Jindřich Toman: Now you see it, now you don’t

Like other Western fads and fashion before it, Dada wasted no time crossing the Czech border. A crude chronology of the 1919-20 season shows that Dada reached Prague soon after the end of World War I: in September 1919 a student magazine announced a Dada journal to be launched by a group of young Czech poets. Echoes of the new ism resounded in Prague cabarets the following month, and, in March 1920, Dada Raoul Hausmann and Richard Huelsenbeck, visiting from Germany, staged two Dada evenings in Prague. The French brand of Dada also caught the attention of local newspapers at roughly the same time. Given these early reactions, it would seem that Dada should have taken the Czech capital by storm and saturated its audience with both German and French varieties of this new European sensation. Although interest in Dada was obvious, it did not directly translate into the formation of any prominent Dada group - the journal mentioned above never took off, and the group around it was in all respects ephemeral. It was only in the mid-1920s that preoccupation with Dada reached a new level, and that important poets and theorists of the Czech avant-garde began to react to Dada in an original way. No clearly defined Dada group emerged at this point either, but reflections on Dada became an important ingredient in the formation of the Czech avant-garde. In the following essay, I will trace this development and offer some explanations on why Dada’s reception in Czechoslovakia had precisely the chararcted it did. Although I believe that my survey is balanced and detailed, gaps resulting from space limitations and the rarity of primary sources certainly remain, and the topic is by no means exhausted.

Early advocates

Not surprisingly, Prague’s first documented reactions to Dada are in German. In December 1918, barely two months after the end of World War I, Melchior Vischer (1895-1975), a young Sudeten-German student of German and mathematics – and the future author of what is usually referred to as the first and only Dada novel in the world, Sekunde durch Hirn (A Second Through the Brain, 1920) – began to correspond with Tristan Tzara, who had just moved to Paris. One may conclude from this correspondence that Prague German newspapers reported on Dada as early as the summer of 1918, and that Vischer was informed, in part, through these sources. According to Vischer, however, the new movement was not met with open arms. Vischer described an atmosphere of pettiness, on both the German and Czech sides, and he talked about hostility toward Dada and other modern currents. Of course, whether his was an accurate account is not to be decided here. He was a radical author writing to another radical, trying to establish a bond of comradeship in a common battle against adversaries of new directions.

Vischer’s forays had parallels on the Czech side. At some point before September 1920 the young Czech poet Jaromír Berák (1901-64) successfully established contact with Richard Huelsenbeck. As a result, Huelsenbeck’s short article entitled “Dadaism” was published in September 1919 in Ruch (Activity), a new student magazine. In all likelihood, the article is the first printed mention of Dada in the Czech language. The essay was obviously solicited for this very occasion. (To my knowledge a German version has never been published.) It includes excerpts from Huelsenbeck’s Phantastische Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) and Tzara’s Dada poetry. This was all fitting for Ruch as a number of future Czech avant-gardists were already testing their strength in its pages. Moreover, the publication seemed to be part of a larger scheme: a footnote appended to the text states that “Czech Dadaists intend to publish their own Dada journal in the immediate future.” The project did not materialize, however.

“The Czech Dadaists” in question were apparently a loose group around Berák himself; other members included Zdeněk Kalista (1900-82) and Artuš Černík (1900-53), at the time, all students with literary aspirations. Although it showed no activity during 1919-20, the group resurged in the fall of 1920 around Den (The Day), an ephemeral journal concerned with modern art. Kalista also recalled another such group that had relations to Den and seemed to converge with Berák’s circle. It included Jiří Weil, Arnošt Vaněček, and O. Štancl. Unfortunately, little is known about Berák himself, except that he wrote some poetry, was interested in German expressionism, had communist sympathies, and even tried to forge clandestine contacts in 1920 with the leftist radicals in Munich, for which he was arrested and investigated. Other men around Den certainly became more famous: Jiří Weil (1900-1957), also an early communist, emerged as a major prose writer in the late 1930s; Černík was an important participant in various groupings of the Czech avant-garde; and Kalista abandoned his early leftist position to become a historian and prominent author.

