Tom Sandqvist: A Word that Leads Ideas to the Hunt
Dada - there you have a word that leads ideas to the hunt:
every bourgeois is a little dramatist, he invents all sorts of
speeches instead of putting the characters suitable to the
quality of his intelligence. The first thought that comes
to these people is bacteriological in character: to find its
etymological, or at least its historical or psychological
origin.
Tristan Tzara, 1918
Expressionist theater tradition and various Western European forms of absurdism. Not until seven years ago, the American art historian Steven A. Mansbach touched upon the possibility of another, ”secret” history of Dada, though leaving to others to look further into this possibility. According to him, much of modernism was undeniably born on the eastern margins of industrial Europe - constructivism in the tsarist Empire, uniquely creative forms of cubo-expressionism in Habsburg Bohemia, and dadaism in royal Romania. Moreover, it was in the immense geographical swath from the Baltic to the Balkans that aesthetics of progressive character and insistent social applicability were articulated - philosophies that would fundamentally define the modernist mission universally. Western scholars have long viewed the 1916 display of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire as an original event, indeed as a defining phenomenon in the evolution of modernism. Yet, says Mansbach, though failing to give any substantial evidence of his arguments, this milestone may be interpreted otherwise form the perspective of Romania. Bucharest and Iasi had for several years witnessed a form of Dada avant la lettre, been amazed by Dada poetry and prose, and been provoked by Dada visual spectacle, although these manifestations went under other names. Thus, when a group of Romanian modernists travelled to Switzerland, they transposed to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire a ”dadaism” that was already an important and publicly manifested form of artistic engagement in their homeland.
Furthermore, Mansbach says, what was witnessed as authentically novel in Zurich by Western artists and audiences - and a succession of historians - was actually an intermediate stage in the history of Romanian modern art. Further, Dadaism was a form of radical expression that would later attain some of its most imaginative actualizations in Bucharest (and Iasi) - as well as powerfully expressive variants in Zagreb and Belgrade - rather than in Berlin, Hannover, Rotterdam, or New York, where its development has been primarily chronicled.
Most of the works of reference concerning both art and literature, but also more qualified studies claim that Dada was born on the 5th of February 1916 when Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. This is only partly true, since giving the exact moment of birth and the exact spot of the ”delivery of the child” doesn´t take into account any possible moments of conceiveance or - for that matter - any proper cultural and historical settings beyond the acknowledgement of those scattered artistic and literary impulses, mainly in Germany, that might have affected the Dadaist activities during or just before the outbreak of World War I. Certainly there are faithful mentions of both Tristan Tzara and the three Janco brothers, Marcel, Jules, and Georges Janco, being born in Romania, even though it is often forgotten that one more artist, born in Romania, took part in the scandalous activities of the Cabaret Voltaire apparently already from the first evening, namely Arthur Segal. It is certainly true that hundreds of artists, writers, actors, journalists, and other intellectuals from all over Europe were living and working in the small Swiss town at the same time together with almost just as many political refugees, professional revolutionaries and anarchists. But the fact that half the first Dadaist group was Romanian is nevertheless to that extent remarkable, that this fact needs an explanation beyond what can be labeled merely a coincidence.
While Hugo Ball seemed to be the driving force in regard to the organizing arrangements of the cabaret, the indisputable star of the more entertaining aspects was his fiancée Emmy Hennings at least until Richard Huelsenbeck arrived some time after the first chaotic performance on the 5th of February. Nevertheless, the artist who eventually became the most famous one performing on the stage of the restaurant Meierei and especially behind it desperately trying to transform the movement into a global event was naturally a man, namely Tristan Tzara, who, according to Hugo Ball´s diary Die Flucht aus der Zeit (1927), belonged to the ”Oriental-looking deputation” of four men arriving already to the very first performance. These men with portfolios and pictures under their arms were, besides Tzara, Marcel and George Janco, and a fourth one whose name Ball couldn´t catch but who must have been either Jules Janco or Arthur Segal. In fact, Tzara was already a full-fledged Romanian poet, on that same evening reading some ”traditional-style” poems, which later have been identified as poems published in the Romanian pre-Avant-Garde magazine Chemarea in 1915, a journal founded by Tzara himself together with his close friend, the Romanian poet Ion Vinea (Eugen Iovanaki). In this journal Tzara also used his famous pseudonym for the first time meaning ”sad in his own country” (”trist en tsara”) instaed of his real name Samuel Rosenstock.
