Even their Anglicised names are a kick to the ribs of German nationalism. If, as Grosz wrote, quoting Zola, ‘Hatred is holy’, then the Berlin Dadaists are its high priests. Thanks to one of the Cabaret Voltaire Dadaists, Richard Huelsenbeck, who moved back to his hometown of Berlin in 1917, a Berlin version of Dada soon explodes into absurd, venomous life, with the scathing photomontages of John Heartfield, and the equally scabrous, graffiti-inspired paintings of George Grosz its most prominent manifestations. So even while Dada seems to begin in Zurich a century ago, with an anarchic cabaret, flush with poem readings, sometimes in three different languages simultaneously, masked plays, and modern-before-it-was-modern dance, in New York, two French emigres, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, have already been making proto-Dadaist waves since 1915, especially Duchamp (without his knowledge, as it turns out) with his Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 (1912).ĭada’s geographical reach is astonishing. It’s a zig-zagging tale of cultural cross-pollination, a network of mutual inspiration, and often, antagonism. But, as Rasula explains in this stimulating, profound exploration of that most elusive of avant-gardes, Dada’s story is not linear. So begins Jed Rasula’s Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century, at Cabaret Voltaire, the site of Dada’s birth, on 5 February 1916.
The year is 1916, and the place is Cabaret Voltaire.’
In the old bohemian district, a block from the river that feeds into the lake from the north, the door opens at number one Spiegelgasse (Mirror Street: what a name), emitting a dense cloud of tobacco smoke. The street has a dusting of fresh snow on accumulated layers that crunch underfoot cheeks and noses of pedestrians glow in the mountain cold.
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