Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula

Several months before Cabaret Voltaire opened, Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel in a Broadway hardware store and inscribed on it, “In advance of the broken arm,” creating the first “readymade.” This antic spirit had already found an artistic outlet in New York City in late 1915. When Grosz tried to evade a studio visit from Schwitters by claiming, “I’m not Grosz,” he provoked a classic Dada response: Schwitters left but returned moments later to say, “I’m not Schwitters either.” He fills a lacuna in many previous accounts with his appreciative coverage of the neglected scene in Hanover, where Kurt Schwitters’s improvisational, multimedia works made from found objects epitomized the Dada spirit, even though the Berliners disdained him. Rasula deftly traces Dada’s evolving nature as it moved around Europe. Dada’s iconoclasm became overtly political in Berlin, where satirical illustrator George Grosz and pioneering photomontagist Helmut Herzfeld (who anglicized his name to John Heartfield as an antiwar gesture) joined Huelsenbeck in sardonically characterizing the nation-state as “a cultural association of psychopaths.” Zurich Dada wanted to shock the bourgeoisie Berlin Dada often sounded as though it wanted to kill them. When Dadaist author and cabaret participant Richard Huelsenbeck headed to Berlin in January 1917, he found eager recruits in a hungry, exhausted city entering its fourth year of war. By the end of the year Zurich had a Dada manifesto, a Dada gallery, and several Dada books. These free-form activities acquired the name Dada on April 18, 1916, though those involved debated for decades the question of who coined it. Cultural traditions and genre distinctions got no respect from people who wanted to knock art off its pedestal.

A vaudeville skit and a Maori tribal spell bookended a recitation from Goethe.

Emmy Hennings sang a tender ballad followed by a ribald ditty, then did splits. Words were used to craft patriotic platitudes sugar-coating the horrors of World War I, so at Cabaret Voltaire Hugo Ball created poetry from sounds instead.

Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula