The cabaret closed in early July 1916, almost a month before Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, and her daughter, Ammelie, left Zurich for Vira-Magadino on Lake Locarno. Though the cabaret was gone, Dada performances or soirées continued. Before Ball and Hennings departed, the first Dada soirée was held on Bastille Day, July 14, in Zunfthaus zur Waag, an old guildhouse on Münsterhof Square, one of the more prominent and upscale sites in Zurich. With this change of venue, Dada instantly shed the knockabout connotations of the cabaret and entered a new phase of its short but growing history. This swank locale imbued whatever Dada might mean with an air of seriousness.
The group presented a reprise of material from Cabaret Voltaire, along with the debut performance of Tristan Tzara’s play First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine. Hennings performed three Dada dances, with masks by Marcel Janco and music by Ball, and Ball read his sound poem “Gadji Beri Bimba,” which he had premiered at Cabaret Voltaire in the magic bishop costume. This time, though, the trappings of the cabaret were gone, and he looked the well-attired gentleman addressing a “new tendency in art.” He rattled off the multilingual associations of the term Dada, then splintered the names of his collaborators into a verbal stew: “Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.”
Much to the amazement of the audience, Ball then switched gears abruptly and began to read his Dada manifesto. “How does one achieve eternal bliss?” he asked. “By saying dada.” Dada was the inauguration of a new mode of speech, a new outlook on life, in which “I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows.” Dada was the soap that washed the grime off language, that precious instrument for elevating animal sound into intelligible human expression. “Dada is the heart of words,” Ball said. “The word, gentlemen,” he concluded, “is a public concern of the first importance.”
A few weeks later, basking in blissful August weather on the Alpine heights north of Milan, Ball reflected on his Bastille Day manifesto-lecture, realizing it was a “a thinly disguised break with friends” and adding, “they felt so too.” He wondered, “Has the first manifesto of a newly founded cause ever been known to refute the cause itself to its supporters’ faces?”
Ball had felt the end approaching even earlier, back at Cabaret Voltaire, and he now rued his “regrettable outburst” in the magic bishop outfit, even as he remained preoccupied with it. He wanted transfiguration, yearned for personal tranquility, and was deeply moved by the Catholic services he began attending—seeing in them a reflection of the same sort of absolution he sought in his art. “It is with language that purification must begin, the imagination be purified,” he wrote in his diary. Clearly, such purification was an incentive behind his “wordless poems” as he called them, even if he felt himself carried away, irrationally, in the delivery. There was something essential in them, a key somehow to the bracing challenge of an adage he transcribed from the German Romantic poet Novalis: “Becoming a human being is an art.”
If Ball was intent on the art of becoming human, the others back in Zurich were determined to become Dadaists by way of art. Ball and Hennings had been indispensible in the cabaret, but for publishing and arranging exhibitions, they weren’t strictly necessary.
After Cabaret Voltaire appeared, Tzara was bent on launching another journal with the name Dada, along with a book series. The first title was a handsome production of his play First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, eight pages of text with six full-page two-color woodcuts by Janco. Antipyrine was the brand name of a headache remedy—a malady to which Tzara was prone—so the titular figure is a Mr. Aspirin or Mr. Tylenol. Ostensibly a play, it was little more than a verbal onslaught distributed among characters with names like Mr. Blueblue, Mr. Shriekshriek, Mr. Bangbang, Pipi, and a Pregnant Woman. A hefty dose of Tzara’s Africanisms (zdranga, zoumbye, affahou, etc.) are distributed throughout, as if to certify the nonsensical character of lines in apparently normative speech:
pregnant birds who drop turds on the bourgeois
the turd is always an infant
the infant is always a goose
the turd is always a camel
the infant is always a goose
and we sing
oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi
It’s not known who performed the play at the Bastille Day soirée, though undoubtedly the cast included the other Dadaists. A provocative debris of words rained down on the audience until, in the middle of the play, Tzara himself delivered a speech. “Dada is our intensity,” he began, “it erects inconsequential bayonets”—a nod to the equally futile military campaigns being waged across Europe. This interlude only took two or three minutes of the program, and while reinforcing the play’s effect of words being sprayed at the audience, Tzara took care to insert an intelligible aside: “Dada is not madness—or wisdom—or irony.” He also came up with a memorable pronouncement: “Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it’s shit after all, but from now on we want to shit in different colors in order to embellish the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates clo clo bong hiho aho hiho aho.”
