Louis Armand and David Vichnar ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION: THE POLITICS OF PRAGUE DADA1 1. It is a frequently repeated assertion that Dada, like the Plague of 1348, passed the City of a Thousand Spires by―an assertion given credence by the few commentaries and ripostes published by such prominent practitioners and theorists of poetism as poets Vítězslav Nezval and Artur Černík, and critics Roman Jakobson and Karel Teige between the mid-1920s, and uncritically repeated by subsequent generations of art and literary historians like Karel Srp, Jindřich Toman and Pavlína Morganová. Yet the assertion is a highly doubtful one. In his 2007 article, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia,” Ludvík Kundera wrote: “The very title sounds doubtful: the Czech lands after WW1 were an island in the ‘sea’ of defeated countries. The end of WW1 brought us freedom, sovereignty, positive, well-nigh optimistic tendencies, whereas Germany was in the throes of chaos, negation running rampant, no perspectives, so the belief was that in Bohemia there was no matrix for Dada: the whole movement was dismissed on the basis of a very superficial view of its doubtful value.”2 Only during the 1960s, when Prague became 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). 2 Ludvík Kundera, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia” (2007): www.pwf.cz/rubriky/dalsi-projekty/dada-east/ludvikkundera-dada-v-cechach-a-na-morave_3246.html. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the Czech and German originals are the authors’ own. 108 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Fluxus-East HQ under the direction of Milan Knížák, did research into the city’s Dada and “Ur-Dada” movements commence with any seriousness, although with the third wave of national revivalism after the Velvet Revolution, this too seems to have been consigned in turn to the “dustbin of history”: Srp conspicuously makes no mention of Kundera in founding his assertion that “Only in the mid1920s did Dadaism become the centre of attention,” albeit in Brno, not Prague. “The only artist linked with the original Dadaism who had marked success in Prague,” Srp insists, “was Kurt Schwitters” who “put on an evening of poetry in 1926.”3 This view is directly contradicted in a 1965 article by the playwright and caricaturist Adolf Hoffmeister (a self-professed Dadaist and long-time friend of John Heartfield), who recounts with some authority the arrival in Prague in 1920 of the Dadaists Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader at the Old Crop Exchange on Senovážné náměstí―announced in the Prager Tagblatt of 25 February with an article by Hausmann entitled “What does Dada want in Europe?” Hoffmeister writes: Their 1 March performance looked ominous. The Czechs were anti-German. The Germans were anti-Bolshevik. The police were suspicious. […] With Baader having defected with half the manuscripts, the remaining two protagonists―one German and the other Czech-German from Vienna―had to improvise. “The Race between a typewriter and a sewing machine.” Hausmann’s “Sixty-One-Step.” They played, they read, they shouted, they danced, whatever came to mind. The performance was a sweeping success. For the first time 3 Karel Srp, “Prague and Brno,” Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avantgardes, 1910-1930, eds. Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 358. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 109 ever Dadaists were accepted by an uninitiated audience with resounding applause. And it happened in Prague.4 This success was commemorated by Hausmann in his 1920 photomontage, Dada Siegt (“Dada Conquers,” a.k.a. “A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement”), in which Hausmann himself is seen standing centre-right beside an easel displaying an image of Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Huelsenbeck records the event in En avant dada: Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus, published the same year by Paul Steegemann in Hanover: The newspapers launched a monstrous anti-dada propaganda a few weeks before our arrival in Prague. Still there were crowds in the streets, shouting rhythmically after us: da-da, da-da… The manifestation was to begin at 8 o’clock. Thousands of people thronged at the entrance… Baader disappeared… At 8:20 we got a letter from him… We had to start without him.5 The next day, Kundera reports, the Prague evening daily Bohemia ran a lengthy report entitled “Dada Scandal in Prague.” Similar articles also appeared in Národní demokracie and Národní politika. For his part, Hausmann described the event as “problematic,” writing in a 1965 letter to Kundera: At first, we visited a number of editor offices, but the social democrats threatened us with a beating since we’re communists, and at the Prager Tagblatt they 4 Adolf Hoffmeister, Čas se nevrací (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1965), 196. 5 Qtd. in Miroslav Topinka Hadí Kámen: Eseje, články, skici 1966-2006 (Brno: Host, 2007). Cf. Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant dada: Geschichte der Dadaismus (Hannover: Steegemann, 1921), 88. 110 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM were so kind as to pull out a revolver and menace us with using it against us as instigators. Shortly before our soirée Baader disappeared and, while looking for him, I found―in the cupboard beneath my clothes―a letter from him. He’d decided to return to Berlin and in order to screw up our show he’d taken all the manuscripts with him. The public, 1,200 people approx., were livid. Huelsenbeck and I together read a simultaneous poem improvised from two newspaper articles, talking complete gobbledygook. When the tumult became too much, Huelsenbeck announced I would now dance the “Sixty-One Step.” Whenever the public was too outraged, I had to dance something in order to calm everyone down. In the end it was a sweeping success. The next evening we presented another show to a relatively calm audience, having meanwhile quickly written new texts. Then we went to Karlovy Vary, where the soirée got cancelled following threats of violence.6 All of these accounts give a different picture to the one painted by Srp and uncritically repeated―for example in Morganová’s History of Czech Action Art―that “very rarely is there a link to Dadaism or Futurism, as is common in a western context. These avantgarde trends did not evoke much of a response in the Czech[oslovak] milieu… where there was very little room for Dadaist provocation and impertinence.”7 While Morganová notes (somewhat confusedly) that “in 1920 and 1922 two important productions of Swiss and German Dadaism were held in Prague,” she nevertheless insists that “Dada in its original form” had no “repercussions.”8 6 Kundera, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia.” 7 Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum, 2015), 37-38. 8 Ibid., 38. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 111 The activities of the Prague “Devětsil” group (founded in 1920), meanwhile, were at best ambivalent in their acknowledgement of Dada’s influence, as evinced in the writings of its most prominent members Nezval and Teige, neither of whom demonstrated any great appreciation of Dada in any case (with the notable exception of Teige’s “Dada Military Parade” article in Pásmo, December 1925). In part this may be attributed to the diffuse nature of the interwar scene in Prague, which also spans the irrealism of Kafka, the “science fiction” of Karel Čapek, the experimental poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva and the structuralism of Jakobson and René Wellek, among others. In part, this was also due to the political situation following the declaration of Czechoslovak independence in 1918, PanSlavonicism, and the orientations of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (which, in tandem with a degree of Francophilia, was a major catalyst for the strong reception of Surrealism in the mid-30s). With such proximity to such culture centres as Berlin, Hannover, and Zürich, there was an ingrained perception of Dada as a “German” product. In any case, Srp and Morganová’s nativist view of the inter-war Prague art scene misrepresents the internationalism both of Dada and the city itself. (It’s not for nothing that Hoffmeister, like Walter Mehring, characterised Hausmann as a Viennese Czech poet.) As Tzara wrote in “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto” (1916): “Civilisation is still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of the consulates.”9 2. Yet, for all the attempts at “Germanising” Dada, as a superficial and foreign influence―evoking the very 9 Tristan Tzara, “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto,” The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, edited by Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), 73-97. 112 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM chauvinisms Dada was born in response to―this account fails on its own terms. A tendency to nationalist chauvinism and anxiety of influence cannot obscure the fact that 1920s Prague and Brno did spawn a significant, in some cases even unique, “underground” Dada scene. Even less does it mean that the cultural repressions undertaken in the name of the poetist 1920s political orientations should be brushed aside in subsequent, even contemporary, literary history. For a closer look behind the official scenes and beyond the usual suspects reveals that Prague had indeed functioned, in Jed Rasula’s more thoughtful account, if not as “a bastion of Dada,” then at least as its “incubator.”10 The salient fact remains that Dada can be said to represent the first major avantgarde to emerge in Prague after the foundation of Czechoslovakia, and the first dedicated Dada journal appeared in Prague the following year. Entitled Ruch, it featured in its September 1919 issue a Czech translation of Huelsenbeck’s Was ist Dadaismus? Teige himself acknowledged reading this text and also contributed an article on photography to the following issue (raising the question of how far Dada in fact predetermined the founding of Devětsil). Ruch was joined by Červená Sedma cabaret’s Bulletin, which in mid-1919 published Kurt Schwitters’ Dada theatre manifesto, To All the Theatres in the World, along with an excerpt from “Ferenc Futurista’s Dadaist poetry” and was soon augmented by the tireless Dada propaganda of Aleksić and Branko Ve Poljanski, who were both active in Prague in 1921 organising Dada soirées (including one in April of that year featuring Aleksić reading from a scroll he claimed was twenty-five metres long),11 and whose Zenit, 10 Jed Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 270. 11 Rasula quotes accounts claiming that their events attracted the participation of some 1,000 ecstatic spectators ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 113 Dada-Jok, Dada Tank and Dada Jazz magazines, while published in Zagreb, would include major statements of Prague Dada and “anti-dada.” Kundera, in examining what had so often been depicted as a series of brief incursions by Berlin Dadaists into an otherwise indifferent Prague environment, echoes testimonies by František Halas, Bedřich Václavek, Walter Serner, and other eyewitnesses, pointing to an existing Dada and Ur-Dada scene, contemporary with Dada’s transition from Zürich to Paris and Berlin. Importantly, Kundera identifies the host of Baader, Huelsenbeck and Hausmann’s first Prague visit (in February and March of 1920) as the local writer Melchior Vischer (born Emil Walter Kurt Fischer in Teplitz/Teplice, North-West Bohemia), who later that same year was to publish what was hailed in his correspondence with Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara as the “first Dada novel” (“‘insofar,’ as Vischer himself wrote in a letter from January of that year, ‘as one can still use the silly word “novel” at all’”),12 Sekunde durch Hirn (Second through Brain). (Rasula, Destruction, 270). 12 Qtd. in Vichnar, “Radiantly Splattered,” introduction to Melchior Vischer, Second Through Brain, translated by Tim König and David Vichnar (London: Equus Press, 2015), 7. 114 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Fig. 1. Melchior Vischer, Sekunde durch Hirn (Hannover: Steegemann, 1920) / Second through Brain (London: Equus Press, 2015) Sekunde durch Hirn―”a book,” Kundera notes, to be “counted among ultradadaist texts”13―was published in 13 Its “narrative” consists of a series of disconnected vignettes, flashing through the mind of one Jörg Schuh, a stuccoist in the process of falling off the scaffolding of a forty-storey construction site. Staring certain death in the eye, the protagonist embarks on a cab ride “on the great Milky Way” which takes him through his past life, both actual and also the many might-have-beens. Although the setting of Jörg’s fall has no place name proper, most of the flashbacks do have a local habitation: his conception at a Central-European brothel and his birth aboard an Andalusian barge in the Lisbon harbour give rise to a highly erratic, if also very place-specific travelogue. Throughout, Jörg appears in different times, spaces, and impersonations: he witnesses his own conception, he experiences his prenatal life, his birth, his existence as a newborn, and an interminable series of further incarnations, then back to the falling ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 115 Hannover as part of Steegemann’s well-known Silbergäule series (alongside works by Huelsenbeck, Schwitters and Serner), with a cover designed by Schwitters himself. It served as the focal point of Dragan Aleksić’s “Dadaism” article, published in the April 1920 issue of Zenit, in which he examined the paradox of a “Dada novel”: “A novel is a mistake… A novel is a long-winding tapeworm. A novel should be thrown about… A DADA-novel is an electrical radium rapid jolt. (Melchior Vischer Prague…).”14 The article goes on to proclaim: “DADA is developing everywhere. DADA has representatives in Prague and their success spreads as fast as drum fire.”15 Aleksić’s article, like Jakobson and Teige’s “Dada” essays of the same year, coincided with the arrival in Prague of none other than Tzara himself, who remained in the city until September. Vischer’s correspondence with Tzara had begun in late 1918, with Vischer’s polite letter of greetings apprising Tzara of his plan to start the first Dada journal in Prague. A year later (in January 1920) Vischer wrote again, this time with the manuscript of his “Merzroman” aka Sekunde durch Hirn (an allusion to Kurt Schwitters’s “Merz” collages), inquiring if the Dada papa couldn’t be Jörg Schuh and, finally, a “brain radiantly splattered” against the pavement. This fantastic roller-coaster ride through the head, in turn, takes Jörg from Genoa, St. Gotthard, and Vienna, to “a thermal city in which Goethe had stayed temporarily” (i.e. Vischer’s native Teplice) and onwards: to Lapland, Nagasaki, Notre Dame, “Caoutchoucstate, Africa,” Shandong, the Moon, Prague, Madrid, Fiume, Budapest, Berlin, Brazil, Cape Horn, Chicago, and via London back to “the antiquated appetitebiscuit Europe” and toward the great beyond. For a more detailed account, see Vichnar, “Radiantly Splattered,” 5-45. 14 Dragan Aleksić, “Dadaizam,” Zenit 3 (April 1921), translated by Maja Starčević as “Dadaism,” in Between Worlds, 350. 