The Dada Cyborg This page intentionally left blank The Dada Cyborg Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin Matthew Biro University of Minnesota Press / Minneapolis • London The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Michigan, and the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the work of Edward Dimendberg, editorial consultant, on this project. Chapter 3 appeared previously as “Raoul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Media,” Art History 30, no. 1 (February 2007): 26–56. Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in “Allegorical Modernism: Carl Einstein on Otto Dix,” Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (2000): 46–70; “History at a Standstill: Walter Benjamin, Otto Dix, and the Question of Stratigraphy,” RES 40 (Autumn 2001): 153–76; and “The New Human as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 62 (Spring–Summer 1994): 71–110; copyright Matthew Biro. Copyright 2009 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Biro, Matthew, 1961- The Dada cyborg : visions of the new human in Weimar Berlin / Matthew Biro. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-3619-8 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-3620-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cyborgs in art. 2. Dadaism—Germany—Berlin. 3. Art, German—Germany—Berlin—20th century. I. Title. II. Title: Visions of the new human in Weimar Berlin. N8214.C93B57 2009 709.43'15509042—dc22 2009006988 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 18171615141312111009 10987654321 For Bev This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Cyborgs, Hybridity, and Identity 1 1. Berlin Dada: Origins, Practices, and Institutions 25 2. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Photomontage, SigniWcation, and the Mass Media 65 3. Raoul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Cyborg 105 4. The Militarized Cyborg: Soldier Portraits, War Cripples, and the Deconstruction of the Authoritarian Subject 153 5. The New Woman as Cyborg: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch 199 Conclusion: Dada Cyborgs in the Twenty-Wrst Century 255 Notes 259 Index 311 Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the generous support of numerous individuals and insti- tutions. The original idea goes back to an essay that was published in New German Critique in 1994, and I owe a debt to the editors of that publication, Anson Rabinbach and Andreas Huyssen, for their belief in the project and their incisive responses to my initial formulations. A number of scholars, including Dora Apel, Edward Dimendberg, Ann Duroe, Geoff Eley, Barry Flood, Romy Golan, Jennifer Jenkins, Donald Kuspit, Christine Mehring, Alex Potts, and Jonathan Reynolds, read various chapters (or por- tions thereof) at different stages of their evolution, and I greatly appreciate their valuable comments and suggestions. Other parts of the manuscript were presented at different venues around the United States, and, for their observations and questions about the ideas treated in this book, I thank the organizers and attendees of talks that I delivered at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Swarthmore College, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Slought Foundation, the College Art Asso- ciation annual conference, the German Studies Association annual conference, the University of Michigan, and Bryn Mawr College. Finally, I am deeply grateful to four stalwart readers—Edward Dimendberg, Christine Mehring, Libby Otto, and an anony- mous reviewer for the University of Minnesota Press—who, in the concluding phase of this project, read the entire manuscript from beginning to end and pushed me to develop my arguments to their fullest possible extent. Their contributions have been particularly invaluable. Two important fellowships—a Helmut Stern Faculty Fellowship from the Insti- tute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—allowed me to accomplish the research and to ix x — Acknowledgments write a few early essays that eventually became part of the text. More recently, through its generous sabbatical program, the University of Michigan provided me with the re- maining time off that I needed to complete the manuscript; in addition, it provided the funds for the images and publication rights for all the illustrations. I thank the various editors of the scholarly journals listed on the copyright page for their comments and, in some cases, their permission to republish certain sections of these essays. I also thank the various anonymous readers who commented on these texts for those publications. As they will see, I continued to think about their responses to my work for a long time after it was first published. Finally, this project would not have been completed without the love and support of my wife, Beverly Fishman, and Juliane Biro, my mother. This book is dedicated to Beverly because she, more than anyone else, sustained me both emotionally and intel- lectually during the time when most of the manuscript was written. Every day I am inspired by her art, her love, and the generosity and grace with which she lives her life. Introduction Cyborgs, Hybridity, and Identity By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. —donna j. haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) From the photomontages of the Berlin Dadaists to certain plays by Georg Kaiser to the films of Fritz Lang and the early writings on technology by Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger, the cyborg played a central role in many of Weimar culture’s most signifi- cant productions.1 Within art and cinema, works by Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy- Nagy, Marianne Brandt, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Richard Oswald, and Leontine Sagan can also be related to the concept of the cyborg, and many further examples are easily found throughout theater, literature, popular magazines, advertising, and photojour- nalism.2 Because the types of cyborgs created by the Berlin Dada artists were so copi- ous and variegated, however, this volume focuses exclusively on Berlin Dada art. It is in part the Berlin Dadaists’ intense exploration of the figure of the cyborg that gives the movement its enduring interest and appeal. And by investigating the Dadaists’ examination of this figure, we can better understand its continuing importance. In part the sign of a fearful response to the destruction brought about by World War I, the cyborg was, paradoxically, also a creature on which many Weimar artists and other cultural producers could project their utopian hopes and fantasies. By trac- ing the origins of the Weimar cyborg in Berlin Dada art, this book expands the con- cept beyond its initial definition as an organic–technological hybrid to encompass a series of interrelated meanings, including the cyborg as representing hybrid identity in a broad sense and as the locus of new modes of (interior and exterior) awareness 1 2 — Introduction created by the impact of technology on human perception.3 It argues that the differ- ent representations of the cyborg in Berlin Dada art can help theorists and historians today understand how new forms of human existence and society were imagined in Germany between the two world wars. In addition, it also demonstrates how these representations can help us grasp how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived in the early 1920s. Although my focus is on the cyborg in Berlin Dada art, this figure did not orig- inate in Weimar’s visual sphere. Indeed, a look at science, art, literature, philosophy, and material culture since the Renaissance, both in Germany and in other Western countries, proves this was not the case.4 In addition, if one includes automata, chimeras, and other forms of fantastic creatures as precursors of the cyborg, then the figure’s his- tory reaches back significantly further. However, as I demonstrate, the Berlin Dada movement was central for the cyborg’s development, precisely because it represented the figure with such complexity. The Cyborg: Two Concepts The term cyborg never appeared in Weimar culture and was invented much later. Yet the term is useful, because it suggests how the interwar artistic and visual cultures in Germany anticipated much of the cultural discourse around the cyborg and cyber- netics in the United States and Europe since the 1940s, both theoretical and practical as well as popular. The cyborgs that appeared during