Years later, when Tzara published his collection of Dada manifestos in 1924, this theatrical aside from Antipyrine, now a manifesto, was positioned first in the book. It’s an interesting reflection on Tzara’s role in the Dada group that his first manifesto would appear, furtively yet dramatically, in the middle of a play—which was not even listed in the printed program for the soirée. Maybe he wasn’t kidding when he remarked in a 1918 manifesto, “in principle I am against manifestos”—adding the stinger: “as I am against principles.” In fact, neither was Ball’s Dada manifesto listed on the program, that “thinly disguised break” with his friends.
These manifestos were an impromptu sort of sparring between the older man who founded Cabaret Voltaire and the younger one on the cusp of assuming the mantle of Dada leader. There’s no hint of hostility between them, but since Ball and Hennings left Zurich within two weeks of the Bastille Day event, it’s likely their departure had been in the air during the preparations for the soirée. The writing was on the wall for Tzara to read, at least: if Dada was going to amount to anything, the July soirée had to be billed as inaugural. The program lists “Dada-Evening” as the first, suggesting a series. It was also advertised as an “Authors’ Evening,” listing Hans Arp, Ball, Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, Janco, and Tzara. The nature of the program is parenthetically indicated as well: music, theory, manifestos, poetry, pictures, costumes, masks, and—last but not least—dance.
Dance had been part of the entertainment offered at Cabaret Voltaire, but its small stage cramped movement. In one performance Hennings wore something like the magic bishop costume that had so constricted Ball’s movement he had to be carried onstage. Not surprisingly, Hennings “couldn’t do anything else but clatter her feet or tilt the whole costume like a chimney,” Suzanne Perrottet, a dancer and musician from the Laban dance school in Zurich, recalled, “and sometimes she let out a scream, one scream.”
After the cabaret closed, the Dadaists began hosting, over the next several years, events in more ample venues, and dance became increasingly prominent. For the Bastille Day soirée, for instance, in addition to Hennings’ dance performances, the program concluded with a Cubist dance arranged by Ball, involving Hennings, Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Ball himself.
True to the provocation of Cubism, this and other Dada dances were jerky and asymmetrical. They’d been incited, after all, by Janco’s grotesque masks. But the Dadaists were not making it up entirely on their own: they had the benefit of the nearby academy of modern dance run by Rudolf Laban.
The lifelong mission of the charismatic Laban was to emancipate dance from its traditional subservience to music and drama, and in this he had a profound influence on the Dadaists. Laban wanted to make dance a primary expression of the life force. An inspirational figure, he could be cruelly demanding, but always in the service of liberating individual potential. He had “the extraordinary quality of setting you free artistically, enabling you to find your own roots,” one of his students, Mary Wigman, recalled.
Laban didn’t need to recruit followers, being a gravitational force unto himself. “A person’s proper aim,” he wrote, “is his own festive being.” Movement was the inauguration of living form, and dance was its festive outcome. Under his guidance and instigation, ecstatic self-empowerment was a plausible goal. Photos of the time show groups of gesticulating dancers invariably in the open air, responsive to the Alpine mountains and lakes. There’s no choreographic unity to be seen, just figures absorbed in communal ecstasy, some of them naked, others clothed in heraldic robes like Laban himself.
Such ritualistic bliss could strike outsiders as perverted, charges bound to accrue to a man who by the advent of Dada had nine children by four different women. As his dancers readily attested, it was hard to resist such personal charisma, especially in one as handsome as Laban. Wigman recalled his particular magnetism in terms that evoke the spirit of Cabaret Voltaire: “There was always Laban, drum in hand, inventing, experimenting. Laban, the magician, the priest of an unknown religion.” He had the mercurial ability to slip from one role to another, guru to playmate: “How easily he would change from the gallant knight into the grinning faun!” The faun was often what outsiders saw, or whispered about, because his “school” resembled nothing so much as a seraglio.
