Memoirs of a Dada Drummer

r THE DOCUMENTS OF 20TH-CENTURY ART Memoirs off a Dado Drummer by Richard Huelsenbeck Edited by Hans I. Kleinschmidt s I If Uli Memoirs of a Dada Drummer THE DOCUMENTS OF 20TH-CENTURY ART ROBERT MOTHERWELL, General Editor BERNARD KARPEL, Documentary Editor ARTHUR A. COHEN, Managing Editor Memoirs of a Dada Drummer by Richard Huelsenbeck « Edited, with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography by Hans J. Kleinschmidt TRANSLATED BY JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK Copyright © 1969 by Richard Huelsenbeck English language translation Copyright © 1974 by The Viking Press, Inc. Introduction and notes Copyright © 1974 by Hans Kleinschmidt All rights reserved First published in 1974 by The Viking Press, Inc., 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited sbn 670-4679i-x Library of Congress catalog card number: 73-380 Printed in U.S.A. Acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use the materials indicated : The American Journal of Psychoanalysis'. “Psychoanalytical Notes on Modern Art,” by Charles R. Hulbeck (Huelsenbeck), in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 20 (i960), no. 2, pp. 164-173. Reprinted by permission of the Editor of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis. limes verlag: For permission to translate “Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze” and “New York,” by Richard Huelsenbeck. the museum of modern art: From Arp, edited by James Thrall Soby. Copyright © 1958 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. new directions publishing corporation: From Poems from the Book of Hours, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Babette Deutsch. Copyright 1941 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. random house, inc.: From “September 1, 1939,” by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940 by W. H. Auden. willy verkauf: “Dada and Existentialism,” by Richard Huelsenbeck, from Dada: Monograph of a Movement. Reprinted with permission of Willy Verkauf. The illustration on page xvii of the editor’s Introduction is the front page of the magazine Revolution, founded in 1913 by Hugo Ball and Hans Leybold. The drawings in “The Dada Drummer” were made by George Grosz for the second edition of Huelsenbeck’s Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers), published in Berlin, 1920. Reprinted with permission of the George Grosz* Estate. The woodcuts in the other essays were made by Hans Arp for the first edition of Phantastische Gebete, published in Zurich, 1916. Reprinted with permission of Mme. Marguerite Arp. We hold the hogs bladder in our hands and catch the burning oakum with our ears. We are ceremonious and melancholy, we ancient priests. In the valley, they are beating the great kettle drum, the vermilion tide is rising, the porce lain stars are falling down—eioéh eioéh—we are so ceremonious and serious in this hour. We have forgotten minor things, we tore the hyacinths from our heads, we clapped the earth out of our bellies. This means that we are very ceremonious. Have we ever had more reason to act madder, lovelier, insaner, or more ceremonious? Have we ever had more reasons for blowing red-hot smoke out of our noses or being prouder? We killed a quarter of a century, we killed several centuries for the sake of what is to come. You can call it what you like: surgery, kleptomania, calligraphy; for all we can say is: We are, we have worked some—revolution, reaction, extra! extra! we are—we are— Dada first and foremost—first and foremost a word, whose fantasticness is incomprehensible. —HUELSENBECK Editor's Note When Richard Huelsenbeck asked me to edit a selection from his recent writings, I accepted with delight. Not only are we both products of a German humanist education, but we were also both determined to devote our lives to careers in art and literature. My diploma from the Kaiser-Friedrich Gym nasium in Berlin unequivocally states that I was to be an art historian. Instead, like Huelsenbeck, I went into medicine and became a practicing psychiatrist. Nevertheless, an ever-deepening interest in German expression ism and the manifold evolving trends in art and literature from the turn of the century to the end of the Weimar Republic has enriched my life through out the years. The major portion of the text in this volume is a translation by Joachim Neugroschel of Huelsenbeck’s Mit Witz, Licht und Grütze, published by Limes Verlag in 1957 and used here with their permission. Most of the essays have been selected from the more than öne hundred articles published by Huelsenbeck in Swiss and German newspapers and have been translated from the German by Mr. Neugroschel, who also translated the poem “Rivers” and the excerpt from Huelsenbeck’s introduction