Page 43 - Studio International - November 1970

FOOTNOTES
1917
Russian Revolution
April: Split in Socialist Party.
Summer: Strikes in Berlin;
Stockholm peace movement fails.
1918
Jan: Strike of munitions workers.
Spring—Summer: Ludendorff offensive and lull March: 1st Berlin Dada manifesto read.
in political activity.
October: 'Revolution from above'.
November: Republic declared;
Armistice.
December: Independent Socialists leave
government; German Communist Party founded.
1919
January: Spartakist rising suppressed;
Elections for National Assembly.
February: National Assembly meets at Weimar. Dadaists protest at Weimar.
March: Street fighting between Noske's
Friekorps and the Spartakists.
April—May: Suppression of Bavarian Soviet.
June: Treaty of Versailles.
August: Constitution of German Republic
formally promulgated.
1920
February: Foundation of Nazi Party.
March: Kapp Putsch.
June: First Reichstag elections—
Socialist coalition in minority.
Invention of photomontage.
Malik Verlag founded.
February: Huelsenbeck to Berlin.
Disputes within Expressionist groups.
May: Huelsenbeck's 'Der neue Mensch'
published in Neue Jugend.
Die Aktion allies with extreme left.
April: Club Dada founded.
June: Schwitters joins Sturm group.
Foundation of
Novembergruppe and Arbeitsrat für Kunst.
Baader sermon in Berlin cathedral.
Bruno Taut publishes first Arbeitsrat pamphlet.
Hans Richter to Berlin.
Taut's Stadtkrone published.
Wiener's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
Dadaists involved in street brawls.
Wieland Herzfelde arrested and imprisoned.
Toiler involved in Bavarian troubles.
Arbeitsrat publish Bauhaus manifesto.
Novembergruppe publish An alle Kunstler.
Novembergruppe and Arbeitsrat exhibitions.
Hausmann founds Der Dada.
November: Arbeitsrat questionnaire published.
Arbeitsrat joins Novembergruppe.
Taut and others form the Glass Chain.
December: Novembergruppe 'shows for
proletarians'.
First issues of Taut's Fruhlicht.
Huelsenbeck publishes Dada Almanach and
En Avant Dada.
February—March: Berlin Dada tours abroad.
April: Schwitters publishes Merz in
opposition to Club Dada.
Berlin Dada Fair.
1 'Der neue Mensch' is reprinted in Huelsenbeck's
Dada. Eine literarische Dokumentation, Hamburg, 1964,
59-64.
2 Printed in Huelsenbeck's Dada Almanach (1920); re-
issue, New York, 1966, 104-8.
3 This is reprinted (from Huelsenbeck's En Avant Dada,
Hanover, 1920) in Robert Motherwell's anthology The
Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951, 40-41, from
which the following quotations are taken.
4 For a reasonably impartial view of the Huelsenbeck-
Schwitters dispute: Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada,
Paris, 1958, 148ff. For Huelsenbeck's position: Dada
Almanach, 9; his 'Dada and Existentialism' in Willy
Verkauf, ed., Dada-Monograph of a Movement, London,
1957. For Schwitters': his `Merz' (1920) in Motherwell,
Dada Painters and Poets, 55-65.
5 Huelsenbeck relates this episode in his 'Dada and
Existentialism' (Verkauf, Dada, 54). After he made this
remark, a war-veteran with a wooden leg left the lecture
hall to the applause of the audience, who then rose and
nearly lynched their speaker.
6 Cf. Christopher Middleton, `Dada versus Expression-
ism or The Red King's Dream', German Life and
Letters, XV, 1, October 1961, Middleton's 'Bolshevism
in Art: Dada and Politics', Texas Studies in Litterature
and Language, IV, 3, Autumn 1962 is also highly relevant
to the themes under discussion here.
7 The `November-group' called itself a 'union of radical
creative artists' and was an organization of primarily
propagandist aims which succeeded in having ambitions
so generally stated as to attract a very wide range of
artists within Berlin, where it became a kind of cultural
centre, and from throughout Germany. Pechstein and
Cesar Klein were prominent organizers from the start;
but the range of members included the 'formalist'
Dadaists, Richter and Eggeling; musicians like Hinde-
mith and Berg; writers like Brecht; as well as many
Expressionist artists. The 'Workers' Council for Art'
was a working and study group with similar aims to
those of the Novembergruppe, and after a year of
independent existence did in fact merge with it. But
before this happened it was essentially a small-scale
group dominated by architectural interest and revolving
around the two key figures of Gropius and Bruno Taut.
Cf. U. Conrads and H. G. Sperlich, Fantastic Architec-
ture, London, 1963, passim.
8 Organization Manifesto. Quoted by Conrads and
Sperlich, Fantastic Architecture, 136.
9 Friedrich Paulsen, Bauwelt, XI, Heft 7, February 12,
1920, 111.
Gropius, 'My conception of the Bauhaus idea', 50
Tears Bauhaus, London, 1968, 14. (Gropius did not fight
in the war.)
11 As outlined in his Die Stadtkrone, Jena, 1919, from
which the following quotations are taken.
12 Afterwards published in Der Einzige, April 20, 1919.
Quoted in Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 33-36, in which
the chapter 'Dada contre l'Esprit de Weimar' is rele-
vant here. For an account of this phase of Dada by one
of the participants: Walter Mehring, Berlin Dada,
Zürich, 1959.
13 En Avant Dada. Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets,
42.
14 The reference to sexual reforms might not be just a
Dada joke. It came up in the proposals of the Activists
(see above) and perhaps reflects Dr Magnus Hirschfeld's
campaign against paragraph 175 of the German penal
code which punished abnormal sexual practices, and
which also helped to provoke a series of sex films when
censorship was abolished after the war.
15 En Avant Dada. Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets,
42.
16 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: experiments in
totality, New York, 1950, 3.