In other words, even though Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings realizing their long-lived dream of a literary cabaret were responsible of the launching of Dada in Zurich in 1916, there are plausible reasons to believe that they were not that influential when it came to Dada´s ideological, philosophical or even artistic outlook that allowed its absurdism to develope as it did during the first crucial months towards, for instance, the Lautgedichte, the automatic writing, the nonsense poetry, the practical jokes, and the mocking provocations, as well as Dada´s experimental visual art and design in general. Already the search for the origin of the term Dada itself reveals further interesting facts in regard to the question of Dada´s Eastern European connections. Although Tristan Tzara´s role at the baptism of Dada is highly disputed, it may be linked to a, from the Romanian point of view, most interesting circumstance which seems to confirm the suggestion that it was Tristan Tzara after all who was responsible of the baptism and which at the same time brings Dada closer to its Romanian sources than noticed before, when one is able to connect his birthday (16th of April 1896) with the feast day of the holy martyr Dada in the old Orthodox calendar of saints.
Indeed the Eastern European and especially Romanian connection appears even more profound than this, when taking into consideration not only the, until now, almost totally neglected biographies of the Romanian Dadaists, with the exception of Marcel Janco thanks to his biographer Harry Seiwert (1993), but also the Eastern European cultural background in general when it comes to the artistic, ideological, and ideohistorical ”roots” of Dada, which has not been the case in international research, for some reasons. Until now, neither the fact that, for instance, both Samuel Rosenstock and Aron Sigalu (Arthur Segal) were born and grown up in the Romanian Principality of Moldavia just before and at the turn of the last century nor the fact that the Janco brothers were born and spent their adolescence in the Romanian capital Bucharest, where, furthermore, Rosenstock joined them during his high school years, seems to have caught the scholars´ attraction, although it has been widely recognized that the term Dada itself means ”Yes, you are right, indeed” in Romanian. This seems strange also in the light of the fact that for instance Tristan Tzara didn´t hide his Romanian cultural background in any way in spite of the fact that he, to what he said himself, was dreaming of becoming as impersonal as possible during his childhood in his native town of Moinesti, a kind of a non-person without individual characteristics. In fact, as mentioned, he appeared as a more or less mature Romanian poet having complete mastery of the poetic trade as he stood on the tiny platform of the Meierei already the first evening of Cabaret Voltaire reading his own poems, which he rapidly translated for the occasion and of which some had been published previously in the magazine Simbolul, a literary magazine that young Rosenstock, using the pseudonym S. Samyro, had established already in 1912 together with, among others, both the Janco brothers and Ion Vinea.
It is no coincidence either that the magazine was called Simbolul, since Symbolism was the current of the day within the emerging Avant-Garde in Bucharest, and one of the writers of the Romanian turn of the century who must have had a crucial impact on young Rosenstock, thus arousing his interest in French Symbolism and poets like Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Laforgue, and Corbière besides ”self-evident” sources of inspiration like Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, all of them very much present in current Romanian literature, was Alexandru Macedonski. He was the most prominent figure of Romanian Symbolism whose poetry was characterized by, for instance, excentric allegories, absurd combinations of verbal images, neologisms, linguistic repetitions, and a good portion of ironical humour.
However, the immediate successors of Makedonski, the ”others”, among them Ion Minulescu, may have had even a greater significance for Samuel Rosenstock than the Master himself; Minulescu, the darling of the Symbolist bohemians of Bucharest, was characterized by the vanguard journal Integral in 1925 as equally important for Romanian poetry as Guillaume Apollinaire was for the French one, at the same time it has been said that Rosenstock did nothing else than copied Minulescu in his earliest poems. In this context, it is also more or less impossible not to mention to the enfant terrible of the Romanian turn of the century, namely the dramatist and merciless social satirist Ion Luca Caragiale, to whom the Romanian scholar Marin Sorescu also refers when he describes the Dadaists in Zurich as a gang of young men always ready for new practical jokes, characterized by an explicit spirit of mean hoaxes and a taste of tricks and teatrality. According to Sorescu, the Dadaists appear like true Caragiale figures in full action.
