by Greil Marcus
—from the gnostic “Gospel of Truth,” the Nightmare Parable, c. 150 A.D.
Here, Huelsenbeck, who at the time—1920—was lecturing to a psychiatrists’ convention in the Free City of Danzig (today, Gdansk), where he would set up a practice in 1922, stepped out from behind his lectern, did a few steps of the Eagle Rock, pulled a paper bag over his head, scribbled blindly on it with a grease pen, punched out eye holes, drew a pistol from his jacket, and fired a full clip of blanks at the audience. The half-dozen or so who had seen the act before were primed to applaud.
Ha. Thank you. Bruitism—well, you see. Bruitism is a kind of return to nature. It is the music produced by circuits of atoms—
(at this point a member of Huelsenbeck’s claque rose from his chair and fired a pistol filled with blanks at Huelsenbeck, who bit down on a capsule secreted in his mouth, causing fake blood to drip down his chin and over his shirtfront. He grabbed the lectern and continued speaking, bent over and turned away from his listeners)
death ceases to be an escape of the soul from earthly misery and becomes a vomiting, screaming, and choking. The Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire took over bruitism without suspecting its philosophy—basically they desired its opposite: a calming of the soul, an endless lullaby, art, abstract art. They wanted the moral safety valve—“Disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts,” “Our sort of Candide against the times,” our sort of four-ply comforter—but dada grew into a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present. Do you understand? We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one—that’s what we get paid for!
IT ALL
It all came together on 23 June 1916 in the cabaret, unless it was July 14, in a rented hall, when Ball dressed up like a sorcerer in the weird costume, designed by Janco, built out of cardboard by his brother (“It was fun to do it,” Jules Janco said in 1984, “and even more fun to undo it!”). On Ball’s head was a blue and white striped hat two feet high; his body was covered in an obelisk painted blue. Huge claws replaced his hands. Wings, red on the inside and gold on the outside, went down to his waist; as Ball chanted his sounds, two different poems on reading stands at his sides, he flapped his arms like a bird.
It was a moment of panic: Ball suddenly realized he didn’t understand what the costume was demanding of him, didn’t recognize the audience, didn’t know what his empty words (“blago bung / blago bung / bosso fataka”) didn’t mean. In his terror, he felt himself drawn back to the cadences of a priest celebrating the mass as he, little Hugo, knelt with his mother and father two decades before; the years rose up, then died. It was a moment of hubris and fear that took Ball straight out of dada, opened the road back to the church, and, eventually, got him on TV.
The famous photograph of Hugo Ball dressed as a sorcerer, as used in Dadaco, Munich, 1920
BY THE TIME
By the time Huelsenbeck gave his Danzig lecture (it was no lecture, none of the events described ever happened, but the words in roman type are from his 1920 pamphlet En avant dado), thanks to the holes punched in his eyes in the Cabaret Voltaire he had seen it all, far more than he ever wanted to see. As time went on he saw it again and again. “The dadaist is a man of reality who loves wine, women and advertising,” he said in 1920; soon enough advertising would be dada, dada would be everywhere he looked, dogging his footsteps, and so like the rest he would run from it. The great goal of dissolving all boundaries between art and life would be realized, which meant there was nothing left to do but contemplate the strange way in which the realization of the great goal had not granted everyday life the transformative power of art, but only dissolved art’s power and produced nothing to replace it, contemplate that, or talk about the legend, for a fee, those days in Zurich, I was there—or remember that before there was dada, there was an ad for Dada Shampoo.
In 1980 Bob Acraman advertised a vacation package at a New Belsen theme park, and a wire service picked up the story. By then the word dada was in the dictionaries, artists from all countries claimed it, there were quarterlies and conferences, archives and revivals, but if dada lived it was in such novelty items buried in the daily papers, weird tales that blew up the frank-exchange-of-views prose of front-page propaganda, or never touched it—Bob Acraman, not Andy Warhol, was the real neo-dadaist, even if on this level too dada was a replica of itself: old news. After all—it was only 1921 when the Basel News offered its readers a package tour to the battlefields of Verdun, promising “the quintessence of the horrors of modern warfare,” real life as modern art, “unforgettable impressions” of destroyed villages, “enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen men,” and every body was doing it, doing it, doing it, first come first served:
Not only to the French mind is [Verdun] the battlefield par excellence on which the enormous struggle between France and Germany was finally decided . . . If the entire war cost France 1,400,000 dead, almost one third of that number fell in the sector of Verdun, which comprises but a few square kilometers. The Germans suffered more than twice the number of casualties there. In this small area, where more than a million men—perhaps a million and a half—bled to death, there is not a square centimeter of soil that was not exploded by grenades. Afterwards the traveler should cover the battlefields of the Argonne Forest, the river Somme, wander through the ruins of Reims, returning via St. Mihiel and the Priest Forest: but everything merely repeats
umbah, umbah—
details which at Verdun combine into an unprecedentedly phenomenal panorama of horror and dread . . . wine and coffee and gratuities included.
