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"Dada Means Nothing!" So proclaimed Tristan Tzara, the movement’s tireless publicist. Yet this did not prevent the most fanatical and talented artists ans writers across Europe from rushing to join its ranks. Anti-war, anti-art, anti-dada, from its beginnings in Zurich during the first World War the dadas swept aside the cultural, philosophical and political norms of their time. Utter disgust with a society that had created the war (and then expected to survive the peace) spurred them to ever greater demonstrations of revulsion and derision. Yet it was not all nihilism: many factions worked within the Dada Movement and it was Huelsenbeck’s intention to embody most of them in the Dada Almanac. The largest collection of Dadaist texts ever assembled by the movement, it was originally published in 1920 in a mixture of French and German.

The Dada Almanac was truly international in scope, with substantial sections from the Swiss and French sections of the movement, it embodies Dada’s failings as well as its sucesses, its excesses, its seriousness, its idiocy, but above all the anarchic vitality which made it such a vital precondition for so much that followed in the fields of art, literature and general cultural terrorism.

The editors of this first English translation have added dozens of other relevent texts, documents, portraits etc, as well as explaining contemporary references and events and providing biographies of the numerous personalities involved. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

This kind of nothing keeps us alive and full of truth
This collection is an absolute essential for all of humanity, but especially those as obsessed as I am with art, writing, passion, politics, love, hate, rage, calm, and the resulting dynamic ... Dadaism is truly truly truly a timeless movement that could never happen again and that is sad, but at least we have this almanac. This book is superb, truly. It isfundamental to the study of Dadaism, as essential as Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism is to surrealism. Buy this book, read it, allow yourself to literally fall into it, and you will indeed not be able to help the coming obsession with these colorful Dadaists!

The Dada Almanac
I am Enrolled in a class entitled "Film and Revolution."Thefirst movement we are learning about is Dada.This book gives a goodunderstanding of Dada.It also gives examples of Dada art, or anit-art asit it called.This is definitely a must for people wanting to learn ofDada. ... Read more

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The German contribution to the Dada movement ("DADA MEANS NOTHING!" proclaimed Tristan Tzara) as it unfolded in Zurich during the first World War is not widely known.This collection brings together three texts translated into English for the first time, which were essential for the very creation of the movement, and which influenced all its future developments in France, Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Included is the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, written by the movement’s founder Hugo Ball. sections of which he performed at the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire. It is partially a roman à clef recounting the birth of Dada and the author’s subsequent love-hate relationship with his monstrous creation, and yet is much more besides. Richard Huelsenbeck’s Fantastic Prayers was the first Dada poetry collection, and these precocious "Bruitist" poems clearly illustrate how the absurd elements in early Expressionism evolved into the bizarre eloquence of Dada. Finally, Walter Serner’s Last Loosening manifesto, the first major German manifesto written in Zurich, which provoked numerous brawls at its various performances and yet is hardly known. In fact it was the source for many of Tzara’s future literary provocations and seems to have been deliberately suppressed for this reason.

Three vital texts from one of the most extraordinary manifestations of the avant-garde of this century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Burn Your Poems and Ride the Hobby-Horse
In a recent review of two books from the Subtext collective (some sort of Seattle based poetry commune), Stephen Thomas, wrote, "Wallace Steven remarked somewhere that every successful poem expresses a theory of poetry... Every serious poet has had to come to terms with the power of language to express its own meanings apart from, or even in opposition, to the poet's own intention. The Language poets seem to start with this experience. It is not too much to say that they cultivate a distrust of language and that their poems often frustrate the `basic' function of language to narrate, to explain, to describe and to import knowledge or wisdom."

I should point out that every serious poet should be burned with a Buick Regal's cigarette lighter and thrown into the Duwamish until they learn that the basic function of the human throat is to howl. The `basic' function of language is to frustrate this impulse.

Eighty years ago, in Zurich among a population of international outcasts and deserters from the Great War, a group of artists exploded what had been German Expressionism. They protested Western Civilization (the whole ball of wax), a society whose devotion to a coldly analytical and rational language had wrought Verdun and the Somme. Remembered largely now as the foundation for Surrealism and trivialized for their jokes, such as Marcel Duchamp's urinal, La Fonatine (1917), The First Texts of Dadarevels in the serious anarchy and the subversive antics that gave birth to Dada.

