by Greil Marcus
Reading the testimony of the Cabaret Voltaire cut-ups one finds only Série noire: “The Seventeenth Murder” in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the dead chauffeur in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Frank and Cora fornicating in the dirt next to her husband’s corpse in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sheriff Nick Corey’s chiliastic serenity in Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280. If dada was a locked-room mystery the door was open and there wasn’t even a body—just blood on the bed, a four-letter word scrawled on the wall, and a hundred-and-thirty-three-year-old skull in the closet. Like the private eye in William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, as detectives the dadaists were their own culprits, forced to work simply for the sake of the story. “We killed a quarter of a century, we killed several centuries for the sake of what is to come,” Huelsenbeck wrote. “You can call it what you like.” At the climax there was no chance to assemble everyone in the drawing room, because Ball and Hennings had gone back to the church, Arp and Tzara were out of town, Huelsenbeck had changed his name, and letters to Janco came back no such number, no such zone. Anyway it would be decades before any of them could even name the victim: what they wanted.
BACK IN
Back in Zurich in the first month of the cabaret there was as yet neither corpse nor story. For that matter there was no dada; the word had yet to be discovered.
It meant “hobby horse” in French; in German it was a dismissal, “Goodbye,” “Be seeing you,” “Get off my back.” In Romanian, “Of course.” In Italian, “wet nurse”; in Swabian slang, “sex-crazed moron”; in English, “father,” and “get ready”—a fanfare. Deep in the Indo-European substratum it meant both yes and no: it was a magic word.
Tzara decided on it one morning in a cafe, his only affidavit from Arp, who swore he was present with his twelve children while wearing a bread roll in his nose—solid dada evidence Huelsenbeck countered most effectively by outliving Tzara. “When Ball and I discovered Dadaism,” he wrote in 1927, putting it all behind him for the first time,
we were unaware of our errand. Ball had just eaten a bowl of noodle soup and I had just thrown the last drunken students out of the Cabaret Voltaire when Ball said, “Da . . . da [There, there], don’t you see where it all leads!” . . . In this moment—it was an historic moment—the responsibility of a mission was given to me, which until now I have not dared to shake off. I grasped Dadaism.
“When I came across the word ‘dada,’ ” Ball wrote on 18 June 1921, “I was called upon twice by Dionysius.” He meant not Bacchus (Dionysus) but someone far more esoteric: a Greek converted by St. Paul in the first century. It was a mystical code, “D.A.–D.A.”—a doubling, John Elderfield writes in his introduction to Flight Out of Time, “of the initials of Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the three saints who were to form the subject of [Ball’s 1923] book Byzantinisches Christenum. This, however, is most likely Ball’s hindsight . . .” You can almost hear Elderfield muffling his scream.
Dada history is a writer’s dream: choosing among versions, one has to make the story up. Following accounts of how in March (or April) 1916, Huelsenbeck, looking for a name to give a there-and-gone Cabaret Voltaire canary (Shall we call her Divina de la Nuit? Sally Hot Jazz? Irene Dogmatic?), chanced upon the word in an open dictionary (German? French? English? Romanian?) and immediately realized it would blow modern art, literature, and culture to pieces, one can imagine him edging into a pharmacy the next day to buy a pack of contraceptives, only to come face to face with “DADA SHAMPOO,” fine product of Bergmann & Co., on sale at Bahnhofstrasse 51 since 1913. Oh shit, Huelsenbeck must have said—or, Of course! Dada shampoo! The universal cleansing agent!