to the Dada Almanach, which appear in my introduction. Two of the essays, “Psycho analytical Notes on Modern Art” and “On Leaving America for Good,” were written in English by Huelsenbeck; the essay “Dada and Existentialism” was translated by H. A. G. Schmuckler and Joyce Wittenborn; part of the Arp X ! EDITOR’S note essay originally appeared in English in a Museum of Modern Art catalogue published in 1958. The extracts from “The New Man” used in the introduc tion were translated by myself. I would like to express my gratitude to Paul Raabe of the Schiller Archive in Marbach, Germany, for putting his bibliographic archive at our disposal. My thanks are also due to Peter M. Grosz for permitting us to reproduce the George Grosz drawings from the second edition of Huelsenbeck’s Phan tastische Gebete and to Marguerite Arp for permission to reproduce the Arp woodcuts from the first edition. My special thanks to Barbara Burn of The Viking Press, whose editorial assistance was invaluable. H. J. K. Contents The New Man—Armed with the Weapons of Doubt and Defiance: Introduction by Hans J. Kleinschmidt xiii The Dada Drummer I Psychoanalytical Notes Jean Arp 96 on Modern Art 149 Tristan Tzara 102 On Inspiration 162 Hans Richter 105 About My Poetry 167 A Knight in Connecticut 108 New York 170 Marcel Duchamp 113 Modern Art and Totalitarian George Grosz 116 Regimes 172 August Stramm 123 The Agony of the Artist 177 Joaquin Torres-Garcia 127 A Few of the Artist’s Problems 180 Jean Tinguely 130 On Leaving America for Good 184 Postscript to Dada 135 The Case of Dada 136 Plates following page 76 Dada 139 Bibliography 191 Dada and Existentialism 142 Index 195 xi The New Man—Armed with the • Weapons of Doubt and Defiance • Introduction by Hans J. Kleinschmidt i For a while my dream had been to make literature with a gun in my pocket. —huelsenbeck, En avant dada, 1920 At the beginning of an extended lecture tour in the winter of 1970, Richard Huelsenbeck gave a talk on dada at the Goethe House in New York.1 * He did not beat a drum nor did he read from a prepared manuscript. For an hour and a half he spoke with wit, charm, and the disarming blend of seriousness and self-irony so characteristic of this elder statesman of dada. The audience responded with delight when he described how he had chanted his early “African” poems to the accompaniment of a tom-tom, shouting at the end of each poem: “Umba, umba.” “I was very good at ‘Umba, umba’ in those days,” he said, and his listeners roared with laughter. But this was New York 1970, not Berlin 1918. Dada 1970 was very dignified. The man who was the courier of dada, the man who brought it to Berlin and said that “by giving the word dada to the movement, I gave it its revolutionary impetus,” is today dada’s chronicler. Following the lecture, a young person loudly asked for the floor: “Dr. Huelsenbeck! Our protest, our refusal to accept the Vietnam war, our refusal to accept the hypocrisy of our leaders, isn’t our protest the same as yours was?” * Numbers refer to the Notes which start on page xlvii. xiii xiv / Introduction “I don’t think so at all,” he replied. “Because the two situations are quite different. You have to know the background story. All men are vic tims of—or, if you will—all men express their historical context.” There was silence. The young protester sat down in astonishment. I had looked forward to this moment with a mixture of eager anticipa tion and apprehension. How, I had wondered, would a founder of dada react to the protest of 1970? In recent years he had emphasized more and more the philosophical, psychological, and moral aspects of dada, while minimizing its political side. As I expected, the issue of civil disobedience, its possible justification, had been raised at once. Huelsenbeck fielded their probing questions calmly and wisely, no doubt disappointing most of the young people in the audience. “We were never really politicians,” he explained. “Certainly not in Zurich, where ironically the police took an interest in our- carrying-on while leaving completely undisturbed a politician who was preparing a great revolution. I am refer ring to Lenin, who was our neighbor at the Cabaret Voltaire. “Dada was a protest without a program, without a political program. We protested the system without ever offering alternatives. Dada was a moral protest not only against the war but also against the malaise of the time; it was an awareness that something was very wrong. “The protest arose from a deep creative doubt. One must protest what is morally wrong. To protest what is wrong is a creative act. It becomes a power in itself. “Dada was a collective struggle,” Huelsenbeck continued, “a struggle for individual rights, which included values.

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