The young Dadaists made a beeline for the alluring young women of this emancipated sanctuary. “Into this rich field of perils we hurled ourselves as enthusiastically as we hurled ourselves into Dada,” recalled Hans Richter. “The two things went together.” In fact, Richter found a wife among the dancers, a woman who’d previously been involved with Janco’s brother. The marriage didn’t last: “It was very stormy,” he wrote, “because she was so very pretty, and everybody wanted to have her. Some did, so that was not my idea of married life.”
As Richter’s experience suggests, sexual openness was part of the attraction—and risk—for the young Dadaists as they mingled with Laban’s acolytes. Arp was involved with Sophie Taeuber, a Laban dancer who already had a career as an art teacher. Tzara had a long stormy affair with Maja Kruscek.
Not all the Dadaists focused their romantic efforts on the Laban dancers. Janco played the field, while poor Huelsenbeck missed out on these erotic delights, being involved with a proper middle-class Swiss girl whose upbringing made her sexually unavailable. In his desperation, Huelsenbeck confesses he even went so far as to offer to repudiate Dada altogether if she’d make that concession—but to no avail.
The cultural significance of Laban’s school is evident in the care with which Ball notes their attendance at Cabaret Voltaire. Clearly the Dadaists had some sense of performing for the eminent dancer who, “drum in hand,” incited a similar kinetic anarchy in his nearby school. Laban himself never participated in Dada, nor did Wigman, though a photographic motion study of her dancing appeared in the Dada journal Der Zeltweg. They were content rather to be spectators of the more general phenomenon of Zurich transfigured by wartime refugees. (In a letter of the time, Laban informed a friend, “all the cafés with delusions of grandeur in the world have sent their greatest heroes to Zurich.”)
Still, a number of Laban’s dancers did perform at the cabaret and became crucial contributors to the Dada soirées during 1917. On the “Evening of New Art,” April 18, 1917, Laban dancer Käthe Wulff recited poems by Wassily Kandinsky and Huelsenbeck, and Perrottet performed piano works by Arnold Schoenberg. The arrangement was reciprocal; a friend of Arp’s, dressed in a turban, performed the artist’s Cloud Pump poems at Laban’s school on March 18, 1917 (around the same time Wigman held a costume party at which, Ball records, he heard Arp’s poems for the first time).
Foremost among the Laban dancers was Taeuber. A photograph survives of her, decked out in a collage-based costume by Arp at a performance in March 1917. Billed as “Abstract Dance,” Taeuber’s performance was set to Ball’s poem “Song of the Flying Fish and the Seahorses” (“Little seahorse” was Ball’s pet name for Hennings).
As Ball noted afterward, “A gong beat is enough to stimulate the dancer’s body to make the most fantastic movements. The dance has become an end in itself. The nervous system exhausts all the vibrations of the sound.” In this particular instance, “a poetic sequence of sounds was enough to make each of the individual word particles produce the strangest visible effect on the hundred-jointed body of the dancer . . . a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity.” It’s easy to imagine this “poetic sequence” squeezing movements directly out of the sounds, with its “tressli bessli,” “flusch,” “ballubasch,” and “zack hitti zopp,” especially if enunciated with the care Ball put into devising and spelling them out in the first place.
Sophie Taeuber dancing with Marcel Janco mask, Zurich, 1916–1917.
Archives Fondation Arp, Clamart, France.
Ball returned to Zurich in the fall of 1916, coaxed back by Tzara. The return was fraught. The magic bishop performance at Cabaret Voltaire had presaged the onset of Ball’s nervous breakdown—not all at once, but in stages. From the vantage of Vira-Magadino in August 1916, Ball had even fancied that performance as his break with Dada.
Ball’s friends in Zurich seem to have understood his need to get away, but they also felt acutely their need for his involvement if Dada was to continue. And why shouldn’t it? Cabaret Voltaire had been rough going, night after night, but it had been an incubator and the egg had hatched. Now Dada had a publication program, with books and a journal. As the Bastille Day soirée had proved, it even had box office potential.
