Carl Jung, Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, and Man Ray, 1961

Raoul Hausmann

In 1966 Hannah Höch returned to her former companion Raoul Hausmann several of his classic and valuable Dada works, which—Hausmann claimed—she had kept for herself after they had parted company forty years before. In a letter to Hausmann, I congratulated him and expressed the fully justified hope that he would welcome this gesture of his former girlfriend in a friendly way, even if not in a spirit of friendship.

For decades, whenever Hannah’s name was mentioned, he had reacted with diabolical hatred—which seemed to stimulate him.

On December 27, 1966, he replied: “If you have lost faith in humankind (as I have), you’ll have no need to rediscover it just on account of Hannah Höch!” His letter ended with a piece of advice: “Well, my poor friend, I hope your health will remain good, and it will do so as long as you don’t think about humankind. With cordial best wishes for the New Year, yours, Raoul Hausmann.”

This was not a pose. Hatred—of people, of authority, of banality—was not his privilege alone: it linked him with the spirit of the Berlin Dada movement, particularly George Grosz, Franz Jung, and Wieland Herzfelde, each of them having his own anarchistic or communistic coloring. Love of hatred was the cement that held the group together for its short lifespan. Moreover, hatred was what stimulated them; they would load up with hatred or contempt, and then discharge it all upon a public that had come for amusement. That was their joie de vivre. Out of their contempt for human beings, for as long as they lived both Grosz and Hausmann extracted positive energies that others extract from love and compassion.

So Hausmann’s anti-Hannah reaction is to be viewed as a defense mechanism rather than anything else. It was his way of preventing any superficial feelings from penetrating his dynamic energy center, or it was egoistical self-preservation, not just an old man’s grumpiness. In 1915 he had been no different, not a scrap—just more wild.

When in 1922, in company with Franz Seiwert, he burst in upon the Düsseldorf Congress of Independent Artists, roaring “We are all cannibals!” he had meant it quite literally.⁴ Eat or be eaten—a motto for life. A defensive aggression, or an aggressive defense. It only seems to be a contradiction that he then immediately began to sing “The Internationale,” the (long-since discredited) appeal for human brotherhood. Hausmann certainly did not believe in this brotherhood (and besides, it was a long way off). What tickled him about the song was—as for many other people at that time—its challenge to all men to show for once exactly how brotherly they really were. Until that showing, Hausmann was ready to punch each and all of the unbrotherly ones in the face.

As he wrote from Limoges on March 9, 1953, concerning the Sidney Janis Gallery Dada: 1916–1923 exhibition:

A morsel of cheese may catch a mouse, but it won’t catch me. I realize only too well that my role, and thus the role of Dada in Berlin, would become too weighty if too much of my work were to be shown. Keiglechteweikembohurno!

I’m not interested at all in selling the little pamphlet, Material of Painting, for a little money, for I do not myself possess a copy. And merdesheissekaka. I’d rather have a hard time than throw away my historical concerns in exchange for a porter’s tip. And you can well believe that I’m not having an easy time.

He was, indeed, very hard up. But he was wrong about the Sidney Janis exhibition, at which a good number of his works were shown. However, being far away, and always ready to attack first, his initial suspicions were of the worst—that he would be “suppressed” or robbed.

Hausmann’s longest and most bitter battle was over the authorship of his 1918 sound poems, in which the sounds f m s b w t ö z ä u pggiv— . . . ? m ü had been taken over by Schwitters for the start of his Ursonate. In his letter of February 4, 1952, he protested to me: “If my poem of 1918 says f m s b w t ö z ä u pggiv— . . . ? m ü, and Schwitters’s poem says fümms bö wö tää zää uu, pögiff, kwii ee, then that is simply a phonetic transcription of my poem, in my own Czech pronunciation, as Schwitters himself once expressed it.” Then he went on to cite from his correspondence with Schwitters on this delicate subject. Since Schwitters was refusing to write in German now, after the destruction of his Merz construction (not even by the Nazis, but by Allied bombs during an air raid), the two men exchanged letters in English and German.

July 8, 1946, Hausmann to Schwitters: “Dear Kurt . . . but in my little book I cannot conceal the fact that fmsbw is a child of my own, and that you adopted it for your Ursonate. Look, it would be very decent of you if you were to do like the composers and print the words, ‘Variations on a Theme by R. Hausmann’; then, as far as I’m concerned, there’ll be no further difficulties between us.”

July 1946, Schwitters to Hausmann: “Dear Hausmann, Frau Giedion has sent me her proofs. I replied that when she writes about the Ursonate she should write, ‘came into being as a variation on a melody by Hausmann.’”

In token of respect for the Sisyphean effort of this great fanatic to vindicate his name as an artist (in this case and many others), his letter-poem should be carved on his tombstone: f m s b w t ö z ä u pggiv— . . . ? m ü. Such an inscription would be superlatively Hausmannesque.

His letter of May 4, 1953, reveals his real, not just “suspected,” hardship, and one can easily believe what he says. It was a tragic situation, considering that he was almost blind:

In a few days I shall have to pawn my typewriter, it will fetch 5000 francs, and one can live off that for a week, if one is careful. But that will be the end. My camera and my wife’s last piece of jewelry are already gone. But one can’t live for two weeks off not-eating, believe me! The Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art has written, saying they’ll be asking me for more materials later—I still have about 24 photographs, 30 × 40 cm, of peasant architecture on Ibiza, could you ask them if they’d buy these? Eh bé, life isn’t a threepenny opera.

