). Four rooms are to house a museum shop and rotating exhibits on the first floor, and a café-bar with library and performance space for readings, film screenings, and symposia, on the second.
Rosetti + Wyss, both trained as architects in Zürich, win the competition. Their idea is to leave the four rooms in a state of incompletion, with wall paintings left from the artist’s collective and patchwork re-plastering begun under the insurance company, leaving intact the many transformations the building had undergone since it was first sited on a city map of 1576 as two houses, becoming one house a year later. Between the main rooms they insert three boxes made of fiber cement slabs, polished and placed millimeters apart. The counter for the museum shop is dark gray, the library with Internet access is yellow, and the bar of the café is red. The effect is both highly artificial, as though these were foreign bodies taking up permanent residence, and somewhat archaic, given the polished cement. It has a feeling of being unfinished. The chairs in the cafe are aluminum with nylon webbing. The café has always seemed uninviting. It’s not clear whether one is entering an exhibition space or a store, whether one is expected to pay an entrance fee or buy something, or whether one has accepted a role in a historical reenactment. It is o
ften closed when I arrive. How to commemorate a place inhabited by exiles, who left nothing except an empty room? How to avoid a museum, given that Dada knows no birth, and no death? How to invite people into a cultural heritage site that the city itself at times feels indifferent toward, at times refuses, and at times displays sympathy with, given that in so many ways Dada is so not Swiss? And yet the seemingly seamless solution to a problem initiated by squatters, addressed by a work stoppage and solved by Swatch, seems like the ultimate Swiss compromise.
Ball reconverts to Catholicism in the Tessin, writes the first book on Hermann Hesse, and dies young. Tzara moves to Paris after the war, in order to make himself, and Dada, more famous. He is the only one to end up in a play by Tom Stoppard. Huelsenbeck, a founder of Berlin Dada, lives in New York for thirty-four years as Charles R. Hulbeck, psychiatrist and cofounder with Karen Horney of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. He likewise retires to the Tessin. In 1928 Sophie and Hans Arp settle near Meudon-Val Fleury, France, in a house designed and decorated by Sophie. Hans Arp fails to acquire Swiss citizenship, because they worry he still might go crazy.
Not even “a man without qualities,” the Dadaist is a man without a man; the opposite of the Super-Man, he is an Un-man. The Dadaists virtualized this figure of dehumanization as a form of defense—against world war, brutal industrialization, nationalist madness, repressive government. (Foster, “Dada Mime”)
And the women? Hennings works in a factory by day and writes poems at night, alone in a house she shared with Ball in the Tessin. She dies in 1948. Sophie Taeuber-Arp dies in her sleep in 1943, as the result of a malfunctioning gas stove in Max Bill’s house in Zürich. She is the only woman and the only Dadaist to appear on a Swiss banknote. Since 1995, the fifty-franc note has been called the “Green Sophie.”
Coming Out Swiss Page 13