Cut with the Kitchen Knife

A poster-sized photomontage that shreds and reassembles the whole Weimar republic out of the illustrated press, generals and dancers and machine parts, made by the only woman in Berlin Dada, with a corner map of where women could vote and her own face pasted where a painter would sign.

1. 1
   The Kaiser, with a wrestler moustache

   Upper right, the large head of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the “anti-dada” camp

   The deposed emperor Wilhelm II anchors the establishment corner, and his famous upturned moustache has been snipped off and replaced with a pair of tiny upside-down wrestlers. It is the whole montage in miniature: take the most pompous symbol of authority and deflate it with a cheap clipping from a sports page. This identification is certain and universally cited.
2. 2
   The military around him

   Upper right, the generals and Weimar government men ringing the Kaiser, including Hindenburg

   The old army and the new republic’s officials cluster in the upper-right “anti-dada” zone, the field marshal Paul von Hindenburg among them. Scholars (Maud Lavin, Smarthistory) read his head as set on a belly-dancer’s body, one of Höch’s recurring head-swaps that strips a man of his dignity. Treat the exact body-pairing as a scholarly reading; the camp and the figures are certain.
3. 3
   The “dada” camp of radicals and Dadaists

   Lower left and across the picture, the revolutionary and Dada figures opposite the establishment

   The other side gathers the revolution: the Communists and radicals Lenin, Karl Marx, Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Radek, the Dadaists themselves (Hausmann, Grosz, Herzfelde, Baader), and Albert Einstein nearby as the new science. The split into two warring camps is certain; some individual head-on-body matches are scholarly identifications, not labels on the work.
4. 4
   The dancers carrying men’s heads

   Across the lower and central field, small cut-out performer bodies topped with political and cultural heads

   A defining device: the cut-out bodies of dancers and film stars carry the heads of serious men, deflating their authority by sticking them on a chorus girl. Scholars identify the dancer Niddy Impekoven’s body balancing the artist Käthe Kollwitz’s head, and read Anna Pavlova, Pola Negri, and Asta Nielsen among the sources. These name-to-figure matches are partly inferential; the head-swapping motif itself is plain on the work.
5. 5
   The lettering: “Die grosse Welt dada”

   Lower right, the cut-out type reading roughly “the great Dada world,” with “dada” and “anti-dada” used as camp labels

   The printed words act as the picture’s captions, sorting the figures into “dada” and “anti-dada.” At the lower right the phrase “Die grosse Welt dada” (“the great Dada world”) reads out, and there is a documented edit here: Höch first had “Weltrevolution” (World Revolution) in this spot and replaced it with the milder Dada wording, softening an open call to revolution into a Dada slogan.
6. 6
   The suffrage map, and Höch’s own face

   Lower-right corner, a small map of Europe with her self-portrait pasted at its upper-left

   In the corner where a painter signs, Höch pasted a little map of Europe marking the countries where women had won the vote (Germany itself had just granted it in the 1919 Weimar constitution), and at the map’s upper-left she pasted a photograph of her own face. A woman, and the question of women’s political power, occupy the signature spot inside a movement that nearly shut her out. That the self-portrait sits with the map is certain (Khan Academy); the best-sourced placement is the lower right.