Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm and the Origins of Dada in Zurich

Abstract

It will be clear to anyone who peruses the vast literature on Dada even casually, or who visited the labyrinthine Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005–2006,1 that there are almost as many ‘Dadaisms’ as there were Dadaists. Hugo Ball (1886–1927) was a founder, a key theorist and the most self-reflective of the Dadaists in Zurich.2 His Dadaism was deeply ambivalent and contingent. Having opened the Cabaret Voltaire, the much-mythologized ‘birthplace of Dada’, in February 1916, he renounced the emerging movement just six months later, worrying that ‘all Expressionism, Dadaism, and other -isms are the worst kind of bourgeoisie’.3 Persuaded back by Tristan Tzara, with whom he ran the Galerie Dada from March until May 1917, Ball broke definitively with the movement in a state of exhaustion that summer. But in public and in private, he wrestled for decades with the concerns that will be outlined here. They affected his work, life, political views, and shifting religious convictions before, during, and after the time that he was a ‘Dadaist’.