Despite the list of names, perusing Den is quite disappointing. Dada shows itself only once: Berák wrote a brief article on it for the November 1920 issue. Although this is the earliest account from a member of the young generation, the text is a rudimentary selection, highlighting Tristan Tzara. The final paragraph, however, is worth noting:

And so it seems that the era which the Dadas are dreaming about has arrived – an era of chaos, yet at the same time an era of triumphant life, since life is chaos. There arrives, if you want, a time of revolutions in politics, society and art, as the three are intimately connected, just like the twenty-four hours of the day, just like light and darkness.

In invoking social upheaval and linking Dada with social turmoil, Berák’s statement ties in, by and large, with the political views of Berlin Dada. Although Czechoslovakia did have a brief period of tumultuous political activity in 1920, prompting all sorts of leftist activism, it could not compare with Germany. November 1920, when the article appeared, was marked by strikes and communist activity, but by the end of December most of it had ceased, and political life in the future was shaped by entirely different concerns. Berák’s anarchistic Dada-dream did not materialize in Czechoslovakia.

From: At the bottom – Noll, Hasek, and Other Locals

It is clear that the world of the cabarets in Prague was also the world of the actor Karel Noll, and with him, of course, of Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923), the author of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the First World War (1921-22). As Noll’s popularity was largely derived from his roles in cabaret adaptations of Hašek’s book, the connection is not surprising. Such adaptations came quite naturally, given the fact that large sections of Švejk read as slapstick scenes. Episodes such as Švejk on the telephone, Švejk at the military doctors, and Švejk’s dialogues with Dub, all clearly exploit language as a source of absurd humor. Also Chaplain Katz’s drunken, babbling monologues represent a genre that was standard in cabaret repertory and, despite a fundamental difference in focus, can be linked with Hugo Ball’s Lautdichtung. In any case, Noll and his cabaret capitalized on Švejk’s performative potential, even introducing variations that left Hašek’s original text far behind.

Hašek’s Švejk is also relevant to Dada in another respect. The book incorporates a variety of voices, letters, newspaper articles and military texts, eventually producing the impression of an enormous literary collage. Hašek was very familiar with this technique: beginning in 1904, well before Dada and Švejk, he had prepared photographic montages for the Prague journal Animal World (Svět zvířat). A few other episodes from his bohemian life have the flavor of Dada happenings as well. In 1911, he founded the “Party of Moderate Progress within the Pale of the Law,” a mock movement pretending to participate in that year’s general elections. The “Party” launched an electoral campaign of its own, with meetings, speeches, and an absurd political program, the cornerstone of which was the abolition of the institution of the domovník (concierge). The annals of this “Party” are part of Hašek’s major works.

Significantly, the interwar Czech avant-garde often honored Hašek’s legacy and connected it with Dada. Bedřich Václavek, a leftist literary critic who propagated German Dada in Czechoslovakia, stated that Czech prose “also had its Dada, but one situated outside all programs and before them, a folk Dada [Jaroslav Hašek].” In addition to this somewhat biased assessment (Václavek uses the ideologically laden attribute lidový) [folk based], we find frequent references to Hašek in the writings of other Czech theoretists who were already interested in Dadaism in the 1920s, such as Teige, Halas, Burian – all mention Hašek.

During this period, Czech culture was full of Bacchanalian twists. Other Czech authors and artists might also be mentioned as predecessors and potential fosterers of a climate of absurd humor. For instance, the artist and author Josef Váchal (1884-69), stylistically unequivocally indebted to turn-of-the-century symbolism and individualism, was also an eccentric satirist and authored a book called Kalendář tolerancí (Tolerance calendar, 1922). The volume looks like a replica of popular prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but, on closer inspection, turns out to be a book of unusual typographical innovations and wild parodies of symbolist poetry. Váchal set it in a single session directly from the printer’s box, without any manuscript – a Dada happening?

Finally, the name of the eccentric writer and philosopher Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928) must be included, as he was the grand old man of Czech decadence to whom the Czech avant-garde authors often related the spirit of Dada. After 1918, he participated in politically-flavored grotesque literature with the play “Matthew, the Square” (Matěj poctivý, 1922), a co-production with the young dramatist Arnošt Dvořák (1881-1933). The authors even succeeded in staging their play in the National Theater.

