by Greil Marcus
Filippo Marinetti, parolibero, 1915
ACCORDING
According to legend the invulnerable sentence was the antithesis of dada; dada denied there was any such thing. But dada was part of its time, and Ball’s politely unquoted line is part of dada. It brings dada all too close to futurism, which in the 1920s would happily make the leap from avant-garde aesthetics into the new world of fascism. It was a small leap, from either direction: Mussolini had himself been a poet, a futurist hanger-on, though perhaps one less attracted to Marinetti’s experiments with language than to his celebration of war as the highest form of modern art.
Ball’s sentence opens dada to the will to power. It sounds like something that should have been written by Hitler—or Lenin, who in 1916 was living just down the street from the Cabaret Voltaire: his house has a plaque too. He came often, arguing night after night with Janco over the fallacy of abstract art when what had to be created (Lenin pounded the table) were new facts—or he came never, not even on Russian folk-song night, having already decided that art in whatever form was a moral safety valve: “I can’t listen to music too often,” he once said of Beethoven’s Appassionata. “It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy.” Invulnerable sentences are death sentences. “Six million exterminated” is an invulnerable sentence. You can’t argue with it. There is a way in which it is dada.
There was real fear in Siurlai’s review of Hennings’ performance. “Hysteria,” he wrote; “avalanche,” “morphine,” “bloody,” “flame,” “violent,” “ravaged,” “distortion,” “corpses,” “infinities.” He was right to be scared. Ball’s diaries are a dubious record because they make up a treatise on ethics; day by day, as dada unfolded, he sought justifications for the barbarisms of the night before. But inside the cabaret he and the others abandoned the need for justifications; then like lovers seeking a way out of an illicit affair they all of them contrived endless escapes the next morning, and surrendered again by sundown. They knew Nietzsche’s warning that “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster”; as they danced in a circle on the stage, making a fire out of all literature, culture, modern art, they remembered those words like junkies reading the warning on a bottle of narcotics. They knew they had created a monster, and they had as much affection for it as Mary Shelley had for hers: “My little child.” Huelsenbeck:
If you have had the miraculous good fortune to be present at the birth of such a “sensation,” you will want to know how it happens that an empty sound, first intended as a surname for a female singer, has developed amid grotesque adventures into a name for a rundown cabaret, then into abstract art, baby-talk and a party of babies at the breast and finally—well [Huelsenbeck said in 1920], I shall not anticipate. This is exactly the history of Dadaism. Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing it; it was an immaculate conception, and thereby its profound meaning was revealed to me.
. . . In the hands of the gentlemen in Zurich, Dada grew into a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present; and soon its existence could no longer be arranged with the precision demanded by a businesslike conduct of the Dadaist movement in art. Despite the most impassioned efforts, no one had yet found out exactly what Dada was.
THERE IS
There is a figure who appears in this book again and again. His instincts are basically cruel; his manner is intransigent. He trades in hysteria but is immune to it. He is beyond temptation, because despite his utopian rhetoric satisfaction is the last thing on his mind. He is unutterably seductive, yet he trails bitter comrades behind him like Hansel his breadcrumbs, his only way home through a thicket of apologies he will never make. He is a moralist and a rationalist, but he presents himself as a sociopath; he leaves behind documents not of edification but of paradox. No matter how violent his mark on history, he is doomed to obscurity, which he cultivates as a sign of profundity. Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is one version; Guy Debord is another. Saint-Just was an ancestor, but in my story Richard Huelsenbeck is the prototype. God only knows what he was like as a psychiatrist.
“I still have a clear memory of the evening on which I entered the Cabaret Voltaire,” he wrote in 1957.
Hugo was sitting at the piano, playing classical music, Brahms and Bach. Then he switched over to dance music. The drunken students pushed their chairs aside and began spinning around. There were almost no women in the cabaret. It was too wild, too smoky . . .
Hugo had written a poem against war and murderous insanity. Emmy recited it, Hugo accompanied her on the piano, and the audience chimed in, with a growl, murdering the poem.
Huelsenbeck idolized Ball. They met in 1912, in Munich, where Huelsenbeck was studying literature and art and Ball was working in the theater. The next year Huelsenbeck contributed to Ball’s magazine Revolution as its in-house Paris correspondent (he had at least been to Paris, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in late 1912; after dada he would become a real-life foreign correspondent for Berlin newspapers, traveling around the world, interviewing Chiang Kai-shek and turning up at the funeral of Sun Yat-sen). When Ball left Munich for Berlin in 1914, Huelsenbeck followed. In the first months of the war they organized readings to honor newly dead poets from both sides; in 1915 they put on an explicitly antiwar, anti-German “Expressionist Evening,” offering nonsense verse and “Negro poems” to counter the destruction of Europe. When Ball first abandoned dada in July 1916, Huelsenbeck had a nervous breakdown that lasted almost six months (“punishment for dada hubris,” he said). He was in Zurich only because of Ball—and his draft board. He arrived on February 8, 11, or 26, three, six, or twenty-one days after the cabaret opened.
