Swiss American Historical Society Review Volume 53 Number 1 Article 3 2-2017 A Chasm Between Two Vanguards: Near Encounters of Russian Emigre Marxists and Dadaism in Switzerland Bryan K. Herman Doctoral Candidate, History Department, University at Albany Axel Fair-Schulz Department of History, State University of New York College at Potsdam Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_review Part of the European History Commons, and the European Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Herman, Bryan K. and Fair-Schulz, Axel (2017) "A Chasm Between Two Vanguards: Near Encounters of Russian Emigre Marxists and Dadaism in Switzerland," Swiss American Historical Society Review: Vol. 53 : No. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_review/vol53/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Swiss American Historical Society Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Herman and Fair-Schulz: A Chasm Between Two Vanguards A Chasm Between Two Vanguards: Near Encounters of Russian Emigre Marxists and Dadaism in Switzerland by Bryan K. Herman Doctoral Candidate, History Department, University at Albany and Axel Fair-Schulz Department of History, State University of New York College at Potsdam In the year 1916, Switzerland was an island of peace in a sea of belligerence. Surrounded by Germany, France, and Italy, Switzerland was one of the few European counties to maintain its neutrality during the war that transformed Europe into a graveyard. It also became an ideal sanctuary for those who opposed the brutality and strident nationalism of World War I. Ever since the defeat of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, Switzerland had acted as an ideal place of refuge for members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (the RSDLP, a Marxist party founded in 1898). This party sought to overthrow the Russian autocracy and further the cause of an internationalist revolution based upon Marxist principles of creating a society where "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." 1 1 Already in 1848, Marx and Engels define their Communist goals in the following fa shion: " In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , Frederick Engels, trans. and ed. (Chicago, Ill.: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906), p. 47. Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2017 1 Swiss American Historical Society Review, Vol. 53 [2017], No. 1, Art. 3 2 February 2017 SAHS Review In 1903, this party split into two rival factions: the Bolshevik wing, calling for a tightly-organized structure based upon committed revolutionaries, and the Menshevik wing, seeking to work within the current system and not openly incite revolution .2 Although these were distinct currents within the party, the split was not final until 1912, and hence there was a much greater degree of fluidity compared to later periods. Devoted to the international workers' movement instead of jingoistic impulses, RSDLP members were appalled at the collapse of the Second International in 1914, when many members parted ways based upon national lines-thus betraying their own professed internationalist commitments and succumbing to nationalist and pro-war propaganda.3 Members following Vladimir Il'ich Lenin's Bolshevik faction, within the RSDLP, waited for the time when this nationalist competition between warring nations would transform into a situation that could cause the proletariat to rise up and seize the reins of power, led by Lenin's own revolutionary vanguard. Not far away from Lenin and other members of the RSDLP in the Swiss city of Zurich, another vanguard of a very different sort emerged during the war. While abhorring the bloodshed of inner­ imperialist rivalry that exploded in World War I, some members of the RSDLP viewed war also as a springboard to revolution , another group of avant-garde artists, led by Tristan Tzara, rued war as the ultimate triumph of irrationality over the rational .4 Many trace the Dada Movement back to 1915 when Hugo Ball and Emily Hemmings experimented with anti-war performance in their Cabaret Voltaire 2 For a more complete discussion of the context of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, see Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What ls to Be Done? In Context (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2008). 3 R. Graig Nation's War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left. and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2009) contextualizes how World War I divided the parties of the old Second International based on whether collaboration with, or resistance to , the war effort, was the best course of action . The Bolsheviks were among the few socialist organizations that consistently and openly opposed the war. 4 Leah Dickerman , Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York , Paris (Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art and Distributed Art Publishers Inc. , 2005), pp. 2-7. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_review/vol53/iss1/3 2 Herman and Fair-Schulz: A Chasm Between Two Vanguards A Chasm Between Two Vanguards 3 designed to shock the audience. It was only in February of 1916, when Dada began to coalesce as a coherent artistic movement, that Ball and Hemmings invited artists like Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter to join their group. Tzara's role was particularly important in shifting Dada into a cohesive movement that used printed media instead of just performance art. From Zurich, Dada spread to several other major cities like Berlin, Paris, and New York.5 ln a world that seemed to be falling apart about them, Tzara and other followers of the art movement that would later become Dadaism concluded that the world that surrounded them was filled with absurdity and brutality and that Modern Art called for something new to reflect these trends. After the war, inspired by Bolshevik techniques of agitation, Dadaism would even produce works of art that meant to shock as a sort of artistic engagement. Although the purpose of Dada from the beginning had been to disorient its audience, in cities like Berlin and Cologne many of the leading Dada artists were actually members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), particularly at the high­ water mark of 1920. Berlin artists, like George Grosz and John Heartfield, waged battles over whether or not it was necessary to protect works of high culture during a revolution, especially since the Dadaists took a stance that valued human life over works of art.6 They wrote pamphlets linking Dadaism with Communism and created art designed to confront the sensibilities of their audience.7 Indeed, Tzara identified as a Soviet sympathizer well into the late 1940s, at a time 5 Marc Dachy, The Dada Movement /915-1923 (New York, N.Y.: Skira/Rizzoli , I 990), p. 33. For the early years of Dadaism in Zurich, also see Dickerman, pp. I 9-35 . 6 Brigid Doherty, "The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada" Oc!ober l 05 (Summer 2003), pp. 73-92. Compare with Anatol ii Lunacharsky's fears of works of art being destroyed in Russia during the October Revolution of 1917. See Sheila Fitzpatrick , The Commissariat of Enlightenmenl: Soviet Organization of Education and !h e Aris under Lunacharsky October 1917-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) , pp. 13- 14. 7 Georges Hugnet, "The Dada Spirit in Painting" in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Robert Motherwell, ed . 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: G . K. Hall & Co., 1981), pp. 147-53 , 156-57 . Also see in the same volume Richard Huelsenbeck, "En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism (1920)" ibid. , pp. 41 -42. Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2017 3 Swiss American Historical Society Review, Vol. 53 [2017], No. 1, Art. 3 4 February 2017 SAHS Review when the Soviet art scene was starkly di ssimilar to Dadaism .8 A little after the heyday of Dadaism, leading French Surrealists, such as the poets Andre Breton, Louis Aragon , Benjamin Peret, and Paul Eluard, gravitated towards Marxism and even joined the French Communist Party (PCF), seeing their aesthetic, philosophical, and political commitments to Dada-inspired Surrealism and Marxism-Leninism as mutually complementary. Hence, the French and German Communist parties, at various points of the 1920s, embraced Dada and Surrealist artists. It seems vogue in certain quarters of educated popular opinion to suggest a natural affinity between Bolshevism and Dadaism. After all, both Dadaism and Bolshevism developed in order to contest the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation, imperialist wars, rampant racism and colonialism; in short, the status quo and those complicit with it. Some of this perceived affinity goes all the way back to the movement itself. The Dada artist Hans Richter made one of the few observations of the nearby Russian Bolsheviks. He quipped that the authorities in Zurich "were far more suspicious of the Dadaists, who were liable to pull off some unexpected stunt at any moment, than of those quiet, scholarly Russians." 9 Even in the 1920s, Hitler tended to consider modernist trends in art, like Dadaism, under the pejorative term "Bolshevik Art." 10 One of the few books that deals directly with Lenin and Dadaism is a satirical volume, Dominique Noguez's Lenin Dada: Essai. This tongue-in-cheek French book follows up one absurd hypothesis with another, all accompanied with extensive footnotes that provide only circumstantial support for the book's assertions, as it claims that "dada" originated from Lenin calling out "yes, yes" (in Russian: da , 8 Robert Motherwell ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Robert Motherwell , ed.