interviews

Michael March:  What is Dada? 

Tom Sandqvist:  It’s a state of mind.

MM:  A social state of mind, a political state of mind? 

TS:  It was a part of the Zeitgeist. There was a war going on. That kind of thing. It’s a mixture of every kind of social and artistic implication. It’s an ontological state of mind, a worldview different than Surrealism, which was more an artistic style than a state of mind. Surrealism was a modernistic current, which Dada was not.

MM:  Let’s situate Dada. Officially, it was created at the Cabaret Voltaire on 5 February 1916.

TS:  In practice, it was Hugo Ball, a former dramatist, writer, and poet—together with his fiancée, Emmy Hennings—who finally realized their dream of having a literary cabaret. They placed an invitation in Neue Züricher Zeitung calling on all artists, journalists, and intellectuals to join the cabaret. That was in February 1916. It started there. According to Hugo Ball, the first evening consisted of an “oriental looking deputation” comprising Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, his two brothers—George and Jules—and, perhaps, Arthur Segal. According to other information, one of the guys in this deputation must have been Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, that is, Lenin. Who really knows?

MM:  Lenin on drums, on matchsticks?  What was Lenin doing there?

TS:  He was one of the refugees from the war. In Zurich, there were thousands of European intellectuals who had fled the war and resided in neutral Switzerland. Lenin was a professional revolutionary in politics. Hugo Ball was a professional revolutionary in art. That’s the connection.  

MM:  But Lenin rejected artistic behavior. He saw no use for it in his revolution. 

TS:  Of course, it was bourgeois. But he may have been in the audience at least a couple of times. Who knows whether he enjoyed it or not?

MM:  Dada came from the carnage of war, the destruction of European civilization.

TS:  I wouldn’t put it like that. I wouldn’t say that it was a direct answer to the war. From the turn of the century, there was an intellectual reaction against modern society as such, especially in the regions of Central and Eastern Europe.

MM:  But Dada came from Futurism, an extremely modern movement.

TS:  Dada was not a modern movement. Dada was not part of modernism. It was something else. If you simplify it, you may say that the modernists think in terms of “either or.” Either false or true—either high or low—either black or white. But the Dadaists take them both—simultaneously. That’s the basic difference. Dada remains more of a post-modern state of mind than a modern one.

MM:  An alchemical state in itself—rather than a state of mind.

TS:  Dada was an amalgamation, a chemistry of all prevailing currents. Dada was a kind of litmus paper.

MM:  Dada was a physical reaction—what the mouth pronounced, the body staged.  

TS:  Precisely. The human body was conceived as a vehicle of artistic statement—everything was staged—everything depended on the spoken word.

MM:  Even deception.  Many of the events were not staged—merely inserted into newspapers—they never existed.  

TS: They consciously created their own myth, their own legend. It was part of their artistic temperament. They had the urge to tell a good story—whether true or false.

MM:  The story was extremely well received—an early form of globalization.

TS:  Yes, yes. The movement spread very fast throughout Europe.  A real success story.  

MM:  Like the Spanish flu—short lived.    

TS:  In practice, all the intellectuals left Zurich at the end of the war. They left for home.

MM:  Was Dada a non-violent movement? 

TS:  In principle, yes, because they didn’t accept the division between false and true—high and low—black and white. They were not neutral either—they played on the paradox.

MM:  What led you back to the East— through Romania—to the concept of Dada East?

TS:  The majority of the founding members of Cabaret Voltaire were assimilated, Romanian Jews who brought to Zurich their own cultural upbringing.  And they were very influential.

MM:  What did they bring?

TS:  On the concrete level, they brought absurd masks and costumes, as well as Romanian poems. There were striking similarities between Marcel Janco’s masks and costumes at the Cabaret Voltaire to those worn by Romanian peasants at their winter festivals. Also, there are some connections to the professional Yiddish theater in Eastern Europe at that time.  

MM: The Cabaret Voltaire was a gift to assimilation, providing the perfect masking of roots in response to the anti-Semitism in Romania.

TS:  It’s quite obvious that many of Tristan Tzara’s poems deal with this question. “Take a good look at me, I’m looking exactly like you, you others,” he says. Which is not true! Why did Samuel Rosenstock  dream of being a non-person during his childhood? Why did Tristan Tzara so effectively hide his Jewish background, but not his Romanian one? 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 simply mean “sad in his own country” in Romanian, 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”.

MM:  Why was the Cabaret Voltaire’s heritage overlooked?

TS:  It is as self-evident, as it is frustrating. Former communist regimes prevented the conditions for research. The tradition of Euro centrism focused on western Europe, causing a lack of communication between international and Romanian scholars—the latter having been, in many cases, careful not to disturb the notion of the Romanian avant-garde not having its basis in Romanian civilization. When it comes to the Yiddish roots, the state of affairs seems even more complex. From a Romanian point of view and in regard to the fact that most if not all the members of the avant-garde were Jews and therefore were categorized as ”foreigners” in their own homeland, the anti-Semitic sentiments seem to have been surprisingly effective in making it possible even today to label the avant-garde as antagonistic toward those “spiritual ideals” which national culture was trying to express.

MM:  Surrealism evolved from Dada.   

TS:  No, I wouldn’t say so. Of course, there were connections. 

MM:  André Breton created Surrealism from Dada.

TS:  Breton was not a part of the Dada group in that way. 

MM:  He was a spy. 

TS:  Breton waited for Tzara to come to Paris as the messiah. But when he finally arrived, Breton was very disappointed because he realized that there would be a power struggle.  

MM:  Because Tzara was too small.  

TS:  Tzara was too small—Breton was even smaller in mind.

MM:  Breton came to Prague—Surrealism came to Czechoslovakia—but not Dada.

TS:  Because of Berlin Dada. Berlin Dada was very strong, and the Czechs had connections—but Berlin Dada was too much associated with German culture, and German culture was not seen as charitable.  

MM:  Nothing happened?   

TS:  Exactly. The artists’ group Devětsil with Karel Teige moved towards Constructivism, which emerged as the main artistic current. Czech artists wanted to be updated—they correctly imagined that Dada was more or less passé.  

MM:  Politically incorrect in the First Republic?  

TS:  Exactly. Dada in the First Republic became a victim of Czech nationalism.

MM:   A victim?

TS:  Not, exactly. Surrealism became much more interesting in Prague than Dada. For decades Czech culture had turned its face towards France—which was associated with Surrealism.

MM:  What about the politics of Surrealism? Breton broke with the Communist Party while Éluard, Aragon and Tzara remained loyal.  

TS:  I have no clue.  No, I don’t know.
   

October, 2006