15 Ibid. 116 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM tempted to read it. Vischer’s expectations from his Dada alignment were nothing short of earth-shattering: in a French salutation to Tzara and Picabia from April 1920, Vischer announces the publication of Sekunde as no less than “a bomb which has to burst open with infection the skulls of our dear ‘bourgeoisie.’”16 The subsequent, if patchy, Vischer/Tzara correspondence promised to yield remarkable fruit. In the summer of 1921, Tzara set out for Czechoslovakia. Tzara’s biographer Marius Hentea records Tzara’s visit to Karlsbad and Prague, including a meeting with “Melchior Vischer, one of the leading Czech Dadaists,” before Tzara continued on to Tyrol in September.17 Among other things Tzara and Vischer discussed Tzara’s hugely ambitious Dadaglobe project―an international anthology of Dadaist writings which, had it been realised at the time, would have served as a definitive statement (involving 76 contributors from seventeen countries). Until recently, the few critics writing on Vischer raised doubts over whether such a project had ever really existed. These doubts have been definitively put to rest with the 2016 publication, by Kunsthaus Zürich, of Dadaglobe Reconstructed, a monumental archival compendium approximating as much as possible the shape and form of Tzara’s original intentions. Dadaglobe Reconstructed makes it clear that not only was Vischer integral to Tzara’s project from the outset (his name featuring right next to Tzara’s in the Dadaglobe prospectus published in New York Dada on April 1921), but that his work was to feature prominently in what would have been the most comprehensive overview of Dada to 16 Melchior Vischer, Unveröffentlichte Briefe und Gedichte, edited by Raoul Schrott (UniversitätGesamthochschule Siegen, 1988), 7. 17 Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014), 171. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 117 date―including six previously unknown Vischer texts (one of them recounting his own embryonal beginnings, in a biblical parody: first was “melchior,” then “dada,” where “melchior was earlier than dada”).18 It is beyond question that, had the Dadaglobe project materialised, it would have secured Vischer’s reputation as a major figure in the history of Dada. As it happened, or rather did not happen, the project―for complex reasons―came to naught at precisely the time at which Dada itself was being superseded in Paris by a nascent Surrealism. 3. At around the same time as Vischer began his correspondence with Tzara, Walter Serner―a native of Karlovy Vary―published his “manifesto,” Letzte Lockerung [Last Loosening] (“What can the first brain that appeared on this globe possibly have been doing?”), anticipating by several months Tzara’s own “Dada Manifesto 1918.”19 If Vischer is one of Dada’s most marginalised and forgotten figures, then Serner, though doubtless better-remembered, is its most mysterious one. Born Walter Eduard Seligmann into an intellectual Karlsbad Jewish family, Serner started his career very much like Vischer―in journalism. In 1910-11, having matriculated at the University of Vienna’s Law Faculty, formally converting to Catholicism and changing his name to Serner, he acted as a Viennese culture correspondent for the Karlsbader Zeitung owned by his father Berthold 18 Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Scheidegger and Spies: Kunstahus Zürich, 2016), 146. 19 Section 4 of which, incidentally, concerns “the novel etc.: the gents talk as if on the spit, or lately not at all. Just a little more sweat and the thing is a success: belles lettres!” See Walter Serner, Last Loosening: 1-10, translated by David Vichnar (London: Equus Press, 2018). Online: equuspress.wordpress. com//2018/09/12/walter-serner-last-loosening-1918-dada-manifesto-prague-dada-miscellany-part-five/ 118 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Seligmann. The name Walter Serner appeared for the first time under the inaugural piece in a series of feuilletons entitled Wiener Kunstbrief in November 1910. In the summer of 1911, Serner made use of his contacts within cultural circles to organise the first solo exhibition of a fellow Viennese Bohemian painter Oskar Kokoschka, acting as impresario and curator, publishing a few detailed articles on expressionist conceptions of the “beautiful” in painting and the fine arts, rejecting modern developments like cubism as false developments in which technique and formalism overcome the artist’s personality, favouring instead a universalist aesthetics (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. Walter Serner, “The Beautiful and Painting,” Karlsbader Zeitung XXV.29 (16 July 1911): 2. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 119 Soon thereafter, Serner quit school and left for Berlin in 1912 where he became a contributing writer for the avantgarde magazine Die Aktion and associated with anarchists. A staunch pacifist, in February 1915, Serner left Berlin for Zürich, assisting with the passage of Hugo Ball. With Ball and Emmy Hennings he co-edited the magazine Der Mistral (where under the name Wladimir Senakowski he published his first prose work) and Sirius (where he published his first attacks on Ball and Huelsenbeck’s 1915 “Memorial Reading for Fallen Poets”).20 A founding member of Dada, Serner was crucial in bringing about “a definitive change” in the movement’s direction “between late 1917 and the demise of Zurich Dada in 1919, during which the influence of Serner, who brought considerable intellectual clout to the group, cannot be underestimated” in that “Dada became subversive” and “the group embarked on a campaign of mystification.”21 Serner made a reputation for himself as “the great cynic of the movement, the total anarchist, an Archimedes who put the world out of whack and then left it to hang,” the only Dadaist who could quite pull off the monocle, according to Hans Richter; while for Christian Schad, it was Serner who “fertilised Dada with ideas, who gave Dada its ideology.”22 What were these ideas? As Halas summarised in his 1925 lecture: “Dadaist is he who has understood that we can only have ideas when we can put them into effect.”23 20 For more, see Malcolm Green’s exhaustive account in “Translator’s Introduction,” in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! (London: Atlas Press, 1995), esp. 24-34. 21 Ibid., 28. 22 Qtd. in Topinka, Hadí kámen, 105. 23 Halas, “On Dadaism,” Imagena, 516. 120 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Fig. 3. Walter Serner, Letzte Lockerung (1918) Serner’s Last Loosening manifesto (Fig. 3), written in January-March 1918 in Swiss Lugano (and reportedly drafted as early as 1915), comes in 78 numbered paragraphs that keep cancelling themselves and everything else, combining the “scholastic rigor of Kant with a steady drizzle of insolence.”24 Its main theme, on which many variations are played, is that idealism is a con, that fixed identity is a danger to be avoided, and that at the root of everything are disillusionment and boredom. The manifesto bids adieu to the possibility of any aesthetic standpoint whatsoever by advancing provocative opinions and then cancelling them: “Every rule at one and the same time an 24 Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice, 156. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 121 exception.” Serner employs a whole gamut of poetical rhetoric while systematically undermining it with irony: “every word, after all, is just a compromise.” The text thus keeps attacking not only the reader, but the author himself as well. A strategy clearly perceptible in the manifesto’s opening lines: Around a fireball speeds a glob of excrement upon which ladies silk stockings are sold and Gauguins discussed. A truly, thoroughly distressing state of affairs that is nevertheless relative: Silk stockings can be grasped, Gauguins cannot. […] What might the first brain to appear on this planet have done? Presumably it was amazed at its own presence and didn’t know what to make of itself and the filthy vehicle beneath its feet. In the meantime, humans have grown so accustomed to their brains they’re considered of little importance and hardly even worth ignoring […].25 Last Loosening was not only dada’s first manifesto, but also the scandalous high point of the final event of its Zürich phase in April 1919. Fellow Zürich Dadaist Hans Richter recalled, “Last Loosening was in fact the final word on and definitive watchword of all that Dada meant philosophically: everything must be loosened; […] screws and humanity on their way to new functions which can only be recognised once all that was has been negated.”26 Serner went on to serve as Chairman of the first Dada congress in December 1919 in Geneva, and started off on the Dadaglobe project as a close ally of Tzara’s―alongside Cocteau, Picabia and Ribemont-Dessaignes, one of its 25 Walter Serner, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Aspiring to Become One, translated by Mark Kanak (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2020), 14. 26 Hans Richter, Dada Profile (Zürich: Arche Verlag, 1961), qtd. in Green, “Introduction,” 33. 122 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM five chief coordinators―but early in its editorial process (February 1920) decided to withdraw from it and turned into its most outspoken critic and ideological opponent― and his resignation took the entire movement along down in flames. Much of Tzara’s fame in Paris was built upon the Dada manifesto which he read in July 1918 in Zurich, first published in Dada 3 in December of that year, and the Dadaglobe project on which he rested his reputation. The Parisian avant-gardists were consequently nervously awaiting his arrival two years later, and were, according to André Breton, extremely disappointed at the famous Dadaist, who openly enjoyed himself and kept rehashing stunts that had worked in the past, the Dadaglobe nowhere in sight. Then Serner arrived together with Schad from Geneva (where their attempts at founding a Dada cell had floundered) and started spreading rumours that large portions of the manifesto were the work of Serner rather than Tzara; Breton put this accusation to use and in Après Dada in 1922 claimed that Serner had specifically come to Paris to expose Tzara’s plagiarism. This may have been a programmatic exaggeration on Breton’s part, who by then found a foe more than a friend in Tzara, and some commentators in the past have propounded a more neutral view on the matter: Green writes that regarding Tzara’s plagiarism, “Serner himself never made any claims one way or the other,” having known Tzara “well before he allied himself with Dada,” and noting that “Tzara would seem to have helped Serner gain a foothold in Paris by translating a text of his […] and by publishing him in the later issues of the magazine Dada.” Still, even Green notes that after his arrival in Paris, Serner steadily distanced himself from Tzara and indeed Dada as a whole. It would seem that this was less because of Tzara’s “plagiarism” ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 123 than because Tzara was posing more and more as the originator and supremo of Dada―the first claim being untrue and the second meaningless in a movement in which, according to Tzara himself, all its members were presidents. Tzara failed to come up with a ready answer to Breton’s charges.27 More than that, as the Dadaglobe Reconstructed now brings into full view, Serner sent an anonymous letter to Picabia, who was by then the sole financial supporter of the project, presenting himself “as a friend of Huelsenbeck’s” and revealing Tzara to be an impostor. Shocked at this intelligence, or perhaps just looking for an excuse, Picabia assembled a special “supplement” to 391 published as Le Pilhaou-Thibaou in July 1921, in which he announced his withdrawal from Dadaglobe, effectively pulling the plug on the project.28 27 Green, “Translator’s Introduction,” 31-2. 28 For more, see the detailed introduction to Dadaglobe Reconstructed, esp. 63-65. 124 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Fig. 4. Serner’s anonymous letter to Picabia, 23 June 1921. Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Scheidegger and Spies: Kunstahus Zürich, 2016) 78. 4. Vischer and Serner are indeed a complementary coupling: both were born on the wrong side of a very bad border at a very bad time, as it were; both sought escape from their personal identity in a pseudonym and from their national identity in avantgarde internationalism. Yet neither was quite able to fly by its nets and while Vischer came to praise Dada, Serner came to bury it. Taken together, Serner and Vischer resist an ideological positioning otherwise common in the art scenes of the new-established Eastern European countries: the notion that Dada is someone else’s movement, with the new political circumstances calling for the need to create one’s own, rather than derivative, avantgarde movements. And both resist subsequent critical attempts at “Berlinising” or “Balkanising” Prague ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 125 Dada, as a superficial and foreign influence, for these nativist views of the Prague art scene grossly misrepresent the internationalism both of Dada and the city itself―a dynamic very much critiqued by the Dadaists themselves. Fig. 5. Kurt Schwitters, “To All the Theatres of the World,” Věstníček červené sedmy / The Red Seven Bulletin (Nov 1919, I.9): p. 5. Fig. 6. Ferenc Futurista, “Dadaist Poetry,” Věstníček červené sedmy / The Red Seven Bulletin (Nov 1919, I.9): p. 6.29 29 Translation: “I DID SOME TALKING to my electric lamp last night—no, last year—and I recall its meaningful nod, screaming into the crowd of half-crazy cats: ‘Circulation, 126 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Yet the “very superficial view of Dada’s doubtful value”―in which the contribution of Vischer, Serner and others is either minimised or ignored―has been taken as proof of Prague Dada’s unimportance by modern-day avantgarde historians and critics. Jindřich Toman, writing in 1998 for The Eastern Dada Orbit collection, decided to entitle his piece “Now You See It, Now You Don’t,” turning Prague Dada into some kind of magician’s vanishing act, believing that his “survey is balanced and detailed” though bemoaning “the rarity of primary sources.”30 But every vanishing act only happens in the eye of the beholder, and its credibility depends on what the eye does not see. These and other similar dismissals are further contradicted by a number of eyewitness accounts of the early 1920s. Looking back on the early twenties from mid-decade called “Creative Dada,” Marxist critic and translator Bedřich Václavek weighed the benefits of Dada even as he clearly thought its moment had passed. The Czechs “missed out on a strong dose of Dada after the war,” he lamented, and had “to proceed without the torch of Dada to clear dense cultural underbrush.”31 As the Constructivist initiative gained momentum throughout Europe, it was often thought to follow in the wake of a salutary cleansing provided by Dada. Unlike the Franco- and Russophiles Teige and Nezval, Václavek was an educated translator circulation!’ What remains for tomorrow, with its scissors working busily—stitcheddy stitch—stitcheddy stich—leave unto tomorrow, I’ll go back to my arc lamp and spend myself fondling the cinders. I’m welded to their cooling blackness, nattering and rattling—yes—the street demands that the victim carry a carbonaceous expression―my black, white, violet clarinet. I’m yours.” 30 http://www.pwf.cz/rubriky/projects/dada-east/jindrichtoman-now-you-see-it-now-you-don-t_8054.html 31 Bedřich Václavek, “Creative Dada,” HOST Review IV. 9-10 (July 1925): 278. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 127 from German, and so was at least aware of what had been going on in Prague’s German scene. His article therefore presents the first critical appraisal of Serner in the Czech context, also looking back to the periodic Prague visits and performances by Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Johannes Baader, and Kurt Schwitters in February/March 1920, and again in September 1921. These trips and performances were novel and exceptional not only in that they were met with “smashing success”―a reception at stark odds with the Dada soirées to which these Berliners were used. Billed as “Anti-Dada-Merz” and taking place shortly after Hausmann and Huelsenbeck’s violent break with Tzara, these Prague soirées suggested that an afterlife of the Dada movement would involve new strategic repositioning: it was in Prague that, for the first time, Hausmann shared stage with Schwitters. And, in an anecdote Hoffmeister picks up from Hausmann himself, on their way back to Berlin, “Schwitters got off the train in Lovosice and started composing a collage right there on the station platform floor,”32 laying the groundwork for one of his most famous texts, the Ur-Sonate. Hausmann, the so-called Dadasof, always felt closely bound with Bohemia. His great-grandfather having settled in Stehelčeves (after Napoleon’s defeat in Russia), his grandfather spent his active life in Kladno and Buštěhrad. His father spoke decent Czech and Hausmann himself included in his correspondence and poetry Czech words, even though garbled. As Kundera reminisces, “his connection to Bohemia was so legendary even Walter Mehring in his memoirs speaks of Hausmann as of a Viennese Czech poet!”33 It is very clearly erroneous to limit the perception of Prague Dada to any sort of “foreign” import, whether 32 33 Hoffmeister, Čas se nevrací, 197. Kundera, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia.” 128 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Western or Eastern. Surely the Berliners would not have enjoyed their first “smashing success,” nor would the Zagrebians throw Dada soirées for a thousand spectators in attendance, had there not been a burgeoning native scene. That Prague Dada spawned remarkable work is not in doubt, however much it has come to be obscured by the competing interests of art history and the very politicised nature of the cultural discourse in which it was rapidly subsumed after the 1920s. Yet the coherence of Prague Dada becomes visible not only through an archaeology of textual sources but lies there undisguised in the fabric of many of the city’s avant-gardist cultural landmarks. Founded in 1909, the Red Seven cabaret had been a disruptive force long before the inception of Dada, but by 1920 it was indelibly associated with this anti-movement’s Prague iteration. With Café Montmartre as its headquarters, the cabaret in the pre-war years was a new development in popular entertainment and experimental theatre. At its helm stood popular song composer Karel Hašler (an expelled member of the National Theatre), street-lawyer-without-degree Jiří Červený, and the painter Pittermann (whose nom de plume was Emil Artur Longen). Alongside these three there frequently appeared the humourist Jaroslav Hašek, whose reputation in Prague’s subversive artistic circles as well as the Austro-Hungarian police files preceded him long before he authored the immortal Good Soldier. Always the merry prankster and troublemaker, Hašek performed comical sketches and gave mock-serious lectures, interspersed with musical numbers, and often used his stage-time for conceptual provocations and anti-theatre spiels. “One time,” reminisced the café’s owner, Josef Waltner, “he had just returned from his trips around Bohemia, sat down on the stage and very slowly and methodically started to take off his shoes and foot-rags ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 129 in front of an audience expecting laughs and pranks.”34 After more similar excesses the owner banned Hašek from the premises. Still, as Radko Pytlík’s authoritative biography of Hašek’s pre-war years shows―notably recounted in a chapter called “Prague Dada”―Hašek never gave up the playfully provocative mode: “the ludic principle is, for Hašek the pre-dadaist, also the creative principle: The principle of the game becomes the principle governing his life.”35 Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk has ever since become a cartoon cardboard character known worldwide, joining the ranks of the Gargantuas and Don Quixotes of the canon; a process which has neutralised the book’s subversive irony, sidestepped the disruptive effects of the protagonist’s ambivalently performed/pretended idiocy, and blunted the savage attack on authority of any kind of the book’s narrative voice. Contrasting Hašek’s reaction to World War I with that of the milder Karel Čapek, critic and translator Peter Kussi has written: Hašek’s reaction to World War I was satire, irony, absurdity: From the lunatic asylum inmate who believes that inside our globe there is another, even bigger one, to the Latrinen-general who believes the war will be won or lost in the latrines, just about everybody in The Good Soldier Svejk seems to have lost all sense. Hašek’s book is bitter satire.36 A sentiment which, combined with the ludic element in Hašek’s writing, is of course thoroughly Dadaist, although 34 Qtd. in Radko Pytlík, Toulavé house (Prague: Emporius, 1998), 209. 35 Pytlík, Toulavé house, 222. 36 Toward the Radical Centre: the Karel Čapek Reader, edited by Peter Kussi (London: Catbird Press), 11. 130 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM the Hašek revival took place much later and outside the Dada circles. As Pytlík sums up: During World War I, a great revival in art is undertaken by the Swiss Dadaists. They too depart from play, elevating the world’s chance, banality and negation into key principles of their creation. By denying causal creation they react to the end of one period of the European civilisation. […] No-one knew of the unfortunate bohemian and roamer from Prague, yet Hašek was a true Dadaist before Dadaism. But there was no-one to understand that.37 Two more offshoots of Prague Ur-Dadaist activity deserve salvaging from oblivion: the one, composer Erwin Schulhoff, who stemmed from a Prague-based German Jewish family and, following his fighting in WWI as legionnaire in Italy, settled down in Berlin in 1919-1923. Forming friendships with painters Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, his exposure to jazz brought him, still in 1919, to set Hans Arp’s Cloud Pump to music in a 5-minute, scrupulously notated “orgasm” for a female soloist called Sonata Erotica, one of the earliest examples of Dadaist music.38 The other, philosopher Ladislav Klíma, who was a maverick recluse, self-taught ever since his expulsion from grammar school for harbouring “anti-Austrian sentiments.” His radically solipsist and voluntarist system of thinking―a bizarre blend of Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche for which he coined the term “egodeism”―found expression equally in tracts (The World as Consciousness and Nothing, 1904) as well as in novels and short fiction (The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, 1928). 