IN APRIL
In April 1916 Ball and Huelsenbeck talked long into the night about art as an end in itself. If the growing dissonance of the cabaret was driven by a contempt for what the world outside called art, even hatred for it, that was because Ball and Huelsenbeck were beginning to recognize the conventions of art as merely the most glittering reflection of the conventions of social life, of all that made the war possible, that kept it going as they spoke. Art turned hell into heaven—that was why the war could be fought for “art’s sake,” for the “German way of life,” or for that matter the French way of life, or the English way of life, the Russian way of life, the Austro-Hungarian way of life, not to mention the Bosno-Herzegovian way of life (coming up late but fast, the American way of life), the redundancy cancelling not only each claim but the language used to make it. They were beginning to see art as a trick: to see the freie strasse, the champ libre, the free space, as an asylum. If they opened the cabaret each night as a war against a million bayonets sticking out of a million standard-issue volumes of Goethe, that was because art had fooled humanity, had fooled them, into thinking the world was better than it was; because on art’s heavenly scales a single copy of Faust outweighed the million men who died that it might stay in print; because art diverted the human desire to remake the world into the lunatic’s therapy of making poems, paintings, ashtrays. Give them to relatives visiting on Sundays, put them in a museum—wasn’t it all the same?
Advertisement, Zurich, 1913
The conclusions Ball and Huelsenbeck were reaching didn’t destroy the impulse that drew them to art. That impulse could not be rooted out: it was the impulse to change the world. When Ball wrote that for “people assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course,” he meant that in times when each day creates its own nihilism, meaning has to be created, made up. Out of what? Out of anything, the dadaists were discovering, as they put the detritus of their civilization on stage and watched it change shape—out of anything, to the point of nothingness. Dada was thrilling because it permitted and then demanded a complete and then conscious abdication of responsibility toward art, then toward the society art represented—by representing, the dadaists were discovering, affirmed. They were about to reach the social atom; they were about to take it apart.
Dada was grace but not for the asking, not by faith and not by works. Grace was up to God, and God was indifferent to the paltry, self-destructing ethical systems humanity had fashioned in imitation of the natural order. Thus the dadaists experienced grace as chance, as a matter of the-right-place-at-the-right-time, a bolt of lightning, a fall in the street. Like a fall in the street, grace came forth disguised in the gestures of ordinary life; like a bolt of lightning, it came to no one more than once, this moment of change in which the whole world was wiped clean and reborn within the New Man, if only for a moment—that was why they never got over it.
He and Huelsenbeck decided, Ball recorded, that art was “only an occasion,” a “method” for locating “the specific rhythm and the buried face of this age”—“its foundation and essence,” the “possibility of its being stirred.” It was the same notion Guy Debord recast and hardened in 1961, in Critique de la séparation (Critique of Separation), a film about the situationists and the world of spectacles they meant to abolish. “Normally,” Debord said on the soundtrack, as he made art, a movie, to argue art out of its claims (though like all but one of Debord’s movies, this was an exercise in détournement, a film made mostly out of bits of other people’s films, trailers, photographs, advertisements, cartoons, graffiti, newsreel footage: on the screen, a pinball machine flashed TILT, then prison guards drove rioting convicts back to their cells), “the things that happen to us, the things that truly involve us and demand our attention, leave us no more than bored and distant spectators. But almost any situation, once it has been transposed artistically, awakens our attention; we want to take part in it, to change it. This is the paradox that must be turned upside down—put back on its feet. This is what must be realized in acts.” Given the new worlds that artists had revealed in the first quarter of the century, the situationists thought, nothing had happened since. All that was left was the impulse: that wish to “take part,” to “change.” Of course, to
those for whom Ball’s paradox was just a word, “time” went on, “art” went on. Whatever it had been in 1916, in 1961 something called dada still inspired people all over the world, many of whom labored to make art they were happy to hear named “neo-dada”—a fraud on both time and art, one-time Berlin dadaist Raoul Hausmann said, because neo-dada took “sides with the object as a ‘thing in itself’—which dada denied.”