Despite the noise and the crowd, he found it dead. He wanted a big beat, and he was ready to make it: with those “Negro poems,” Negergedichte, based on fragments of information about ragtime—based on nothing. Each poem ended with bones-in-the-nose: “umbah-umbah.” He read the poems out on stage.
Jan Ephriam took Huelsenbeck aside. He explained that the German medical student’s bourgeois primitivisms were hopeless fantasies, not even fakes: the old sailor had spent years with African “Negroes.” Fine, Huelsenbeck said (well, really he said Fuck off, but Ball turned him around)—give me something authentic. A few days later Ephriam returned with scribbles: “TRABADYA LA MODJERE MAGAMORE MAGAGERE TRABADJA BONO.”
It was, Ball would prove with his celebrated sound poems, the dada language. If words that cannot contain facts can dissolve facts, Ephriam’s sounds called up the invulnerable sentence. Huelsenbeck stood on the stage and recited the cabaret owner’s blank syllables, then made up his own, refusing in every instance to give up his stupid “umbah-umbah”; the crowd responded in a hundred different ways. He sat behind a big bass drum, pounded it, shouted the new words, then like Jerry Lee Lewis in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” whispered them, then roared back. Reciting his poem “The End of the World,” he stalked the stage and slashed the air with a riding crop, spitting out his meaningless sounds as if they were apochrypha straight from the lost gnostic Gospel of Truth: “poème bruitist performed for the first time by Richard Huelsenbeck Dada,” he liked to say, “or, if you prefer, the other way around.” It was still a fraud but no one knew: “I secretly went to the University and started studying medicine,” he told the audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1971. “I couldn’t say it to anybody because they would have thought I was a terrible liar and bourgeois. In the morning he goes to the University and at night he makes umbah-umbah.” But in Zurich in 1916 neither the dada six nor the crowd could have told “umbah-umbah” from “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and so the dadaists made their rhythm as the crowd clapped off the beat, rushed the stage, grabbed at Huelsenbeck’s legs—it didn’t matt
er what language he was speaking, or if he was speaking any language at all. “All art begins with a critique,” he said, “with a critique of the self, the self always reflecting society. Our critique began, as all critique begins, with doubt . . . Doubt became our life. Doubt and outrage. Our doubt was so deep, finally, that we asked ourselves: Can language express a doubt so deep?”
On stage he kicked back. Fights broke out; he encouraged them. “You are invited to interrupt me any time you want to,” he said in London. “I would like you to be a little bit lively such as we were. Now I am approaching the last third of my life,” he said at seventy-nine, “and I’m not as lively as I was in 1916 in Zurich at the Spiegelgasse, then I was very lively—I could jump over tables and chairs, beat people up and was beaten up of course too, but there’s still a little bit of this spirit left in me . . . Ball in his famous book Flight Out of Time describes me there as a young, aggressive, disagreeable person who always attacks the public, who spits at it, and always as his third word says his umbah-umbah. It cannot go on this way, something will have to be done about it sooner or later if he does not discontinue that. So we went on.”
“A terrible chaos,” Huelsenbeck said that night in London. “The meaning of chaos, that’s what I’m going to talk about.” But he never got around to it.
DISINTEGRATION
“Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation,” Ball wrote. “It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences.” 15 June 1916:
Huelsenbeck comes to type his latest poems. At every other word he turns his head and says: “Or is that an idea of yours?” I jokingly suggest that we should draw up an alphabetical list of our most frequent constellations and phrases, so that production can proceed without interruption; for I too sit on the window seat trying to resist unfamiliar words and associations; I scribble and look down at the carpenter who is busy making coffins in the yard. To be precise: two-thirds of the wonderfully plaintive words that no human mind can resist come from ancient magical texts. The use of “grammologues,” or magical floating words and resonant sounds characterizes the way we both write. Such word-images, when they are successful, are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory, and they emerge again from the memory with just as little resistance and friction. It has frequently happened that people who visited our evening performances without being prepared for them were so impressed by a single word or phrase that it stayed with them for weeks. Lazy or apathetic people, whose resistance is low, are especially tormented in this way.