Tzara was obsessed with bringing Ball back into the fold. On August 4, Ball wrote his Rumanian ally, “I’m a bit distant from Dada for the moment,” adding “but I do have an appetite ‘also for roaring’—later.” Some consolation, that “later,” but Tzara kept pestering. He wanted Ball to use his literary connections in Berlin to publish Tzara’s manifesto (presumably the one from Antipyrene). The problem was, it was in French. Ball wrote back, astounded, telling Tzara to imagine a French journal publishing a German manifesto while the war was still raging. At least he could console the aspiring poet: his friends in Germany (including Wieland Herzfelde, who would participate in Berlin Dada) had said good things to him about Tzara’s Antipyrine.
By the end of September Ball sent a mixed message to Tzara, repudiating the avant-garde roots of Dada and the movement’s baiting of the bourgeoisie. “No more anti-bourgeois,” he said—enviously eyeing the middle class from a position of poverty (he’d even irked Huelsenbeck because he had no money to contribute to Dada publications). “Being bourgeois, that’s very interesting,” he now found, “and likewise difficult.”
But Ball and Hennings had not altogether repudiated the life of the music hall. Ball confessed to his friend, “I have a burning desire for drumming. Always drrrrrrrrrrrrrumming.” But then he asked, warily, “Are you trying to seduce me to return to the Varieté?” When he and Hennings had left Zurich, they had promoted themselves as a touring couple for “Modern Literary Cabaret-Evenings” in tourist hotels. They even had a promotional flyer printed, with accolades from Cabaret Voltaire and earlier performances printed on the back, and prospective program material on the front, including (for Hennings) Paris boulevard songs, Chinese ballads with puppets, and Dada dances; and (for Ball) piano music by Debussy, Schoenberg, plus poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, and others. The impoverished couple had no choice but to draw on their old repertoire to get by. Still, it was a struggle, and they had to confront the need for some kind of stability.
By October 1916, Ball was taking on writing and translating assignments back in Zurich. But he swore that this time would be different. “I won’t be involved in a cabaret again,” he wrote his sister, “even though we could make a good living doing it. I prefer to write. That’s my goal.”
Dada was at low ebb when Ball returned to Zurich. Huelsenbeck had been beset with insomnia and gastric ailments. Ball wrote to Hennings about the plight of their friends: “I ran across Tzara in [Café] Terrasse. He’s very worried about what’s happening in Rumania. His parents have probably lost their entire fortune. He hears nothing from them anymore. The country is in a state of catastrophe.” (In fact, Tzara’s father had cut off funds, frustrated that his wayward son was neglecting his education.)
Tzara’s plight must have struck Ball, ever sensitive to human suffering, since he takes it up again the next day, in another letter to Hennings. “Tzara has become impoverished,” he informed her, and “Janco is quite desperate, can’t work, moans and laments.” Despite their misery, however, “fundamentally, they all remain Dadaists. Tzara and Janco are especially urging me to stay, I must stay, I could stay. But I want to get on. I’m not ‘desperate,’ not a Dadaist, not ‘weary’,” he adds, his scare quotes suggesting he was prone to conflate Dada with desperation, a desperation he was anxious to overcome. Assessing the situation, Ball confided to a friend, he now had to “reacquaint myself with Dada, which I myself founded.”
Pressed into service on behalf of the cause, Ball rekindled the old spirit with a new enterprise, Galerie Dada. Technically, the Galerie began as an exhibition at the gallery of Hans Corray in January 1917, consisting of work by Arp, Janco, and Richter, along with Arp’s pre-Dada friends Otto and Adja van Rees and a few others. The press regarded them as Cubists, which suggests that this show was not billed as a Dada occasion. But when the group arranged for continued use of some of the gallery’s rooms in March, Dada got top billing.
For the most part Galerie Dada was run like a normal gallery, selling art and exposing the public to current trends. In this sense, at least, the venue and the undertaking it hosted could not have been more different from the goings-on at Cabaret Voltaire: not spontaneous but carefully planned as befitted an upscale venue on the west bank of the city, located above a chocolate emporium. Guest lists were compiled, invitations printed. Public events cost three or four Swiss francs—far from cheap, since the most expensive theater seats in town went for that price. But they always had a full house. “Everything had become very distinguished,” Hennings wrote later on, “and one had to keep up appearances.”
If the cabaret thrived on the sort of entertainment Hennings and Ball had provided in music halls and dives to a risible audience, now they could winnow out the mob and deal directly with the cultural elite, people who would pay dearly to experience the latest art and poetry. “We have surmounted the barbarisms of the cabaret,” Ball triumphantly decided, just a few days after the gallery opened. There were no more students and nocturnal revelers at the new venue—just paying customers. Discomforting though it may have been, Dada was inching toward respectability.
Ball took the cues for Galerie Dada from his experience with the Blue Rider movement in Munich before the war. Prewar Munich had been one of the cultural capitals of Europe, rivaling Paris and Berlin, with its Bohemian Schwabing district an international cultural melting pot. In 1912, Kandinsky and Franz Marc published the legendary Blue Rider Almanac.
The innovations of the almanac influenced the way the Dadaists approached art. This famous publication was an inspiring catalogue of progressive tendencies in modern art. Although it embraced a spectrum of modern tendencies (Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Expressionism), the real innovation of the almanac was its emphatic expansion of the very concept of art. Children’s drawings; “primitive” artifacts from African, American, and Oceanic cultures; Russian folk icons; and Bavarian glass paintings were plentifully distributed throughout, where they were often conspicuously paired with historical masterpieces of Western art. Such juxtapositions were characteristic of the two Blue Rider exhibitions as well. The Blue Rider Almanac is, among other things, an early example of what André Malraux later dubbed the museum without walls, a global portfolio of visual activity unencumbered by inherited canons of taste.
Kandinsky and Marc intended the almanac as the advent of a spiritual awakening. The subscription prospectus declared: “We stand before the new pictures as in a dream and we hear the apocalyptic horsemen in the air. There is an artistic tension all over Europe. Everywhere new artists are greeting each other.” Despite the reference to pictures and artists, the editors promoted the almanac as a forum for all the arts, a prospect that would undoubtedly have been fulfilled had the war not intervened. The almanac did prominently feature the music, writings, and even paintings of Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose piano compositions were frequently performed in the Zurich Dada context. Schoenberg spoke of emancipating dissonance, construing dissonance as a consonance yet to be attained. Resolution and irresolution could coexist. Music critics were aghast at Schoenberg’s impertinent “sound effects,” his “hair-raising cacophonies,” frivolities at best, more likely a seditious brand of “mischief” threatening civilization.
Kandinsky, being a theosophist, consistently expressed his vision of artistic transfiguration in spiritual terms. Even his most radical ventures, like the breakthrough into abstract painting, came across as common sense. “In daily life we would rarely find a man who will get off the train at Regensburg when he wants to go to Berlin. In spiritual life, getting off at Regensburg is a rather common occurrence.” While Dada is better known for its caterwauling tactics of confrontation, the convictions behind it remained close to that of Kandinsky and the Blue Rider, convictions regarded as unobjectionable, like the Russian Nikolai Kulbin’s “Free Music,” his contribution to the almanac in which he says that “a nightingale sings any note it likes” and such elasticity should hardly be denied the musician.
Hugo Ball first met Kandinsky in 1912, at the pinnacle of the artist’s flourishing career, a year in which the publication of the almanac was complemented by two more titles: Concerning the Spiritual in Art and a collection of woodcuts and prose poems, Sounds. Ball would later take pride that these poems were first performed at Cabaret Voltaire. He had tried unsuccessfully to produce Kandinsky’s play The Yellow Sound in Munich before the war.
Not surprisingly, then, Ball’s major contribution to Galerie Dada was a lecture on Kandinsky on April 7, 1917. It was an ambitiously comprehensive account, beginning with a broad sketch of the prevailing symptoms of the age, like the decline of religion and the rise of the modern metropolis. Accordingly, “the artists of these times have turned inward,” he informed his audience. “Their life is a struggle against madness,” he added—far more applicable to himself than to Kandinsky.