37 38 146. Pytlík, Toulavé house, 224. For more, see Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice, ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 131 Klíma’s unfinished novella, Voyage of the Blind Snake in Search of Truth―written in German as early as 1917 with František Böhler―exhibits, according to historian Miroslav Topinka, “strong Ur-Dadaist features,”39 despite the fact that only volume 1 of the book has survived. The fragment is conceptually Dadaist in presenting to the “dear dumb reader” a satirical episode set on the Zambezi River that involves an army of ants presided over by His Lousiness (“Lausislaus von Lausien”). Lausislaus forms alliance with a white snake supposed to secure for him world domination in exchange for a bucketful of alcohol. The snake’s drunkenness backfires and ends up costing the ant army dearly. After the dust settles, the apocalyptic finale is brought to a conclusion as follows: Every piece of shite, however, will stop smouldering one day… The oppressive, suffocating darkness crept in, weighing on the earth like a boulder―and together with it its brother, the foul-smelling corpselike silence. […] Slowly, timidly, carefully, comic little stars began appearing in the skies, expiring every now and then like thoughts in a lazy head―stars big and small―thoughts in the hollow head of the divine beast―phantoms in the quagmire of the universe, innumerable, crazy eyes, peering out of the world’s lunatic asylum…40 The satire on contemporary politics might feel rather evident and heavy-handed, the frequent talk of “bivaginal mucosa” rather puerile and misogynist, but the brutal depiction of a power-hungry war-mad out-of-joint world is unmistakably Dadaist, as is the frequent resort to blasphemy, expletives, and offense to the reader. 39 See Topinka, Hadí Kámen, 100. 40 Ladislav Klíma, Podivné příběhy (Prague: Česká expedice, 1991) 103. 132 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM 5. The mid-1920s saw a true explosion of Dadaist activity in poetry, prose, and most pronouncedly theatre. František Halas’ first poetry collection Sepia (1927) featured “The Boulevard of Dadaism” with the couplet “Give unto Laocoon his long-deserved enema / So he won’t have to writhe anymore.” As Kundera comments, this is a direct echo of Arp and Lissitzky’s The Isms of Art, alluding to Arp’s pronouncement that “Dadaism declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled ‘Laocoon and Sons’ to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake.”41 In 1925, Halas had also authored a lecture “On Dadaism,” organised by the Brno Devětsil group and given on 10 December 1925 at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. Framed by a Tzaraesque introduction and Groszian conclusion, the lecture is divided into four chapters covering the philosophy, art, politics, and morality of Dada as shaped by Halas’ acquaintance with the work of Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, and Serner. At the same time, Halas’ lecture also foregrounds a parallel domestic Dada tradition, especially the work of Jaroslav Hašek and Ladislav Klíma. Following an opening borrowed from Tzara (“Take a good look at me. / I’m a dunce, a buffoon, a smoker. / Take a good look at me. / I’m ugly, I’m small, I’m dull. / I’m just like you all.”) is a series of probes into Dada and philosophy, Dada and the arts, Dada and politics, etc. Halas’ argument is rather free-associative, but appreciative and with many moments of insight: Dada has won its struggle against philosophy. It’s a leap above what’s human. In modern humans though. Our children will still, as we once did, spell out (the humbug 41 Qtd. in Kundera, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia.” ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 133 of education) in schools the one greatest Dada: Love the truth, defend the truth, speak the truth! Until death. J. Hus. Dada wants a life naïve, understandable, undifferentiated, unintellectual. The wittiness of serious things derives from the feeling of the sovereignty of the spirit. Dada has given the serious world a good kick.42 Apart from Halas and Václavek, who were more active in Brno, the Prague Dada scene featured para-poetists like Emil František (E. F.) Burian, Václav Lacina, and Karel Konrád, who in the mid-20s subjected the constructivist optimism of poetism to a Dadaist satire. As early as 1920, composer and theatrical producer E. F. Burian had drafted The Bassoon and the Flute (1920), a theatrical fairy-tale ballet inspired by Ballet mécanique. In 1925, he started publishing Tam Tam, a journal presented as a “musical handbill,” whose title itself echoed Dada as well as the smack of a tambourine. “Aesthetics, formerly the Science of Ugly Beauty, Now the Science of Beautiful Ugliness”43 was Burian’s opening provocation. As he wrote in a later piece, Through Dadaism we got truly enriched in beautiful corporeality and optimism. Dada showed us street melodies and squeaking orchestrations, brought us jazz and pianolas, the lewd melancholy of bar girls, introduced our sensibility to the finest vibrations of absolute sound beauty. After Dada we appreciate ugliness and chance―these unquestionable advantages of admirable eccentricity, of a noisy, foolish fox-trot and a drunken hottentot.44 42 František Halas, “On Dadaism” (1925), Imagena (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1971), 514, 520. 43 Qtd. in Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice, 275. 44 Translated by Jindřich Toman. Qtd. in Toman, “Now You See It, Now you Don’t,” 27. 134 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM In 1926, Burian also authored the poetry collection Idioteon, whose very name referred to the anti-rationalist Dada spirit. Its anti-bourgeois, brutal, iconoclastic and anti-war outlook manifests in texts parodying poetic clichés such as “Mother to a Child” (Fig. 7). Fig. 7. E. F. Burian, “Mother to a Child” (Idioteon [Prague: Olymp, 1926] unpaginated)45 In 1927, under the Dada auspices of the Frejka Theatre, Burian premiered his Voiceband, a polyphonic group drawing on jazz syncopation spiced with the sort of vocalising Burian may have picked up from the performances of Schwitters and Hausmann (Fig. 8). 45 Translation: “You / Blue-eyed one / You know me / You looked / You saw / Impossible / that you shouldn’t know / Who I am. / The child: / Lovely one! / Your arse is blocking off / our entire world.” ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 135 Fig. 8. E. F. Burian. “What is Voiceband?” Leaflet advertising a Dada Theatre performance of Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and Václav Lacina’s Suspended Table No. 1 Václav Lacina’s collection Bristling (1925) brims with satirical barbs at the perceived institutionalisation of poetism as the artistic dogma, starkly at odds with its anti-artistic foundations. Take for instance, his “Nonsensical Poem,” in which Prague literary life is mockingly reduced to “literary bars” (Fig. 9). 136 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM Fig. 9. Václav Lacina, “Nonsensical Poem” (Zježení [Prague: F. Svoboda, 1925] p. 23).46 Karel Konrád published TRN (Thorn) student magazine from 1924 onwards, a parodic and provocative tabloid in the spirit of Hašek, which included a number of Dada-texts and pseudo-manifestos, as well as photo-montages―and consequently, often faced censorship and confiscation (Fig. 10). 46 Translation: “I’d like to ride an ox-drawn tram / one child’s ticket across / there’s so many literary bars in Prague / and none called BAR KOKHBA / my heart’s a cuckoo clock / DADA / never fades.” ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 137 Fig. 10. TRN (Thorn), title page of Vol. I issue 1, 15 Jan 1924, and a sample page of its innovative typographical layout. Announcing the first issue was an “Editorial Declaration,” published as a leaflet in December 1923, co-authored by Konrád with Josef Dubský, Bedřich Pschürer, and Břetislav Mencák: “Students come to universities in order later to become bureaucrats, engineers, doctors, lordships, and it is in this bureaucratism that lies the greatest danger of decadence of contemporary society. […] But we’re not only students, we’re first of all people. Our front shall not be demarcated by our student status. We’re going to fight along the entire front: so that humanity is free, strong, and healthy.”47 Konrád followed his TRN activities with such prose works as Rinaldino (1927) 47 Qtd. in Karel Konrád, Z časů Trnu (Prague: Československý spisovatel), 10-11. 