czech dada

Prague also acted as a dissemination point for Central and Eastern European Dada movements, hosting Yugoslavian Dadaists like Dragan Aleksic and Branko Poljanski and their Dada evenings and soirees.  The influential Czech poet, Frantisek Halas, gave an important lecture on Dada in Brno as late as 1925, citing the Czech-born, founding Dadaist Walter Serner and his work.

And then there are the questions: given the early exposure (Czech students were writing about Dada in journals and little reviews as early as 1919), why was Czech Dada so ephemeral and ill-defined?  And when, in the mid-twenties, the avant-garde finally began to respond to Dada in an original way, why did it emphasize certain aspects – satire, absurdist humor, the jokey, prankish side of Dada?  Finally, how did the homegrown manifestations of Czech Dada conform to and depart from other Dada movements elsewhere in Europe?

The first two questions are hotly debated, with critics and historians taking sides on the issue.  Some, perhaps pointing to comments made by Huelsenbeck in his memoirs, “En avant dada,” stress the nascent nationalism of Czechoslovakia at the time.  “The Czechs wanted to beat us up, because unfortunately we were Germans,” Huelsenbeck wrote, and his sentiment has been echoed by critics like Gerald Janecek, who argues that “where there was nationalism, there could not be Dada.”  Others, like Jindrich Toman, point to a sort of “domestic prehistory of Dada” in the figures of Jaroslav Hasek, Josef Vachal and Ladislav Klima, whose emphases on grotesque satire and absurdist humor had already exerted their influence on a whole generation of writers and thinkers, coloring the Czech reception of, and response to, Dada ideas.  

Prague’s cabarets had been host to Dada-like performances as early as 1919, and the Dada tradition of the literary review or magazine was continued with publications like the satirical “Trn,” the musically minded “Tam Tam,” and the late-twenties publication Fronta, from Brno, which included work by Andre Breton, Theo Van Doesburg, Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara.  But the inter-war Czech avant-garde belonged, not to Dada, but to poetism and Devetsil, the movement founded and led by Karel Teige.  Most scholars agree that Teige incorporated elements of Dada into his mostly constructivist vision, though opinions vary on whether he actually “understood” the fundamental tenets of the Dada movement.  Teige emphasized the mischievous, humorous elements of Dada: his most important work of the period was titled “On Humor, Clowns, and Dadaists.”  In Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, Dada, and to some extent the war itself, were seen as purgative: not ends in themselves, but crises that wiped away the old so that new forms and meanings could be discovered and new creation allowed to take place.

Hannah Brooks-Motl