The great Vienna critic Karl Kraus was appalled. “I am holding in my hand a document which transcends and seals all the shame of this age and would in itself suffice to assign the currency stew that calls itself mankind a place of honor in a cosmic carrion pit,” he wrote. “After the monstrous collapse of the fiction of culture . . . [the age] has nothing left but the naked truth of its condition, so that it has almost reached the point where it is no longer capable of lying.” Kraus’s first sentence was Huelsenbeck’s kind of language, his second, Ball’s, but Kraus was not a dadaist; he was simply saying what he meant. Fifty-six years after he wrote, the Sex Pistols would offer him an answer record, “Holidays in the Sun” (Bomb sites! Hitler’s Bunker! The Berlin Wall! Wine and coffee and gratuities not included!)—and by what means was it that a line from the Basel News to Karl Kraus to excursion rates for Auschwitz cattle cars to the Sex Pistols to Bob Acraman pieced itself together? This is the history the dadaists were fighting and the history they were acting out, all of it appearing on the stage at the same time; to reduce the age and its language to the point where it was no longer capable of lying, even if that meant it would no longer be capable of speaking, had been precisely their goal. Had they been there at the end of the line they would have been in ecstasy, convulsed by the thrill of having been proved right. Then they would have thrown up—but dada would still be laughing. To be a dadaist was to be a man of reality who loved wine, women, and advertising; to have a smile on your lips, a song in your heart, and a skull in your pocket.
BY JANUARY
By January 1917 Huelsenbeck was in Berlin, a dada courier. There he would join with new comrades who were almost as mean as he was: Raoul Hausmann, Walter Mehring, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde. After the “health resort” of Zurich, Huelsenbeck exulted, Berlin was real life: “Fear was in everybody’s bones.” All authority was collapsing, which meant that anything was possible, that anyone could be shot down in any street.
Destruction beckoned. “In 1917 the Germans were beginning to give a great deal of thought to their souls,” Huelsenbeck wrote of the last days of the war. “This was only a natural defense on the part of a society that had been harassed, milked dry, and driven to the breaking point . . . A phenomenon familiar in German history was
again manifested: Germany will always become a land of poets and thinkers when it begins to understand that it has mismanaged itself as a land of judges and hangmen.” Thus came the Omphaloskepsist-Himmelists: the expressionists, who “pulled people gently by the sleeve and led them into the half-light of the Gothic cathedrals, where the street noises die down to a distant murmur and, in accord with the old principle that all cats are gray in the dark, men without exception are fine fellows.” Expressionism performed the magic trick of taking Germany inward and heavenward at the same time, so the new Berlin Dada Club countered with magic of its own: the word.
That was all they had: “dada,” a thousand times and a thousand different ways, mene mene tekel upharsin dropped down into a two-step (“Dadatrott,” they named the dance, thoughtfully publishing photos demonstrating exactly how to do it). They trumpeted the word as the great mystery, secreting it in the corners of paintings where people turned into monsters and machines; they left it dripping on walls. Launching the word like a rocket out of their cut-ups and collages, printing it up on handbills, wearing it on sandwich boards and on their clothes, shouting it in the streets or on stage, they claimed it as the most obvious fact. The word became the Modifier, no other word capable of meaning without “dada” attached to it, no other word able to hold its meaning with “dada” riding on its back. Crowds came to hear it happen, to watch the void be conjured up: “Now,” Huelsenbeck said, “they were suddenly confronted with people who deliberately severed the process of communication, the causal nexus between payment and ware, between expectation and fulfillment.” Hausmann broke the sound poems Huelsenbeck brought from Zurich into letter poems; the dictatorship of the phoneme was overthrown. Even names split and reformed: “groszfield,” “hearthaus,” “georgemann.” The dadaists ruled an invisible empire, so they took titles: “Marschalldada” (Grosz, who cultivated his resemblance to a Prussian Junker), “Monteurdada” (Heartfield, the photo-montagist), “Progress-dada” (Herzfelde, a Communist), “Dadasoph” (Hausmann, “the philosopher,” the word perhaps taken to mask his Neandertal brow), “Oberdada” (Baader, who thought he ruled the world), “Meisterdada” (Huelsenbeck).
Dada became a game; powered by a loathing so strong at times it was all but undifferentiated, dada became fun. Throwing off all vestiges of aesthetics, philosophy, ethics, dada became what perhaps it had always wanted to be: merely a voice, a sound. The voice battered itself against the walls of honor and decency, looking for limits, finding none. When Huelsenbeck, speaking the dada language of backward and forward so fast not even he knew what he was saying, announced that “We were for the war and Dadaism today is still for war. Life must hurt,” there were mutilated veterans in the audience. But on the stage behind him there were no aesthetes like Arp, no careerists like Tzara, no Catholics like Ball to stop the show to ask what it all meant: the momentum was all toward spleen. The most arresting images the group left behind are mouths, Hausmann’s or Heartfield’s, open, teeth bared, words or letters spewing forth like giant microbes: We will drown you out.
