The one woman in Berlin Dada

Berlin in 1919 was not a calm place to make a calm picture. Germany had just lost the First World War; the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had abdicated and fled in November 1918; and in his place a shaky new democracy, the Weimar Republic (named for the small city of Weimar, where its constitution was written because Berlin was too dangerous to meet in), was trying to govern a country in open revolt. That January, a Communist uprising, the Spartacist revolt, was crushed in the streets, and its two leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by right-wing paramilitaries. Soldiers home from the trenches, generals from the old empire, street-fighting revolutionaries, and a wobbling new government were all crammed into one furious city. This is the Berlin the picture is literally cut from.

Into that city came Dada, the anti-art movement that had begun in neutral Zurich in 1916 as a howl of disgust at the war and the respectable culture that had marched into it. (The name Dada means nothing on purpose: a piece of baby-talk, a hobby-horse, a noise, chosen precisely because it refused to mean anything sensible.) By 1918 a Berlin branch had formed, and it was the most nakedly political of all the Dada chapters. Where Zurich Dada played nonsense games, Berlin Dada took the same scissors-and-nonsense spirit and aimed it straight at German militarism, the generals, and the new republic. Its weapons were the cabaret stunt, the leaflet, and a new visual technique we are about to meet.

The Berlin Dada circle was a band of brilliant, quarrelsome men: the painter and provocateur Raoul Hausmann; the savage caricaturist George Grosz; the brothers John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, who ran a left-wing press; the self-appointed “Oberdada” (chief Dada) Johannes Baader. And there was Hannah Höch (1889–1978; pronounced “HAH-nah HURK,” the ö roughly like the vowel in “her”), the only woman in the group. (Say Berlin Dada specifically: other Dada cities, Zurich, Paris, New York, had women of their own. In Berlin, there was Höch.)

Her position in the circle was precarious in a way none of the men’s was. She was Hausmann’s partner for seven years, and she earned the rent the rest of them mostly didn’t: from 1916 she worked at the giant Ullstein publishing house, designing patterns for embroidery and handicraft magazines aimed at women. That day job mattered, because it steeped her in exactly the world, mass-printed pictures, illustrated magazines, the cut-and-paste of layout, that she would turn into art. The men treated her, in the words she later wrote, as a sort of charming amateur. Grosz and Heartfield actively opposed letting her show with the group at all. When the group mounted its big public event in 1920, she was admitted only because Hausmann threatened to withdraw his own workif she was kept out. Hausmann himself later wrote, dismissively, that “she was never a member of the club.”

That big public event was the First International Dada Fair (the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe), held in the summer of 1920 at the gallery of a Berlin art dealer, Dr. Otto Burchard. It was a deliberate provocation, walls crammed with photomontages and slogans, a stuffed German officer with a pig’s head hung from the ceiling, posters declaring “Art is dead.” And hanging in it, the woman who had nearly been barred from the room, was Cut with the Kitchen Knife, reportedly one of the most prominent and talked-about pieces in the whole show.

Its title is a sentence in itself: Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (in German, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands). Unpack it slowly. A kitchen knife is cutting; Dada is doing the cutting; what is being cut through is the “beer-belly cultural epoch” of Weimar Germany, the fat, complacent, militaristic old order. The picture is the cut. And a woman, the one the men nearly kept out, is the one holding the knife.