I don’t expect you to send any money. You can write to me WITHOUT enclosing anything, but the fat cats like Grosz and the Herr Doktor of Psychoanalysis could, perhaps? We’ve still got money to come from Germany, but at present only people over 75 are being paid. Thank God I’m only 67—no age at all. But a kilo of potatoes costs 85 francs. Cordially, yours, R. H.

Hausmann’s life, with his embittered outlook, was never a simple one. He was always feuding with someone, and mostly with several people at the same time.

What infuriated him most was the disputing of his claim to have discovered photomontage. His concern was to defend his claim to priority, or at least to deny the counterclaim made in a reference by George Grosz, which gave priority to John Heartfield and himself. Hausmann’s letter of August 16, 1966, contains the following statements, the truth of which has been substantiated:

For two days Dr. Billeter, whom you know, was here on a visit. He told me that he had interviewed John Heartfield by telephone, and that in reply to his question ‘Did you invent photomontage?’ Heartfield replied: ‘I can’t say; Hausmann was making photomontages at the same time as I was, if not before.’ This will go into Billeter’s book, so the matter is now officially cleared up.

Apart from his activities in “foreign affairs,” the fights and frictions, Hausmann had an astonishingly untroubled life as far as “domestic policies” were concerned. He lived for most of his life with two women, like an oriental pasha; in addition to his wife, the daughter of a respected Berlin banker, there was a young Frenchwoman; together, they both helped during the last thirty years of his life with writing his countless letters, articles, and invectives. Toward the end, so I gathered from one of his letters, it was Marthe Prévot who was his main support, and it was she who kept him alive with her devotion and sacrifice. She was his intellectual heir.

The way in which he set up house with two women within a monogamous society (and often without any financial means), as well as the mere fact that he did so, is a memorial to his egoistic nature, which saw to its “rights” and put them into practice regardless of norms. Evidently he ruled his household like a sultan, absolutely: what had to be, was. Marthe Prévot wrote to me:

Raoul Hausmann was not as he has been described. If he was as embittered as he seemed, that was due to circumstances and was the fault of an environment that did not suit him.

People who came to see him during his last years, especially the very many young people, were expecting to meet the man described in the books, but they all said they found him otherwise. They were amazed by his friendliness and by the sympathetic welcome he gave them.

I met him in 1939 and shared the past thirty years of my life with him. I collected his confidences, often writing them down. Like his young admirers and friends, I see in him only the artist, the friend of animals and nature, an extraordinarily sensitive being of the greatest tenderness. And what always and mostly enraged him was lies, wickedness, and stupidity.

I, too, knew him from this side. But above all I knew him as a fearless fighter to the end. His many letters bear witness to his fighting spirit. He never prostituted his vitality as an artist. Never hesitating, he steered by the built-in compass of his convictions. With the following bilingual letter of September 19, 1951, came a poem. The whole text is reproduced in its original form, as it shows this man’s zest and grittiness:

Lieber Richter:

heute kam Ihr parcel und wir danken Ihnen und Ihrer Freundin sehr! Your she-friend is surely a very sweet one, the frock she sent has just the right size, and the blouse too. Here my wife’s best thanks. Leider habe ich nicht sehen können, wann Sie das parcel abgeschickt haben, es war alles ausser der von Ihnen geschriebenen Adresse verschwunden. Warurn haben Sie keinen Brief geschrieben? It would have enjoyed me, you know! Here I send you a poem I made expressly for you:

Syndrome for Hans Richter

ze djadje begs you to sain zu document

It has only two great horses

ai chell refiouse, ai kennot sain

the first one was of wood

according tou zii emeriken laou you mast sain

the second was of life

inn zis kes ai em willingue to sain

but it had six feet of men

ze kes is postpont till tou morro

and was of different countries

hev you oal dokuments zet you nid

the show was at a candy-shop

hev you e beurzsteetment of yours

it was called Akropolis

hev you e dez-stetment of your fazer

to destroy it was enough

ar oal your dokuments autentikated

we had only to say:

dada!

(ze djeudje will gif ze djeudjment onli leeter)

R.H.

There were more and more glimpses of light toward the end of his life. On April 2, 1963, I wrote to him: “Dear Hausmann, When last in Milan, I took the opportunity to ask a gallery if they might be interested in an exhibition of your work. They seemed extraordinarily interested. I gave the man your address. Probably you’ll receive a visit from him.”

The gallery owner did visit him, and the exhibition was held, the first regular one-man show Hausmann ever had. He and his two ladies were invited; he gave interviews, he declaimed his sound poems, which sounded like the groanings of tormented demons coming out of the underworld, he made lithographs, he recited, and he sold. (Even then he made bitter complaints afterward, and justifiably, when difficulties arose over the exchange rates.) Eventually, during the following years, his work was more frequently exhibited, reproduced, acknowledged, and celebrated—all without his giving up, except on occasion, his contempt for human beings.

Thus toward the end of his life fate treated him more kindly than it had treated his friend and collaborator Kurt Schwitters, who had seen no dawn of success before his end.

Yet neither success nor failure, neither esteem nor disregard, influenced in the least Hausmann’s attitude to humankind, nor did he mitigate his wrath against the world, which for eighty years had noticed him little or not at all. He was a Michael Kohlhaas of subjective justice.⁵ An honest, if very difficult, fellow being [Mitmensch] who had devoted his whole life to the creative element that he bore within him.

Meanwhile the wheel of history goes on turning. We are all ground to powder. Grain and chaff fly up, all mixed together, until everything is clarified—until, at some turn or another, the wheel suddenly stops, and Sisyphus is finally called away from his labor.