Furthermore, in 1928, the poet Geo Bogza baptized his own journal, a magazine of totally five issues, and called it Urmuz after the pseudonym of the judge of the supreme court of appeal in Bucharest Demetru Demetrescu-Buzau, the absurdist number one of Romanian literature who had committed suicide five years earlier, like Caragiale a spiritual brother of both Alfred Jarry and Christian Morgenstern influencing not only Samuel Rosenstock but also, among others, Eugène Ionescu. In fact, his Bizare Pagini are surprisingly crazy, absurd, grotesque and, according to the literary establishment, totally incomprehensible short stories defying both the laws of empiricla reality and the rules of literary fiction, occasionally also both classical syntax and rational construction of verbal sentences, depicting a world characterized by black humour, morbid fantasies, and logical somersaults.
Without any direct or immediate connections with European Avant-Garde movements Urmuz was evidently very well informed of, for instance, Italian Futurism. In fact, Marinetti was a cause celebrité in Bucharest already from the moment Macedonski started contributing to Marinetti´s Poezia in the 1890s, and if Urmuz himself is almost unknown among scholars in the West, equally crucial is the fact that Marinetti´s first Futurist manifesto was published in the Romanian newspaper Democratia in Craiova the very same day - the 20th of February 1909 - as it was made public in Le Figaro in Paris, a publication followed only a few days later by commentaries in several other Romanian newspapers and journals making Futurism widely known and discussed by Romanian artist, writers, and other intellectuals. Consequently, if Hugo Ball, for instance, got acquainted with Futurism not before 1914, Marinetti had already for five years been recognized as the creator of ”ultramodern” Futurism within the Avant-Garde circles of Bucharest, hailed as the primary standard-bearer of the latest trends in contemporary art and literature.
Further, it is more than evident that Tristan Tzara and the other Romanian Dadaists at the Meierei, besides the indirect impact of Urmuz, cannot have been uninfluenced by another ”absurd” trait in Romanian culture, namely the frequently very strong fantastic undercurrent in Romanian literature in general and particularly in Romanian vernacular culture and folklore. Within Romanian popular culture the so-called doine poems seem far too similar to the Lautgedichte of Cabaret Voltaire to be only a mere coincidence in this field of dependence, though they are evidently of less significance when it comes to immediate impact than the Dadaists´ frequent use of fantastic, richly coloured and mostly grotesque masks and costumes made of cardboard and designed by Marcel Janco, among them Hugo Ball´s famous bishop´s costume used in the spectacular performance of the 14th of July 1916. Referring to these costumes we are reminded of not only, for instance, the fanciful costumes used in the popular colinde plays performed by peasant youth in the Romanian villages practically all over the country round about Christmas, with corresponding festivals also elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, but also of another kind of masks and costumes belonging to an almost totally different tradition much closer to the Romanian Dadaists´ own biographical origin and cultural belonging.
One way of exploring these connections is actually provided by many of the innumerable definitions of Dada offered by the Dadaists themselves, most of them underlining the nondogmatic character of Dada defining it as the ultimate philosophy of affirmation and paradoxes. Thus, close to Tristan Tzara Richard Huelsenbeck, for instance, is able to explain that Dada is a state of mind, a movement in peace, a naivete trying to prevail over common sense. According to him, Dada is independent of everything and able to connect itself with everything. Dada is elasticity itself, Dada rests within itself and acts of its own accord, it needs no proof and no justification, Dada is pure creative process - according to other definitions, Dada is neither personal nor impersonal, has neither qualities nor attributes, is everything and nothing at the same time in accordance with Hans Arp´s famous statement: ”Bevor Dada da war, war Dada da.” Dada was there already before the creation of the universe. Indeed, as already suggested, it is obvious that Dada actually has a link to God, i.e. through Saint Dada. But this God doesn´t seem to be the Christian one, but the one at least the Romanians at the Meierei must have easily recognized and perhaps even confessed: namely, Jahve.