So it came up: the blind oath, the severed gesture, the buried curse, the dance it took an entire civilization to forget, and ten seconds to remember. The pieces Lefebvre would promise to finish smashing had been discovered. The momentum was there; the task was to increase it. “Some things assisted us in our efforts,” Ball said—“first of all, the special circumstances of these times, which do not allow real talent either to rest or mature and so put its capabilities to the test. Then there was the energy of our group; one member was always trying to surpass the other by intensifying demands and stresses.” Janco contributed the masks.
Ball saw them as abstractions of the passions, images that had somehow floated free for more than two thousand years, arriving in a crooked street in Zurich en route from the secret olive groves where the Greeks performed their first plays. At the same time he recognized the masks as absolutely modern: cutups that remained faces, but just barely. With paste and hair and cardboard Janco had taken the noses, eyes, mouths, chins, cheeks, and foreheads of his friends and skewed them, attacked them, practiced unlicensed medicine on them.
To Arp the masks were at once “fetuses and autopsies.” Flatly, they took the Cabaret Voltaire draft dodgers to the front. In Germany it was already being rumored there were soldiers so hideously disfigured by the new weapons that they would have to be imprisoned in secret hospitals for the rest of their lives; after the war, photographs were smuggled out to prove it. They are so horrible they look like fakes, photo collages—like the postwar collages of Berlin dadaist Hannah Höch, like her Fröhliche Dame (Happy Lady), which looks like a burn victim smiling. But cubism was dismemberment; if war was the highest form of modern art, who could say that a face blown up by a bomb did not reveal character? Ball:
We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume, it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other . . . The motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us.
Tristan Tzara, Zurich, 1917
Reconstruction of mask of Tristan Tzara by Marcel Janco, 1916–17
German victim of World War I
Hannah Höch, Fröliche Dame, 1923
So much for Russian folk-song night.
THE MASKS
The masks brought forth slow dances, made up on the spot and named after the fact: “Festive Despair,” “Nightmare,” “Fly-catching.” In every case the masks affirmed the existence of a language no one knew how to speak, but which contained the only words capable of forming the only truths worth knowing. Trabadya-la-modjere was turning into the philosopher’s stone. The dadaists were going back in time, falling through the stage: “Modern artists,” Ball would write in 1917, “are gnostics and practice things that the priests think are long forgotten; perhaps even commit sins that are no longer thought possible.” These were the sins to be found in an embrace of an ancient heresy, the belief that certain forms of knowledge, of gnosis, accessible only to a few, could bring one so close to the Godhead that the seeker would drive God out of time as if God had never been; in the early Christian era, even as the church drove the gnostics out of history, the rituals they practiced continued. With their gospels burned and adherence to them punishable by death, some adepts, the historian Benjamin Walker writes, remained familiar
with the reputed occult virtues of sound and the latent potency of sacred names, hermetic formulas and magical invocations . . . The most important of all sounds, they believed, is the phoneme, which is the smallest articulable sound unit . . . There evolved in time the practice of singing each [vowel sound of the Greek alphabet] in a single breath . . . combining the vowels with certain consonants, especially those producing a buzzing or humming sound: Zeeza, Zezo, Zoza, Ozzi, Omazu, Nozama, Amenaz, Arazaz . . . As far as possible these archaic syllables were used in unaltered form, even when their meaning, if they had any, was forgotten.
The dadaists were coming into the knowledge that what had been forgotten could be remembered, even by accident; they were realizing that the language everyone knew how to speak was capable of forming only those truths they didn’t want to hear. They didn’t know what they wanted to hear, so they made a sound they called “medieval bruitism,” “noise with imitative effects,” a simultaneous poem, all the acts appearing at the same time, but no longer acts. It meant wails, the bass drum, glissandos, prehistoric harmony, cries of pain and hilarity; if the dadaists did not replace God, they replaced themselves. Huelsenbeck:
The problem of the soul is by nature volcanic. Every movement naturally produces noise. While number, and consequently melody, are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call to action. Music of whatever nature is harmonious, artistic, an activity of reason—but bruitism is life itself, it cannot be judged like a book, but rather it is a part of our personality, which attacks us, pursues us and tears us to pieces. Bruitism is a way of looking at life which, strange as it may seem at first, compels us to make an absolute decision. There are only bruitists, and others . . . In modern Europe, the same initiative which in America made ragtime a national music led to the convulsion of bruitism.
(There were) empty fictions, as if they were sunk in sleep and
found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they come (from) having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again, sometimes (it is as) if people were murdering them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood. When those who are going through all these things wake up, they see nothing, those who were in the midst of all these disturbances, for they are nothing. Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside from them like sleep, not esteeming it as anything, nor do they esteem its works as solid things either, but leave them behind like a dream in the night.