Hugo Ball -- one of the principal perpetrators of Dada and the author of the only Dada novel, Tenderenda the Fantast, included in this book and which of course bears absolutely no resemblance to what then passed for a novel and often doesn't bare clear resemblence to any known language -- believed that under the "influence of Kant and German idealism, as well as Lutheran sobriety, that language had been made abstract and thus had been debased into a utilitarianism that allowed it to be plundered by jingoism, literary professionalism, journalism, and intellectual vacuity. It had become a tool for upholding the ruling value system." Ball made it his mission to purify the word. He saw Dada, which was initially performed at the Cabaret Voltaire as a fusion of sound, drama, and painting; a cacophony of contradiction, music played on found objects (known as Merz performance, the philosophy that any sound or text can be incorporated as material into a performance), monologues of gibberish, that is an art free from any concrete constraints.

This book charts the inception of Dada and more importantly presents three texts in their confounding entirety. This is not a book about art history; it's a handbook for subversion and a champion of the vitality of art as terrorism. It is not much to say that Dada cultivated a mistrust of language; they burned every scrap of it they could find. ... Read more

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Huelsenbecks memoirs bring to life the concernsintellectual, artistic, and politicalof the individuals involved in the Dada movement and document the controversies within the movement and in response to it. ... Read more

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Richard Huelsenbeck's "Memoirs of a Dada Drummer"
This is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the progression of 20th century Art.Living in New York City late in his life, Richard Huelsenbeck - a seminal member of the original Dada group formed at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire - looks back upon his role in Dada and Art (or rather"Anti-Art"), and tries to make some sense of it all.Though highly opinionated (especially in regards to the role of Tristan Tzara), he manages to objectively de-mystify much of the Dada legend and examine some of the human interactions and political and social motivations which sparked the birth of Dada.Low points include the incessant ¡°plugging¡± of his own work and his role in the birth of Dada, but this by no means overshadows his comments and observations about other ¡°Dadaists¡± or the importance of the movement as a whole. ... Read more

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Der Erwerb des Buches enthält gleichzeitig die kostenlose Mitgliedschaft im Buchklub des Verlags zum Ausprobieren - dort können Sie von über einer Million Bücher ohne weitere Kosten auswählen. Das Buch besteht aus Wikipedia-Artikeln: Wilhelm Canaris, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, Theodor Blank, Richard Hülsenbeck, Lothar Emmerich, Benno Elkan, Liste von Persönlichkeiten der Stadt Dortmund, Friedrich Harkort, Helene Wessel, Felix Wolfes, Arnold Andreas Friedrich Mallinckrodt, Kurt Goldstein, Conrad von Soest, Fritz Anneke, Ernst Brandi, Karl Prümer, Bernhard Hoetger, Kurt Piehl, Gisbert von Romberg I., Sonja Schöber, Dettmar Philippi, P. Walter Jacob, Wilhelm Uhlmann-Bixterheide, Friedrich Kullrich, Jürgen Kohler, Charlotte Temming, Victor Weidtman, Pauline von Mallinckrodt, Willi Daume, Hans Tilkowski, Friedhelm Hengsbach, Käthe Schaub, Bernhard Thiersch, Hans Tombrock, Lars Ricken, Friedrich Wilhelm Brökelmann, Fita Benkhoff, Moritz Klönne, Peter Jordan, Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, Hermann Brassert, Wilhelm Schmidt, Wilhelm Lübke, Hans Traub, Josef Kleutgen, Hedwig Dransfeld, Johann Georg Joch, August Klönne, Karlheinz Spielmann, Carl Wilhelm Tölcke, Paul Polte, Wilhelm Spemann, Eduard Sperling, Lambert Lensing, Wilhelm Krane, Carolina Hermann, Konrad Klepping, Fritz Hüser, Thorsten Fink, Johann Wilhelm Kuithan, Franz Lütgenau, Gerhard Langemeyer, Guntram Schneider, Erik Nölting, Wilhelm Tönnis, Fritz Springorum, Jordan Mai, Hans Bönnighausen, Dieter Kemper, Dietmar Bär, Benno Jacob, Emil Stumpp, Franz Schmidt, Konrad von der Mark, Martha Gillessen, Martin Juhls, Daniel Hermann, Karl von Oeynhausen, Fritz Kahl, Max Frank, Ulrich Kuhnke, Otto von Mirbach, Heiner Möller, Agnes von der Vierbecke, Paul Randebrock, Bernhard Temming, Ernst Steinig, Heinrich Wenke, Ullrich Sierau, Bernhard von Glisczynski, Freddie Röckenhaus, Friedrich Bagdons, Julia Wegat, Walter Behrendt, Will Schwarz, Paul Hermann Schoedder, Franz Klupsch, Agnes Neuh...http://booksllc.net/?l=de&id=819019 ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of Richard Huelsenbeck, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 985 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
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• A description of the author's work
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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more