These authors – Hašek, Klíma, Váchal – all shared an aesthetic that included aggressive, grotesque satire and a strong penchant for ridiculing basic Western values in art, politics, and philosophy. This grotesque satire briefly fed on the sense of turmoil and anarchy and converged, in this sense, with the spirit of Dada. The satirical approach, however, did not become anchored in the 1920s. As we shall see below, serious constructive tendencies were called for.

Back to High: Teige on Dada and Laughter

Although the Bazaar only distant echoed Dada, the poetists were familiar with Dada and, subsequently, showed considerable interest in it. This is particularly striking with Teige, whose “On Humor, Clowns and Dadaists” is the first extensive and serious account of Dada in Czech. Rearranged and altered in places, this and other essays eventually entered Teige’s two books devoted to modern art and Dada. But Teige had also commented on Dada on earlier occasions. In 1921, in his programmatic essay “Images and Pre-Images,” he termed Dada “chaotic” and understood both it and expressionism as the “ultimate results of the art of the past and its debacle.” A year later, he again used the term with negative connotations when he glossed Man Ray as an artist who, like many other second-rate cubist painters, merely “followed the contemporary fashion and became a dadaist.”

By and large, Dada appeared to Teige as a product of crisis – an end, rather than a beginning of an epoch: “It swept away many an illusion, but it did not point to new creation.” Its function was merely purgative:

The dadaists live only through their sense of opposition, they are alien to the modern constructive spirit.

Dada negation had enough power to renew a positive creative élan. . . .

It was necessary to negate art thoroughly, to carry out a profound act of destruction so that one might proceed with new construction on the cleared ground. Constructivism and poetism must express their thanks for the Dada work of negation and destruction.

By contrast, Teige wanted a movement, in fact, a Weltanschauung, that would act as a genuine beginning of the new epoch. Such a movement was poetism. The poetist doctrine stressed constructivism as an adequate expression of modern times, but also rationally concluded that a world organized in the spirit of constructivism would need some balancing. In this light, Dada was imbued with new meaning. Writing about the Dutch constructivist/Dada Theo van Doesburg, alias I. K. Bonset, Teige spoke about a paradoxical duality of modern times expressed in the juxtaposition of constructivism and Dada: “Dada, a movement of free imagination, ignores truth, laws and discipline. Liberated from the shackles of utilitarian logic and causality, it represents a cheerful counterpart to the rigor of constructivism. The Dutch modernists thus mirror a dual face, the paradox of our times: order-freedom, Constructivism-Dada.” Whereas the Dutch model appears here as one of contrast, the Czech model was meant to be synthetic. But Dada doesn’t directly enter the synthesis. Mainly Teige appropriates absurd humor and elementary, purgative laughter. His qualification of Dada as cheerful is quite symptomatic in this connection; it points to a somewhat generalized and domesticated view of Dada.

Teige’s transformation of Dada into laughter ties in with his acknowledgment of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the latter’s philosophy of laughter. Bergson’s understanding of laughter encompasses a broad range of points, but clearly there is a reading of Bergson from which laughter emerges as an important social corrective, or, as the Czech author Karel Čapek put it in his 1914 review of Bergson’s Le rire (Laughter), laughter has a “practical, social function.” In this context, it is hard not to think of the role Teige assigned poets and artists in modern culture. Their function was to correct and embellish the machine. They were specialists in relaxation: “Indeed, our world is organized selon l’Esprit Nouveau by anonymous engineers and designers, and fed and embellished by gay fantasists, poets, clowns and acrobats.” The function of poets and clowns (and the division of functions they were supposed to respect) was quite clear. Based on the machine, future civilization was only able to produce the mechanical, thus its automatism had to be broken. Laughter did precisely this. But while Bergson merely described this quality, Teige did more. He rationally tried to include laughter in the world, as a sort of organized selon l’Esprit Nouveau.

Teige stresses physiologically-rooted humor. Spasms of roaring that shake up one’s insides – that is what Teige postulates as the proper mental gymnastics for modern men. He agrees with Pythagoras’s dictum that life is theatre, adding:

We would probably all wish that they played some damn good comedy, some crazy buffoonery, a jester farce without any aggressive sarcasm, in short, a pure flowering of joy, so that when leaving this theater of the world, we could say on our trip to the underworld: what kicks! — and would begin to roar again recalling all this.