The will to change the world, Debord was saying in Critique of Separation—his critique of the separation of art from the world it meant to change, of every person from every other, of each clenched fist from the person who made it—was found most perfectly in the artistic impulse, which was deflected by the object it produced, which became a commodity, an agent of reification, a thing in itself. “Capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession,” Debord wrote in 1960,
that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities . . . but at the same time, this sphere reserved for “free creative activity” is the only one in which the questions of what we do with life and of communication are posed practically and completely. Here, in art, lies the first locus point of the antagonism between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separation [of art] give rise to the general crisis of artistic means, a crisis linked to alternative ways of living, to the demand for a new way of life.
This was the crisis that was beginning to emerge in the Cabaret Voltaire: the realization that art’s meaninglessness, its separation from what actually happened, rendered the beautiful, the true, and the good into the ugly, the false, and the evil. The artistic impulse could not be rooted out, but its means had fallen to ruin: in the face of the new machines that were transforming the world—destroying it—paint and canvas were the tools of an enterprise as obsolete as alchemy. Maybe one had to “create directly,” as Tzara said—to live as a “genius”—but the war made genius effete, its communication a solipsism. As a protest, Huelsenbeck said long after the fact, the cabaret was also a panic: a panic over the realization that whatever artists might have to say, they had no way of saying it, and if they didn’t, neither did anyone else. Separate art was an illusion hiding the fact that in the twentieth century poetry, true communication, came out of the barrel of the gun pointed at your head. In 1920 in Berlin, Huelsenbeck cast all doubts aside: art had to be destroyed, he said, because it was a “moral safety valve,” a mechanism for the unlimited ability of the human mind to turn its worst fantasies into real-life atrocities, then to turn its worst atrocities into pretty pictures. But this was already hindsight, an attempted murder to cover up what hadn’t been; it was only guesswork in the Cabaret Voltaire.
IN THE CABARET
In the cabaret art was staged as a nightly revelation of the buried face—now you see it now you don’t, no matter that most were drunk, dancing, seeing nothing, just having a good time—a nightly proof that the paradox the dadaists meant to enact was a paradox, not a proof. It was a way to keep the place full and the bar trade moving (“Tip your waitress!” goes a lost line from Ball’s diary), “the ideals of culture and art as a program for a variety show,” a race with the expectations of the audience, the audience racing against itself. Night after night, unknown people climbed out of the crowd to speak, to recite poems they had treasured all their lives or made up a few minutes before, to sing old songs, to make fools of themselves, to take part, to change. There were no classics. Voltaire was as contemporary as Apollinaire, the singer named Madame Dada as old as Dionysius the Areopagite, because in the heat of the moment both performers and audience succeeded in losing their memory. As Arp wrote in 1966, the year he died, remembering that even before the cabaret opened he had ripped up one of his pictures in frustration, tossed the pieces in the air, watched in wonder as they fluttered to the floor, and then, seized by the moment, framed the pattern as a fact no less objective than bodies arranged in a trench by a grenade: “Before there was Dada, Dada was there . . .”
Sentimentality had crept in: that portentous dot dot dot. Before dada was there, there was a wish to negate the war and make a name; afterward there was the wish to hold onto it. As artists everybody in the cabaret was a nobody; in Zurich they were famous overnight. Why not the world? Pushed by Tzara, who saw dada capitalized as an art movement, the group issued luxurious, special-limited-edition publications aimed straight at patrons and museums. On vellum it was nothing new; there were countless precedents in prewar Europe for pretentious Nietzschean cafes. But Ball’s needs were greater than most: just before offering his boiled shirtfront and his piano skills to Jan Ephriam, he had tried suicide; he and Hennings had slept outdoors; begged, searched for food in garbage cans. His desires were greater: “Only the theater is capable of creating the new society. The backgrounds, colors, words, and sounds have only to be taken from the subconscious and animated to engulf the everyday routine along with its misery.” Ball started the cabaret as a way to eat, and, if he got lucky, to change the world.