Like the extraterrestrial slime in The Creeping Unknown, the 1954 film that preceded Five Million Years to Earth in the Quatermass series, dada in Berlin began as a speck, and expanded until it swallowed the city; so it went, in the invisible empire. When in 1918 the time came for Huelsenbeck and Hausmann to ask “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?,” the answer was self-evident:
Dadaism demands . . .
The introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity. Only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience . . .
The Central Council demands . . .
Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers to the Dadaist articles of faith . . .
The immediate erection of a state art center, elimination of concepts of property in the new art (expressionism); the concept of property is entirely excluded from the super-individual movement of Dadaism which liberates all mankind;
Introduction of the simultaneist poem as a Communist state prayer;
Establishment of a Dadaist advisory council for the remodeling of life in every city of over 50,000 inhabitants;
Immediate organization of a large scale Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat;
Submission of all laws and decrees to the Dadaist central council for approval;
Immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.
It sounds familiar because two decades later all Germany would be living it out. Hausmann always thought it was a joke, he said after the Nazis had come and gone; he was never sure about Huelsenbeck. “The significance of this program,” Huelsenbeck wrote in 1920, was dada as “no more than an expression of the times,” taking “into itself all their knowledge, their breathless tempo, their skepticism, but also their weariness, their despair of a meaning or a ‘truth.’ ” But that wasn’t it at all, he said as an old man, speaking to his friend Hans J. Kleinschmidt: he had wanted to change society. “There was a moment in Berlin when I would have accepted the help of the Devil to accomplish it,” he remembered, but the devil was otherwise occupied; all Huelsenbeck left behind was a legend, which he carried with him the rest of his life. “NO! NO! NO!,” he said in one of his milder Berlin moments. “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.” Dada was to be the art, and also the explosion, and then another, called up by the art of yesterday’s crash. There was to be no end to dada.
Page from Dadaco, Munich, 1920
Still, all this was hard to get across. In January 1917 Huelsenbeck crossed the border from Switzerland into Germany far more easily than his neighbor Lenin would four months later; for Huelsenbeck, no sealed train was required. The police weren’t stupid: for Huelsenbeck there would be no Finland Station. He too returned to revolution, but not to power; the invisible empire aside, he returned, first, to pedantry. When he first spoke publicly in Germany on dada—in a lecture hall, for a fee—he simply recounted the discovery of the philosopher’s stone: it was, he said then of the Cabaret Voltaire, a “hexen-sabbath,” a sorcery. “I was the cantor, an almost mythic figure,” he said—“with plenty of schmaltz.” You know: Ball’s “aesthetic production” in the face of what, in those days, passed for total war. A nightclub versus a theme park.
The history of the twentieth century was to be the account of the creation of reality through its erasure: through killing people, through the extermination of subjective objects, of realized or potential individuals as forests to be cleared. The triumph of this work can be found in the fact that we have neither art nor language to translate it—that when we try to think about those who were exterminated in Europe in the 1910s and 1940s (Hitler, 1939: “Who today remembers the Armenians?”) or in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, in China in the 1950s, Indonesia in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s (out of the ashes, the New Man), we can’t think of those people as such. We can see Alben Barkley, but we can’t see what Barkley saw. When Ball wrote of the need to erase everything that had been written, when Tzara said he didn’t care if anyone existed before him, when Huelsenbeck chanted “The End of the World,” the dadaists fed on this impulse, even as their disgust over its wastes brought them to life.
Dada, like the century, was the right to piss and shit in different colors: white, yellow, black, and red. Repeatedly in the first years of the Nazi regime, the Gestapo came looking for Huelsenbeck (Is this the residence of Huelsenbeck the dadaist? No, his wife would answer, this is the residence of Huelsenbeck the doctor); safe in the United States, he would never tire of citing the 1936 Nuremberg speech in which Hitler condemne
d dada as a slime pit as proof of dada’s innocent power. But it is not difficult to conclude that Hitler, once part of a bohemian milieu, always a painter, an artist, railed so long and hard against dada because it had touched him, because he felt its pull, just as Ball felt the nihilism in Marinetti’s “Parole in libertà,” Siurlai the whiff of death in Hennings’ “Gloire,” Huelsenbeck the thrill of total rule in “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?” Certainly Carl Jung, speaking in London in the same year Hitler spoke in Nuremberg, would not have found it difficult; he knew the pull went in two directions.
A purely personalistic psychology, by reducing everything to personal causes, tries its level best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. I consider this a rather dangerous procedure which cannot be justified medically . . . Can we not see how a whole nation is reviving an archaic symbol, yes, even archaic religious forms, and how this mass emotion is influencing and revolutionizing the life of the individual in a catastrophic manner? The man of the past is alive in us today to a degree undreamt of before the war [of 1914–1918], and in the last analysis what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?
That had been Ball’s argument, which could have been Hitler’s: “I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation.” It is no matter that, in all his megalomania, Ball would have been horrified by Nazism—which, as a fact of history, Jung went on to weave into a version of the thesis Norman Cohn would set forth in 1957, in The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn was greeted with incredulity when he argued that the exterminating impulses of the twentieth century could be traced to unsatisfied debts first levied by the heretics and inquisitors of the Middle Ages; to Jung it was obvious.