138 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM and Dinah (1928), whose interlinguistic puns and satirical barbs betray a Dadaist sensibility. In the mid-1920s, Prague Dada also went on stage. Founded in late 1925, the Liberated Theatre, co-founded by Jiří Frejka, Jindřich Honzl, and E. F. Burian, quickly became the best-known cabaret-scene in Prague and carried Dadaist absurd language comedy and anti-bourgeois socio-political satire well into the 1930s. It staged contemporary avantgarde pieces both from abroad (Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Ribemont-Desaignes were fixtures) and the domestic scene: Hoffmeister’s own Dadaist theatre production premiered here in 1927 and 28. Most notably, Hoffmeister’s The Bride (1927), “an American comedy in three acts,” and Passepartout (1927) are marked by an interest in sonic experimentation and the technology of communication. Passepartout features “two millionaires sitting in two skyscrapers” with “six telephone girls” providing their communication channels, all to the bewilderment of a drunken passer-by (Fig. 11). Fig. 11. Adolf Hoffmeister, Passepartout, from Hry z avantgardy (Prague: Orbis, 1963), 61. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 139 With the premiere of Vest Pocket Revue in 1927, the authorial collective of Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich and Jaroslav Ježek established themselves as the driving force of the theatre. Voskovec and Werich wrote the scripts and took care of the slapstick physical acting (oftentimes stylised as two clowns), while Ježek provided the jazzy/bluesy soundtrack. Voskovec (1905-1981) in particular, contributed to the critical discourse with his essay, “The Turtle No-One Mentions.” There, he sought to put the poetist vs. Dadaist debate to rest, insisting that Dada was more than negation and anti-art, and that the poetist insistence on the death of art is misguided, pointing out that “after art ceases to be art, its corpse will still be an honest art corpse”: When your deepest and humblest calm becomes settled in the frothiest glass of your fiercest passion, when amidst the most Dadaist and heretical guffaw you amicably smile at the most intolerable classic, when you shed a tear at the moving parallelism of the most contrary artistic movements of the past, present, and future, when during the grand armistice of relativity your left hand starts choking all your arch-enemies while your right is caressing its dear friends, art will appear to you, the magnificent animal, the turtle, “hesitant and firm,” the turtle no-one mentions.48 Later on, Voskovec and Werich dealt in an offshoot of Dadaism called hovadismus (“dunceism”) and defined as “a feature endowing certain human performances and creations in any discipline such obstinate idiocy and inappropriateness their negative effect seems to overexpose aesthetic sensitivity, thus becoming by way of an intentional error registered in the form of seeming beauty.”49 48 Jiří Voskovec, “The Turtle No-One Mentions,” Fronta Review (Prague and Brno, April 1927), 122. 49 Qtd. in Kundera, “Dada in Bohemia and Moravia.” 140 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM After a break with the Liberated Theatre in 1927, Frejka went on to found the short-lived but important Dada Theatre, which for two seasons continued staging some international avantgarde production in translation (such as Schwitters’ Schattenspiel and Apollinaire’s Mamelles de Tiresias) as well as domestic, e.g. Lacina’s texts for the theatre Visací stoly (Suspended Tables) and Ozubené okno (A Cogged Window). In two of his critical essays from 1927 and ‘28, Frejka clearly aligns himself with the iconoclastic, socio-critical legacy of Dadaism. In “Psychology, Psychology, Hehe” Dadaism for Frejka represents theatre devoid of psychologism and reductively “social function”: DADA represents nothing. It’s a function. Not one randomly “chosen,” but a necessary play of artistic as well as acting intelligence. Dada is a protest against dragging private trains of thought into art. Dada is more than an idea in an unexpected place, surprising us like a pipe without a shank, amusing merely through its absurdity. Dada is the necessity with which the bird sings. Dada is neither foolishness―nor wisdom―nor irony. […] And finally: dada is a protest against the lawless plundering and hawking of non-artistic categories within art.50 In “Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart,” Frejka reminisced over the rationale behind the project, linking the poetics of Dada Theatre with the variety show and the “journalistic” mode of production: “Founding Dada, we founded―to the horror of the young artistic philistines―a cabaret. We put art into work rather than words. [… The cabaret is a caricaturing journal. A distorted mirror 50 Jiří Frejka, “Psychology, Psychology, Hehe” Demokratický střed IV.24 (8 Apr 1927): non-paginated. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 141 in which your face grimaces however dotingly you aim to look.”51 Halted, yet clearly not entirely thwarted, by the dominant poetist reactions and reductions of the times, the second wave of Prague Dada in the mid-20s took place as programmatic continuation of the Ur-Dada attempts of the 1910s, in active engagement with the Berlin Dada scene, and with a few intriguing departures that broke new ground. Starting off in the radical fringes of the cultural scene (in leaflets and low-key journals such as Tam-Tam or TRN), via poetic parodies of Halas, Lacina and Burian, Prague Dada culminated round 1927 with the establishment of Dada Theatre associated with Frejka and Liberated Theatre (Hoffmeister, Voskovec) with its programme of “dunceism.” 6. It is necessary to reassess, then, the entire character of Dada’s status in Prague between the wars and to come to terms with the fact of Prague Dada as a distinct cultural phenomenon. In doing so, it is necessary also to recontextualise key aspects of the history of European avant-gardism between the wars and to understand in a different light the significance of the ongoing exchanges between Prague and Berlin Dada that characterised the major avantgarde developments in the region during the 1920s and 1930s― no longer as isolated incidences, but as part of an integral narrative with a number of wide-ranging implications. For its part, Poetism sought to absorb and neutralise Dada as part of the cultural tendency of the age, in which jazz, sports, dancing, music hall, and the circus were extolled as “places of perpetual improvisation,” valued precisely because they were unpretentious and, above all, not art. Teige’s crucial collection of essays may have been 51 Jiří Frejka, “Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart: At the Cabaret,” Signál I.3 (1928): 74. 142 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM entitled On Humour, Clowns, and Dadaists (1924), but here Dada is reduced to “merry-making” and “pleasing tomfoolery” practiced by “a pack of rogues”: “Dadaism is a fun and not undeserving literary movement” which is “posed against art and brings capricious and merry art… Mysticism and humour marks the artistic creativity of lunatics: but in Dadaism mysticism is scarce. They are a pack of rogues.”52 When later on, in The World that Laughs (1928), Teige revisits the subject, he paints Dada as pure negation and revolt, and posits the necessity of “hyperdada” or “surdada,” designed to “restore Dada to the action of actual life”: Dadaism is anarchistic and annihilating revolt, which has devastated the world of art. Mightily and passionately did it hate and negate every intention, authority, and organisation. It lived solely on its chaotic desire for the absolute freedom of inspiration, for the absolute unshackling of imagination. […] But we would like to introduce here something we shall call “hyperdada” or “surdada,” something more profoundly dada than the dada literary movement; i.e. Dadaism that is remote from literature and grows out of the movement and action of actual life.53 Only slightly subtler is the 1924 interpretation of Dada by Teige’s friend and ally in poetism, Vítězslav Nezval, who acknowledges the destructive efficacy of Dada: “Dadas are furniture movers. They have thoroughly dismantled the modern bourgeois’ living room,” he writes, 52 Karel Teige, “On Humour, Clowns, and Dadaists,” Pásmo Review II.1 (October 1925): 7. 