Along with Ball’s need to create there was Hennings’ buried urge to destroy. Booked into a Berlin nightclub in 1912, she had pulled a rare review—rare in the annals of pop music, if not for her. One Ravien Siurlai wrote in the radical journal Die Aktion:
She stepped onto the cabaret stage, ribboned about the neck, her face waxen. With her cropped yellow hair and the stiffly layered ruffles of her skimpy dark velvet dress, she was separated from all of humanity . . . old and ravaged . . . A woman has infinities, gentlemen, but one need not absolutely confuse the erotic with prostitution . . . Who can stop this girl, who is hysteria herself . . . from swelling to an avalanche? . . . Covered with makeup, hypnotizing with morphine, absinthe, and the bloody flame of the electric “Gloire,” a violent distortion of the Gothic, her voice hops over corpses, mocks them, soulfully trilling like a yellow canary.
You can sense Siurlai reaching; you can feel him fall back, finally, into the canary cliché, as if to block his own reach: yes, it was just a show. In the late 1970s dozens of new Siurlais would try to describe attempts to create the same sensations (in San Francisco, the singer for Nōh Mercy comes on stage pregnant, squats, emits a torrent of fake blood, and gives birth to a cow bone; in Los Angeles, a woman strides naked onto the bandstand as Vox Pop plays, collapses into the bass drum, rises, pulls a Tampax from her vagina, and hurls it into the crowd—“grown men, skinheads, turned white and ran away”—that was punk, after the Sex Pistols broke up, after Johnny Rotten had taken the show as far as a show can go). Writers would try to make sense of new versions of Hennings’ apparition and fall short even of Siurlai’s compromise—which perhaps means that something happened in 1912 that did not happen in punk, or that the dread to which Siurlai gave voice required an innocence that could no longer be felt. In 1912 the war was two years away; along with everyone else in Europe, Siurlai had yet to learn the meaning of a phrase like “hops over corpses,” or for that matter the meaning of the word “corpse.” Still, like Louis Veuillot faced with Thérésa, Siurlai was reaching for a prophecy—and the moral disorder he saw in Hennings would soon find its analogue all over the West. Ball may have found it in 1914, in a visit to the Belgian front, which changed him from an enlistee into a draft dodger; he surely found it in July 1915, when Marinetti sent him the futurists’ latest “Parole in libertà” (Free Speech).
“The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments,” Ball wrote the next year, with the cabaret in full swing. “This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons. These are things that have probably never happened before.” But Marinetti had provided the clue: in 1915 the words and letters of his manifesto leaped over the page like illiterate diagrams of a song, like proof of a critic’s inability to keep up
with a new music. “They are just letters of the alphabet on a page,” Ball said in amazement; “you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax has come apart. The letters are scattered and assembled again in a rough-and-ready way. There is no language anymore . . . it has to be invented all over again. Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation.”
It was a perfect theory for Hennings’ practice, a perfect summation in advance of the strongest moments of the cabaret that would follow six months later—especially if one reverses the first and last words of Ball’s final sentence. The cabaret was named for the author of the greatest of all ironies—“All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” said Voltaire. “Our sort of Candide against the times,” Ball said of the Meierei—but for those who knew how to listen, there was no irony at all. Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation, creation right in the innermost process of disintegration—no one, the dadaists least of all, has ever been able to figure out if dada was absolute affirmation or absolute negation, only that the absolute was present, as present as Ball’s sentence was reversible. But even though in Police Academy 2 Zed’s gang kidnaps a police captain and sends him back to the stationhouse with his face and clothes painted with lines and curls that are preliterate, almost precognitive signs reaching for letters, the cop returning to the fold as a manifesto-against-his-will in favor of syntax coming apart, calling for language to be invented all over again, or never again, the Zedists rolling him up like a map of their disgust, that wasn’t quite it either. All dada histories quote Ball’s 1915 line about disintegration and creation; like so much of his diary, it was written to be quoted. But no one quotes the line he wrote next, which does not seem to anticipate dada at all: “It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences.”