In short, modern laughter should be liberating rather than crushing, and exploiting such laughter and humor in poetism was no matter of chance: “The modern spirit is a spirit of construction. It is a spirit of wisdom. But it is healthy to add a grain of folly to every bit of wisdom.” Thus, in the end, Teige’s synthesis of constructivism with the remnants of Dada sounds remarkably rational: chance has design, happy folly a function, and play a high purpose as mental hygiene for overheated modern brains. And, indeed, Teige himself asserts this rationality: “We know that man is an animal that laughs, and this is probably so because he is a rational animal.”

Halas on Dada

A poet who devoted a great deal of attention to Dada was František Halas (1901-49), initially a protagonist of poetism and later one of the most independent and influential Czech poets of the period. Much of his knowledge about Dada came through his friendship with Václavek.

Halas turned to Dada on various occasions, but his most important statement was a lecture he delivered at Masaryk University in Brno on 10 December 1925. In the lecture (unpublished until 1971), Halas briefly rehearsed the history of Dada, linking its origins with the intellectual collapse resulting from World War I:

Art was for Dada merely a frame which it was soon bound to break out of. The chaos of civilization and the inferno of the world war provided it with a ground on which it could successfully thrive. . . . The woe from wit, so characteristic of the end of the epoch, was a current that was driving this boat and its crew, so insanely cheerful and so cheerfully insane, over seas of blood. Just like the Dadas, soldiers in trenches and workers in the rear were forced to think about the grotesque nature of this brutal butchery. . . . With its absurdity, naïveté, and indifference, Dada has become, and remains, a part of modernity. Dada’s pure negativity has unwillingly brought some positive points – out of Dada spark forth those currents of crazy poetry we love, out of Dada comes a lesson for the modern man who is smiling today at what he was horrified by yesterday. Sowing doubts about everything, Dada was the starting point of the process of revitalization of our thought.

Halas subsequently deals with Dada and philosophy; Dada and art; Dada and politics; Dada, love, and morality. It is not easy to give an overly academic account of these sections, which are all interlaced with profuse quotations, mainly from Huelsenbeck and Serner. Halas was especially taken by the latter so that his quotations from Letzte Lockerung (Final Dissolution) occasionally sound more shocking than Serner’s original. Ladislav Klíma, mentioned previously as enfant terrible of Czech philosophy and author of Nietzse-sounding aphorisms, is also quoted.

On the philosophical side, Halas’s desire for intellectual iconoclasm is striking – the only rule is there are no rules, the Faustian mission is something to laugh at, spirituality is humbug: “Truth, said Klíma, equals a convenient position on the loo.” Halas’s gargantuan gestures also tie in with Teige’s ideas about the usefulness of laughter: “We are alive, we are cheerful. This is one and the same thing. Sadness is lack of activity. Laughter is a daring deed; it represents the hygiene of constructive work in which tension requires control of all elementary feelings.”

Unlike Teige, however, Halas continues to see the Dadas as a constructive and positive agent. It would almost seem that the Dadas are his contemporaries:

It is obvious that a Dada is an active and positive type, someone who has turned his back on metaphysics. He understands himself as a phenomenon expressive of a period which basically follows the civilizing-mechanical tendency, but which, besides its crazy tempo, brings fatigue and despair about the meaning of everything. But this sentiment is no nihilism that would provide a nice veil dolce far niente, this is only a thorn forcing one to an even more intensive activity.

The section on Dada and art not only swarms with denunciations of the bourgeois corruption of contemporary art, but, more interestingly, it also sanctions Dada for the Czechs: whereas German Dada was a reaction against metaphysics, an expression of which was expressionism, in countries where there was no expressionism (such as Czechoslovakia), the lesson to be drawn from Dada was a revolt against every idyll. The section on Dada and politics is, by and large, a translation of the Proklamation des dadaistischen Zentralrats (Proclamation of the Dadaist Central Council); The section on Dada and morality essentially approves of Serner’s denouncement of love and assertion of sexuality. And finally, the concluding passage brings political matters to the fore. Halas turns to Georgé Grosz and his statement that to serve the cause of revolution while being a Dada is possible. Halas’s comment is brief: “We acknowledge this recognition. To be Communist and Dada at the same time is possible.”