53 Karel Teige, The World That Laughs (Prague: Jan Fromek, 1928), 47, 31. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 143 and if “we are now standing in the demolished room” then “it is necessary to make a new order.”54 In many respects, the period from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s provides the key to understanding the situation of Prague Dada during the previous decade. It represents a period of consolidation within the Prague avantgarde between a mainstream represented by Devětsil, poetism and later surrealism (whose principal figures were Teige and Nezval), and a continuing current of Dada situated both aesthetically and politically on the radical fringe. During this time Teige published a series of articles―in ReD, Disk and Pásmo―by turns misrepresenting, attacking, dismissing and outright appropriating Dadaism, and it is this line that predominated into the 1960s and again after 1989 in some of the contemporary criticism critiqued above. Only during the 1960s did research into the city’s Dada and “Ur-Dada” movements commence with any seriousness. In particular, and as evidenced in this overview, Hoffmeister’s 1963 and 1965 memoirs and eye-witness accounts of the 1920-21 Dada visits from Berlin and of the beginnings of the Liberated Theatre, Kundera’s “Dada Panorama,” serialised in Světová literatura in 1966, Topinka’s critiques of Teige and exploration of the “forgotten” Serner, as well as Chalupecký’s later meditations on Czech dada vis-à-vis surrealism and revival of Heartfield’s work―all these have secured Prague Dada a temporary reprieve from oblivion. Intriguingly, these efforts overlapped with Tzara’s willingness, later in his life, to revisit and finally publish (forty years after its original publication date) the Dadaglobe anthology―Michel Sanouillet, one of the anthology’s reconstructors, recalls how in summer 1963 (Tzara’s last), it was 54 Vítězslav Nezval, “Dada and Surrealism,” Fronta Review (Prague and Brno, April 1927): 22. 144 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM still far from clear if Dadaglobe had been a real project, a figment of imagination, a spoof, or a joke. Asking Tzara himself, he assured me that Dadaglobe had indeed been a real project. He expressed his deepest sadness that he did not manage to finish the book. What, I asked, did it flounder on? What has become of the material he had received for it? Why was it―apart from New York Dada―nowhere mentioned […]? Tzara answered evasively that the project had failed primarily due to the lack of economic means.55 Still, when in 1966 Sanouillet published a reconstructed map and name list of Dadaglobe contributors, and approached the many still-living contributors with a republication request, “some, like the later surrealists Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Paul Éluard, did not feel comfortable about their earlier works becoming restored in their original context,” and so Dadaglobe Reconstructed had another 50 years to wait. And whatever chances of reappraising Prague Dada there might have been in the mid60s, these were quashed together with the Prague Spring. 7. Dada maintained a significant presence in Czechoslovakia throughout the interwar period. Up until the annexation of the Sudetenland and the declaration of the Nazi Protectorate, Prague had continued to serve as a major cultural crossroads, hosting among others a succession of prominent Dadaists―including Schwitters, who visited multiple times, Walter Mehring, Hans Richter, Max Ernst, et al. The Liberated Theatre and the Dada Theatre, for example, were already mentioned as important conduits 55 Anne and Michel Sanouillet, “Vorwort,” Dadaglobe Reconstructed, 8. ROTATION REROTATION SUPRAROTATION 145 for the channelling of domestic and foreign artistic energies; in the late 1920’s Krasoumná jednota staged a retrospective exhibition of Schwitters collages in Prague while František Kalivoda organised an exhibition of 42 collages by Hannah Höch at the Masaryk student house in Brno. John Heartfield―who, along with George Grosz, is considered one of the inventors of photomontage―spent six years in Prague from 1933, mostly producing anti-Nazi art for his brother Wieland Herzfelde’s communist-affiliated Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Throughout that time, Heartfield’s name remained near the top of the Gestapo’s wanted list and his work was repeatedly the object of police suppression at the behest of Hitler’s government. In 1934 and 1937 Hoffmeister curated major exhibits at Mánes Gallery in Prague featuring work by Heartfield―both censored by the Interior Ministry. Heartfield fled Prague in 1938, ahead of the Nazi invasion, along with Hausmann, who had served for the previous two years as Prague secretary of the International Association of Architects. In a letter to Jindřich Chalupecký on 7 April 1965, Hausmann recollected his relationship with Teige at that time: “I have to confirm that Czech artists and sculptors wanted to have nothing to do with me in 1937-38, especially Mr Teige. I’d like to mention that Teige knew about my person and work quite a lot, having collaborated with the G review, edited in 1921-4 by Hans Richter.” Four years later, in a letter to Topinka (20 November 1969), Hausmann wrote: “When I was in Prague in 1937-38, Karel Teige―who had known me well―not only ignored me but since (in that period) he was a Surrealist, actively campaigned against me.”56 Derek Sayer’s Prague: Capital of the 20th Century ably charts the belated emergence―within this period― of Prague surrealism, which first declared itself in 1934 56 Topinka, Hadí Kámen, 89-90. 146 TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM and cemented its claims with Breton’s and Paul Éluard’s visit the following year. It is singularly notable, however, that at precisely the time Teige and the Devětsil group first declared their affiliation to the surrealist movement, Heartfield and Hausmann, just as Vischer and Serner before them, were being ignored. What we see is that, behind these competing critiques of “realist” aesthetic ideology among the Prague avantgarde (including both domestic and Italo-Germanic “national socialism” as well as Soviet “socialist realism”), is a critical-historical unreality that has remained troublingly underexamined in the broader modernist discourse. The Dadaist’s radical antifascist credentials may also go some way to explaining the whitewashing of the history of Prague’s interwar avantgarde, considering the adherence of Teige and in particular Nezval to Communist Party orthodoxy and the effect of Stalin’s Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler. The Protectorate would always be a sore point for the self-styled Prague avantgarde of the Poetiststurned-Surrealists, who―despite their frequent proclamations―had never in fact gone through a revolutionary period, being bystanders in 1938 as they were in 1918, annexed to the positivist project of the new Czechoslovak nation state and the celebration of Soviet Russia. The calculated indifference, tinged with passive aggression, of their initial response to Dada belied a reactionary “avant-gardist” play-acting, of the kind adverted to in Grosz and Heartfield’s 1920 tract, “Der Kunstlump,” in which they proclaimed: “All indifference is counter-revolutionary.”57 In the end, the active campaign against Prague Dada was merely révisionniste. 57 George Grosz and John Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump,” Der Gregner 10/12 (1919/1920): 48-56.