Ball could almost be describing the walls of Cabaret Voltaire when he observes, “The strongest affinity shown in works of art today is with the dread masks of primitive peoples.” He took solace in Kandinsky’s art as a moral anchor. “One should go to his pictures as on a pilgrimage,” he suggested, making a contrast between “Picasso the faun and Kandinsky the monk.” The concluding section of his lecture emphasized the comprehensiveness of Kandinsky’s artistic aspirations as they touched on theater, dance, and poetry. Sounds, in Ball’s estimation, constituted a “daring purification of language”—which, he would have been justified in adding, had been unsurpassed until Dada.
Ball’s lecture on Kandinsky was in keeping with the offerings of Dada’s new space. Special tours were arranged for various constituencies. On one occasion a tour for the working class was advertised, but only one workman showed up, along with a mysterious stranger of another class who bought half the paintings on display, including works by Picasso, Kokoschka, and Janco. Tzara gave a series of lectures on modern art, and there were gallery talks on individual artists. Once, after a lecture on Paul Klee, the artist’s elderly father arrived too late. Ball felt for the poor fellow and consoled himself that the father at least had the pleasure of seeing his son’s work on display. “They will scarcely be seen again in such a beautiful and lively setting,” he said.
Without existing photos or detailed descriptions of Galerie Dada, it’s hard to know what Ball meant by “lively setting.” It seems to have been more dignified than lively, given the steep admission price for events; even access to the gallery cost a franc. There were teatimes, but no alcohol could be sold. Ball’s description reveals the gallery’s high-toned character. “By day it is a kind of teaching body for schoolgirls and upper-class ladies. In the evenings the candlelit Kandinsky Room is a club for the most esoteric philosophies. At the soirees, however, the parties have a brilliance and a frenzy such as Zurich has never seen before.” That was saying a lot, given the record of Cabaret Voltaire.
If the soirées at Galerie Dada were not as raucous as the performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they were animated by the same spirit. At the opening, Taeuber performed her “Abstract Dance” to Ball’s seahorse poem. Tzara reprised his African poems; some of Arp’s poems were performed though not by him; Hennings read some of her own work; Perrottet played piano, as did Hans Heusser, a composer who’s vanished from the annals of music altogether despite his contributions to Dada (the gallery devoted an entire evening to his compositions).
Subsequent soirées became increasingly coordinated with the mission of the gallery to profile “modern art” in all its manifestations. The next event was billed as a Sturm soirée, a reference to Herwarth Walden’s legendary Berlin gallery and journal. Tzara made the introduction, and the program covered Futurism (via Marinetti), Simultanéisme (Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars), and more of the abstract poems from Kandinsky’s Sounds. The first half concluded with “Negro music and dance,” for which Ball choreographed five Laban dancers wearing Janco’s contorted masks. The second portion of the soirée was given over to poems by regular Sturm contributors like Jakob van Hoddis and August Stramm, recently dead in combat. The evening culminated with Kokoschka’s play Sphinx and Strawman, starring Ball wearing a mask so large it was lit from inside so he could read his lines. “It must have looked strange in the darkened room,” he reflected, “with the light coming out of the eyes.” Tzara proved to be a totally inept stage manager, producing thunder and lightning effects in all the wrong places; but this being a Dada affair, everyone thought it was intentional. Knowing Tzara’s anarchist penchant, maybe it was.
The soirées continued in this vein, with the Dadaists each getting a moment in the spotlight. Janco, for instance, gave a talk called “On Cubism and My Own Pictures.” Tzara kept experimenting with his “simultaneous” poems for multiple speakers. As an acquired trait of his theatrical background, Ball donned costumes, even when reading a lengthy prose piece. Perrottet played Schoenberg. Hennings read some of her own poems and stories, including a lugubrious tale about a corpse’s struggle to preserve itself.