How amazing then is the result when we play the Dadaist hide-and-seek game the wrong way round, so to speak, and look at the ”absurd” descriptions of God and the concept of Ein Sof in Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Radiance, one of the canonical texts of the cabala, finding descriptions almost identical with surprisingly many of the dadaists´ own definitions of Dada. Of course, this would be merely word-twisting metaphors was is not for the fact, totally ignored in both Western and Romanian research, that all of the Romanians in Zurich in 1916, both Tristan Tzara and the three Janco brothers, as well as Arthur Segal, grew up in Jewish families, within which Eastern European Jewish culture must have played a significant role from the Orthodoxy of the Sigalu family to the supposed but not fully confirmed assimilation of the Rosenstock family. Remarkable is for instance the fact that both Samuel Rosenstock and Aron Sigalu were born and grew up in that part of the country where there were communities with more than 75 per cent Jews, of which the absolute majority was Ashkenazy Jews confessing Hasidism and speaking Yiddish, a ”Dadaist” language which Tristan Tzara and Arthur Segal if not also the Janco brothers must have known. Of course, they must also have been acquainted with, for instance, the many wandering Jewish-Yiddish theater companies playing their noisy ”absurd” plays by, among others, Avram Goldfaden, the founder of the first professional Jewish theater in Moldavian Iasi in 1876 as well as with Hasidic, liturgy, prayers and song tradition strongly reminding of the soirées of the Cabaret Voltaire.
Never stepping into Western ways of viewing the world Yiddish culture blends the rational with the irrational, the grotesque with the absurd, the high with the low, linguistic playfulnes with satirical attacks against all kind of supposed intellectuality, displaying a unique ability to recognize the logic of madness and to transform the logical into the absurd. Here, in Yiddish land, the lie and the truth lived so close to each other that the relationship with the absurd couldn´t be experienced as something more problematic than life itself. And doesn´t Artur Segal´s theory of Gleichwertigkeit (which he developed during his Dada years in Ascona), stressing the equality of the visual elements of the painting as well as all beings in universe, remind us of the ”pantheism” of Hasidism?
Many are the witnesses as well confirming that, at the core of Eastern European Jewry, there was a specific doubleness ”caused” by assimilation and at the same time a paticular striving to maintain a specific otherness in relation to surrounding cultures. Consequently, there was a kind of a collage of mutually conflicting signals, messages, narratives, ideas, and thoughts held together by the understanding of the fact that the paradox is in fact the quintessence of life. Why was Samuel Rosenstock so obsessed with dreaming of being a non-person during his childhood? Simultaneously, why did Tristan Tzara so effectively hide his Jewish background but not his Romanian one? And doesn´t Tristan Tzara poke fun at both himself and the cliché of the poor Eastern Jew as the constantly peddling clothier when in 1920 he urges us to buy the clothes from Aa, Tzara´s alter ego, Aa who gives 25 per cent discount and who has blue eyes as well, at the same time he indirectly identitifies this Mr. Aa with the cynic Diogenes when saying that dogs too have blue eyes? In the same manifesto of Mr. Aa the antiphilosopher, he seems also to play the same hide-and-seek as so many contemporary assimilated Jews did, doing everything possible to melt into the culture of the majority while fighting a bad conscience over the self-deception in regard to their own cultural origin:
Take a good look at me!
I am an idiot, I am a clown, I am a faker.
Take a good look at me!
I am ugly, my face has no expression, I am little.
I am like all of you!
Simultaneously Tzara seems to address himself both to the non-Jewish majority and indirectly to the Jews not yet assimilated when he recommends them not to do what he himself has done, at the same time as he seems to reveal his own strategy of hiding his ”real” identity:
NO MORE LOOKS!
NO MORE WORDS!
Stop looking!
Stop talking!
For I, chameleon transformation infiltration with conveniant attitudes - multicolored opinions for every occasion dimension and price - I do the opposite of what I suggest to others.
Assimilation in strongly anti-Semitic Romania was no easy matter. If Samuel Rosenstock chose name-change as a ticket for integration, which has been suggested recently, and if his pseudonym doesn´t only mean ”sad in his own country” in Romanian alluding to the troubles caused by, for instance anti-Semitic legislation and hostile attitudes among the majority population, at the same time as it echoes the name of the French poet Tristan Corbière, there is one more remarkable circumstance connected with his Jewish origin, namely the fact that the Yiddish word ”tzure” means ”misery” or ”trouble” and that this same word in Hebrew is pronounced ”tzara”.
