Dada – the Cradle of Surrealism

      “Dada” – this was actually the name of a journal. But Dada was something much bigger than a journal. Dada was an association of like-minded people, a movement encompassing the international artistic avant-garde. Dada was a coming to light of the tendencies and emotional reactions which were developing simultaneously in various countries of the world. Dada was a revolt against traditional art – the Dadaists advocated anti-art. And Dada was the cradle in which Surrealism uttered its first words, made its first movements – in short, grew and matured. The Dada movement was the first chapter of Surrealism.

      It is usual to regard Zürich as the birthplace of Dada, although its adherents appeared at the same time in America as well. In Europe, the Dada movement gradually spread over various countries. Little Switzerland was the only officially neutral country in Europe, the only tiny island of peace amid the fires of the World War. It was there that those young people who did not want to take part in the European war found refuge. Among those whom the winds of war had blown into Zürich were the Germans Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, the Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko, and the Alsatian Hans Arp, and many others, including some Swiss intellectuals, joined them as well. What united them more than anything was their hatred of the existing social order, of which they saw the senseless slaughter of the war as the result. Among them were pacifists of various hues, but they did not organise anti-war demonstrations, and did not take an active part in political movements. Their protest took special forms, related only to the fields of literature, the theatre and the visual arts. They all came from bourgeois families and they were all, first and foremost, opposed to official art.

      In the spring of 1915 the Romanians Tzara and Janko settled in Zürich. In 1916, on one of the little streets of old Zürich, the German Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire. Later he told the story of how the owner of a restaurant, Jan Efraim, gave him a hall for the cabaret on Spiegelgasse, and Hans Arp offered pictures by Picasso, himself, and his friends for exhibition. Tzara, Janko and the Swiss Max Oppenheimer agreed to perform in the cabaret. On February 5th, the first concert took place there: “Madame Hennings and Madame Leconte sang French and Danish songs. Monsieur Tzara read Romanian poems. An orchestra of balalaikas played delightful Russian folksongs and dances”, Ball wrote in his memoirs.[18]

      The name Dada was invented on February 8th. The godfather of the emerging movement was Tristan Tzara. Legend has it that a paper-knife fell entirely accidently onto the page of a dictionary where Tristan Tzara saw this word. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, Tzara wrote in the “Dada Manifesto 1918”. “We learn in the newspapers that the Kru negroes call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. Brick and mother, in a certain region of Italy: DADA. Wooden horse, nurse, double affirmation in Russian and Romanian: DADA.”[19] Declaring that he was against all manifestos, Tzara wrote: “Thus DADA was born out of a need for independence, out of mistrust of the community. Those who belong to us keep their freedom. We do not acknowledge any theory. We have enough Cubists and Futurists: laboratories of formal ideas. Does one create art to make money and to stroke the nice bourgeois?”[20] The basis of Dada was its ambition to destroy, without exception, all old art, on the grounds that it was not free and had been established by the bourgeois order they candidly despised. Dada was the negation of everything: “Every hierarchy and social equation set up as our values by our valets: DADA; …abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA…” wrote Tzara.[21] His concept of freedom even extended as far as emancipation from logic: “Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It drags the edges of notions and words away from their formal exterior towards ends and centres that are illusory. Its chains kill, enormous myriapods stifling independence.”[22]

      At the Cabaret Voltaire something was always happening. At first, its organisers were content to perform poetic and musical works that were comparatively inoffensive to conventional tastes – they read the poems of Kandinsky and Blaise Cendrars and they performed Liszt’s “Thirteenth Rhapsody”. Russian and French evenings were organised. At a French evening on March 14th, Tzara read poems by Max Jacob, André Salmon and Laforgue, while Arp read out extracts from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi. In the evenings, they sang the songs of Aristide Briand. At the same time, their own individual works were performed, demonstrating Dada’s nihilist position in relation to all art of the past, even the most recent past. The idea of values that lay at the heart of the bourgeois aesthetic was something they utterly rejected. Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on 11 February: “Huelsenbeck arrived. He came out in favour of the intensification of Negro rhythm. If he had his way, he would replace the whole of literature with a drum-roll.”[23] On March 29, Huelsenbeck, Janko and Tzara read out the simultaneous poem of Tristan Tzara “The Admiral is Looking for a House to Rent”, together with Negro chants – works in which the principles of anti-art were formulated. “It is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three or more voices speak at the same time, sing, whistle or do something in the same spirit, but in such a way that the content of the thing that is put together from the intersections of their “parts” becomes melancholy, cheerful and odd”, Hugo Ball wrote of