Page 32 - Studio International - October1968

Everyone knows that Dada was a four-letter word meant to ex-
John Heartfield, Berlin press disdain, if not repugnance, for modern Western society. Not
Dada, and the weapon everyone distinguishes more carefully between the forms that
Dada, as an international phenomenon, took. For sometimes it
of photomontage was playful, esoterically symbolic, delighting in verbal and pictorial
tergiversations contrived to hasten the bourgeoisie into apoplexy.
Sometimes Dada was tortuous and labyrinthine, self-indulgent and
narcissistic, garrulous, affected, and exceedingly dull. But in Berlin,
in that vortex of post-World War I insurrection, it was first and fore-
Aaron Scharf
most a political weapon, deadly earnest (this was the title, in fact, of
one of its many publications) and aimed at well-defined targets.
True, Berlin Dada did have its more fanciful and expressionist wing
in Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, but in the hands of George
Grosz and especially John Heartfield 1, art was an instrument of
ridicule dedicated to the destruction of German chauvinism, social
injustice and political chicanery. Later, when the Nazis rose to
power, their leaders became Heartfield's prime target. His detesta-
tion of the Nazi ideology became the ferment for his best works.
It was no accident that Dada and photomontage should appear in
that form in Berlin during and after the first world war. In that city,
from the days of the Spartacist uprising and the murder of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg to the nightmarish inflation when
bank notes were cheaper than wallpaper, the most abject misery
coexisted with pleasures that beggar description. The Berlin of
Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains conveys the nasty flavour of
the metropolis about 1930. Isherwood describes a veritable cess-
pool of perversion and debauchery: spies, political intriguing, sado-