Dada in the wreckage of a lost war

Dada began in neutral Zürich in 1916, in a cabaret full of exiles who decided that a civilization capable of the trenches of the First World War did not deserve to be taken seriously, and answered it with nonsense, accident and provocation. By 1919 it had jumped to Berlin, and in Berlin it grew teeth. Germany had lost the war. The streets were full of revolution, street-fighting, hunger and rage, and the new, fragile Weimar Republic (the German democracy founded in 1919 in the ruins of the empire) was being born in chaos. Berlin Dada became the most openly political wing of the whole movement.

Its core was a tight, combative group: Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), the Austrian-born painter, poet and theorist at the center of it; his partner and collaborator Hannah Höch (1889–1978), a major Dada artist in her own right; the photomontage propagandist John Heartfield; the savage caricaturist George Grosz; and the provocateurs Johannes Baader and Richard Huelsenbeck. They made photomontages, manifestos, poster-poems and staged scandals, all aimed at the German establishment that had marched a generation into the mud and then lost.

Hausmann was the group’s restless inventor. He is one of the (disputed) inventors of photomontage, the technique of building a new image by cutting up and reassembling printed photographs; he and Höch said the idea came to them on a 1918 Baltic holiday, looking at the framed soldier-portraits that hung in every house. He was also a sound poet, writing “optophonetic” poster-poems out of loose letters and raw phonemes. The drive underneath all of it is the same: make meaning by combining the found and the nonsensical. Around 1920 he aimed that drive at a new kind of object. He reached for a barber’s wooden dummy head and a fistful of office and household junk, and assembled a head.