Most surprising was a soirée called “Old and New Art,” which was successful enough to merit an encore a week later. Despite the billing, emphasis was on the old as the Dadaists read obscure medieval writings, with Heusser setting the musical tone with processionals and fugues. Indifferent to this indulgence in historicism, Tzara didn’t participate. The occasion left Ball wondering who among modern authors would bother publishing books if their names weren’t emblazoned on the covers. A few years earlier he’d considered that “if poets had to cut their poems or only their archetypal images into their own flesh, they would probably produce less.” In a similar vein, he fantasized that if all the libraries burned down a new era of legend would dawn, as people would have to resume storytelling from scratch—a dream that anticipated Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction vision in Fahrenheit 451.
Galerie Dada lasted until mid-May. Ball was sorry to see it fold, but the finances were a mess. He left Hennings to sort it out while he fled south again to Magadino, licking his wounds and ruminating, as ever, on the great enigma that was Dada.
Ball’s experience of Dada pointed him in another direction, away from Tzara and the others. Whereas Tzara had been swept up in the bear-baiting side of Dada, following in the footsteps of the Futurist Marinetti, for Ball those liturgical cadences he’d performed in costume epitomized Dada. He’d gone into the endeavor obsessed with the notion that a reckless or abusive relation to language was responsible for the war, but the revelation of “verses without words,” poems consisting of nothing but sounds, moved him closer to a reverential outlook on Dada. The Futurists, he reckoned, had unleashed the word from the shackle of the sentence and “nourished the emaciated big-city vocables with light and air,” warming them up, stroking life back into enervated limbs. Dada, though, had gone a step further. “We tried to give the isolated vocables the fullness of an oath, the glow of a star.” Behind the closing exhortation of his Dada manifesto in July 1916 was this consideration of the word as a matter of first importance.
The word, for Ball, was by this point synonymous with the mystical logos of Neoplatonic philosophers and early Christianity. Moving vowels and consonants around was a devotional exploration of the living word, word as consonant with “image,” both merging in the figure of the crucified Christ. “Artistic creation is a process of conjuring,” he astutely observed, “and its effect is magic.” But he worried that the Dadaists were “magical eclectics,” not adepts. The inspiration they thrived on felt like divine providence, yet how could he be sure it wasn’t just whimsy run amok? “We are playing with a fire that we cannot control,” he feared.
What Ball and his cohort were actually playing with was the fate of art in the modern age. Numerous nineteenth-century thinkers, like Friedrich Nietzsche and Mathew Arnold, had observed that poetry and the arts were now taking the place that religion once had. This supposition was a commonplace for someone of Ball’s education and outlook. But the convulsions of Cabaret Voltaire, extended in the more refined milieu of Galerie Dada, had the effect of making him live this condition that others only spoke of. He concurred that “modern artists are gnostics and practice things that the priests think are long forgotten.” Citing Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Wilde, and the famous dandy Barbey d’Aurevilly, he noted that “there is today an aesthetic gnosis, and it is due not to sensation but to an unprecedented pooling of the means of expression.” As boundaries between the arts were being blurred—as artists aspired to paint sonatas and fugues, and composers sought to unfurl aural landscapes—it was all becoming one vast adventure without constraints, but also without any safety net.
This prospect had been gleaned as early as the 1790s by German Romantic writers like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, who decided that each artwork in any medium was obliged to convene its own genre. That is, the work was simultaneously performance and theory. Ball felt this pressure in conspicuously religious terms. Works today, he wrote, “all contain a philosophy of their own justification . . . the works all contain a ground plan,” by which he meant something like a blueprint (he was delighted to find Janco agreeing with his notion that Picasso’s Cubist works resembled architectural plans). “The painters and poets become theologians,” because “art is being changed into philosophy and religion in its principles and on its very own territory.”
Unlike other theorists and commentators on the arts, Ball had little interest in writing a treatise and making a case for Dada. He simply wanted to know what was happening to him and his friends. “The nervous systems have become extremely sensitive” as the arts bled into one another, filling the gap previously filled by religion. “Absolute dance, absolute poetry, absolute art—what is meant is that a minimum of impressions is enough to evoke unusual images. Everyone has become mediumistic.”
