From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
      The Dadaists challenged the very foundations of Western   
   civilization which they regarded as pathological, given the context of   
   the destruction of World War I and continuing anti-Jewish attitudes   
   throughout Europe. The artists and intellectuals of Dada responded to   
   this socio-political diagnosis with assorted acts of cultural   
   subversion. Dada was a movement that was destructive and nihilistic,   
   irrational and absurdist, and it preached the overturning of every   
   cultural tradition of the European past, including rationality. The   
   Dadaists "aimed to wipe the philosophical slate clean" and lead "the   
   way to a new world order."2 While there were many non-Jews involved in   
   Dada, the Jewish contribution was fundamental in shaping its   
   intellectual tenor as a movement, for Dada was as much   
   an attitude and way of thinking as a mode of artistic output.   
      
      In a recent article for The Jewish Daily Forward, Bill Holdsworth   
   observes that Dada "was one of the most radical of the art movements   
   to attack bourgeois society" and that at "the epicenter of what would   
   become a distinctive movement . . . were Romanian Jews-notably Mar-   
   cel and Georges Janco and Tristan Tzara-who were essential to the   
   development of the Dada spirit."3 For Menachem Wecker, the works   
   of the Jewish Dadaists represented "not only the aesthetic responses   
   of individuals opposed to the absurdity of war and fascism" but, in-   
   voking the well-worn light unto the nations theme, insists that they   
   brought a "particularly Jewish perspective to the insistence on   
   justice and what is now called tikkun olam" (healing the world).   
   Accordingly, for Wecker, "it hardly seems a coincidence that so many   
   of the Dada artists were Jewish."4   
      
      Indeed it does seem hardly coincidental when we learn that Dada   
   was a genuinely international movement, not just because it operated   
   across political frontiers, but because it consciously attacked   
   patriotism and nationalism. Dada sought to transcend national   
   boundaries and to protest against European nationalist ideologies, and   
   within this community of artists in exile (a "double Diaspora" in the   
   case of the Jewish Dadaists) what mattered most was the collective   
   effort to articulate an attitude of revolt against European cultural   
   conventions and institutional frameworks.   
      
      First and foremost, Dada wanted to accomplish "a great negative   
   work of destruction." Presaging the poststructuralists and deconstruc-   
   tionists of the 1960s and 1970s, they believed that the only hope for   
   society "was to destroy those systems based on reason and logic and   
   replace them with ones based on anarchy, the primitive and the   
   irraional."5 Robert Short notes that Dada stood for "exacerbated   
   individualism, universal doubt and [an] aggressive iconoclasm" which   
   sought to debunk the traditional Western "canons of reason, taste and   
   hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally   
   controlled inspiration in imaginative expression."6   
      
      The man who effectively founded Dada was the Romanian Jewish   
   poet Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock in 1896). "Tristan Tzara"   
   was the pseudonym he adopted in 1915 meaning "sad in my country"   
   in French, German and Romanian, and which, according to Matthew   
   Gale, was "a disguised protest at the discrimination against Jews in   
   Romania."7 It was Tzara who, through his writings, most notably The   
   First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine (1916) and the Sept Mani-   
   festes Dada (Seven Dada Manifestos, 1924), laid the intellectual   
   foundations of the movement.8 Leah Dickerman notes that Tzara's   
   Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, was "the most widely distributed of all   
   Dada texts," and "played a key role in articulating a Dadaist ethos   
   around which a movement could cohere."9   
      
      "Da-da"  means "yes, yes" in Romanian and Russian, and the early   
   Dadaists reveled in the primal quality of its infantile sound, and its   
   appropriateness as a symbol for "beginning Western civilization again   
   at zero."   
      
       Tzara's own "Dadaist" poetry was marked by "extreme semantic   
   and syntactic incoherence."16 When he composed a Dada poem he   
   would cut up newspaper articles into tiny fragments, shake them up   
   in a bag, and scatter them across the table. As they fell, they made   
   the poem.   
      
     Some of this poetry was later published in the Cabaret's period-   
   ical entitled Dada, which soon became Tristan Tzara's responsibility.   
   In it he propagated the principles of Dadaist derision, declaring   
   that:   
      
   "Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere.   
   Doing it deliberately. And is constantly tending towards idiocy   
   itself. . . .   
      
   The new artist protests; he no longer paints (this is only a symbolic   
   and illusory reproduction)."23   
      
      From the very beginning, the Dadaists showed a seriousness of   
   purpose and a search for a new vision and content that went beyond any   
   frivolous desire to outrage the bourgeoisie. . . . The Zurich Dadaists   
   were making a critical re-examination of the traditions, premises,   
   rules, logical bases, even the concepts of order, coherence, and   
   beauty that had guided the creation of the arts throughout history."30   
   The doyen of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, spoke admiringly   
   of Dada's moral shock effects as anticipating the technical effects of   
   film in the way that they "assail the spectator."31   
      
      After the November 1918 Armistice, Tzara and his colleagues be-   
   gan publishing a Dadaist journal called Der Zeltweg, aimed at popular-   
   izing Dada at a time when Europe was reeling from the impact of the   
   Bolshevik Revolution, the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the communist   
   insurrection in Bavaria, and, later, the proclaiming of the Hungarian   
   Soviet Republic under Bela Kun.   
      
      Tzara around this time associated with a group of Romanian   
   communist students, almost certainly including Ana Pauker, who lat-   
   er became the Romanian Communist Party's Foreign Minister and one   
   of its most prominent and ruthless Jewish functionaries.41   
      
      The performances with which Dadaists tested their Parisian audi-   
   ence were consistently aggressive in nature, and aggression character-   
   ized many of their artworks and journals. As one source notes: "Like   
   the plays and stage appearances, individual works produced within   
   Dada emanate a violent humor, ranging from vulgar to sacrilegious   
   language to images of weapons and wounds, or references to taboos   
   great and small: suicide, cannibalism, masturbation, vomiting."47   
      
      It was widely observed at the time that the spectacles and output   
   of Paris Dada constantly exhibited a "profound violence: physical   
   hurt, damage to language, a wounding of pride or moral spirit," that   
   to native observers seemed wholly "uncharacteristic of French   
   sensibility."48 Comoedia, a Parisian arts daily focused on theatre and   
   cinema, soon became the central forum for debates over Dada and its   
   effects on French audiences. Charges of enemy subversion, lunacy and   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)