As Galerie Dada ran its course, Ball reflected on the abstract art it championed. Would it merely revive the ornamental and decorative? Were Kandinsky’s bold and colorful abstract swirls ultimately destined for sofa fabrics, something to sit on rather than hang on a wall? He worried about the consequences. We only have scruples about the artwork, he thought, and leave the artist behind as a lost cause, a sorry case. But that was to reduce the artist to an ornamental adjunct of the work—ultimately a pauperized outcast, the dregs of la bohème.
Then, Ball scribbled down this bolt out of the blue: “It is perhaps not a question of art but of the uncorrupt image.” He was returning to a thought he’d ventured the previous year: “To understand cubism, perhaps we have to read the Early Fathers.” Dada, finally, had pointed Ball back to the roots of Christianity.
Ball still harbored dreams from before the war, when he was in Kandinsky’s circle, and Dada was as close as he’d come to realizing them. This set him apart from the others in his cohort, for whom Dada was beginning to seem like a precious stone in a fairy tale—the key to the kingdom, but what kingdom? Tzara felt there was nothing magical about Dada; it was simply a vocational opportunity, one that he tackled with the diligence of an aspiring law clerk. Ball didn’t have career ambitions like Tzara, but he had many interests ranging from politics to mysticism, with Dada tantalizingly dangling midway between the two.
Ball’s “break” with Dada after the magic bishop performance was tentative at first, but after another round in Galerie Dada he stepped away for good. As he had promised his sister upon returning to Zurich, he would finally focus on his writing—but he would do so from the mountains, rather than from Zurich. He and Hennings left the city again in June 1917.
Ball was off to higher altitudes again in a “flight out of time”—the title he gave his Dada diary. When the book finally appeared a decade later in 1927, it had the same title—Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary—but it left unanswered the question of what Dada was. In it, instead, Ball documented what Dada had seemed to be in the heat of the moment. He also labored over his own past, preserved in countless diaries, with the tenacity of a wood carver fashioning a nativity scene out of a walnut. Ball’s return to Catholicism—a transformation that would occur in 1920—had by this time definitively marked the Dada years as a time of spiritual exile for the poet, and it was only late in the book’s composition that he realized it needn’t be issued by a Catholic publisher. It was, after all, a record of personal struggle that had the universality of St. Augustine’s Autobiography, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals.
Ball struggled with the task of shaping his diaries; preserving their fragmentary nature wasn’t an obvious solution. He even considered drawing on them for a work of fiction in the venerable German tradition of the bildungsroman, the novel of personal development. In the end, he opted to preserve the spirit in which the notes had accumulated over the years, a potpourri of quotations from his eclectic readings, accounts of events, private hand-wringing, transcriptions of memorabilia, and aphorisms lodged into the prose like precious stones glinting out from the trodden ground—remnants of spiritual detonations.
As the record of a struggle, Ball recognized that Flight Out of Time needed to align the personal with the political, so the entries begin in 1914, just after the war was under way. The decade following the Great War yielded several combat masterpieces: Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (which Ball translated into German). Maybe Flight Out of Time belongs in this august company, as a record of another sort of trial in the midst of the war, however far from the trenches.
Yet confining it to the category of war literature doesn’t do justice to Ball’s strangely insinuating book, acknowledged by other Dadaists as a genuine work of wisdom literature, as intense, probing, and enigmatic as its author, “a great artist and even greater human being,” in Huelsenbeck’s estimation. “Discard the Ego like a coat full of holes,” Ball ruminated in Flight Out of Time. “But man has many Egos, just as the onion has many skins. It is not a matter of one Ego more or less. The center is still made of skins.”
In composing his diary of the Zurich days, Hugo Ball had shed the skin of Dada—yet he did so knowing that another layer of Dada would be found beneath it, in an endless process of self-overcoming powered by Dada’s peerless dynamic of yes-no. “Hardly anyone has exceeded my really intractable self-will,” he observed. “It went politically as far as anarchy and artistically as far as dadaism, which was really my creation, or rather, my laughter.”
Beyond the laughter, and beyond despair, was Ball’s personal pledge, his affirmation of life against the odds: “I realized that the whole world, falling into nothingness all around, was crying out for magic to fill its void, and for the word as a seal and ultimate core of life. Perhaps one day when the files are closed, it will not be possible to withhold approval of my strivings for substance and resistance.”