Dada East : the Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire PDF
Preview Dada East : the Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire
M D D A L I M # 8 3 6 0 7 4 0 1 /1 6 /0 6 T A N G R A Y O R A N G E B L K © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy- ing, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MITPress books may be purchased at spe- cial quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use.For information,please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department,The MITPress,55 Hayward Street,Cambridge,MA 02142. This book was set in Caecelia by Graphic Composition,Inc.,and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sandqvist,Tom. Dada East : the Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire / Tom Sandqvist. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-19507-0 (hc : alk.paper) 1.Arts,Romanian—20th century.2.Avant- garde (Aesthetics)—Romania—History—20th century.3.Dadaism—Romania.4.Jewish artists—Romania—History—20th century. I.Title. NX569.A1S26 2006 709.49809′041—dc22 2005054459 CONTENTS Introduction 1 In Romania and Switzerland 15 In Central and Eastern Europe 45 Marcel Iancu Becomes Marcel Janco 65 Little Paris of the Balkans 101 Samuel Rosenstock Becomes Tristan Tzara 123 The Symbolist and Dadaist from Moines¸ti 141 Aron Sigalu Becomes Arthur Segal 171 Symbolists,Absurdists,and Futurists 195 In the Romanian Village 247 In Yiddishland 271 Ex Oriente Dada 289 Back in Bucharest 339 Selected Chronology 381 Notes 393 Index 425 I N T R O D U C T I O N Dada was a curious movement.Early in the last century the dadaists were shouting and yelling,roaring and bawling,standing on the tiny platform of the restaurant Meierei in Zurich trying to carry out a global revolution in art and culture.They recited so-called simultaneous poems,poèmes simultanés,totally incomprehensible verses of nonsense.Often dressed in grotesque costumes and mostly in funny, ridiculous,but occasionally dreadful masks as well,they performed equally absurd, idiotic,“meaningless”small plays,hit both small and big drums and lids of saucepans and frying pans,gave deafening hissing-concerts,and sang howling “negro songs.” The dadaists mocked the audience as much as they could,stamped on the floor, roared and yelled,tore to pieces conventional poetry,tore into rags syntax and gram- matically correct constructions of verbal meaning,turned upside down both particu- lar words and language itself,the letters,the sentences,formerly well-organized and architecturally well-composed meanings.Everything was spread out on the same flatsurface or was thrown into the same boiling,bubbling,babbling pot. Most reference works for both art and literature,but also more specialized studies,claim that Dada was born on 5 February 1916 when Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened the literary cabaret that they had named Cabaret Voltaire at the restaurant Meierei on Spiegelgasse in Zurich.This is only partly true,since giving thisexact moment of birth and the exact spot of the “delivery of the child”doesn’t take into account any possible moments of conception or,for that matter,any proper cultural and historical settings,beyond the acknowledgment of those scattered artis- tic and literary impulses,mainly in Germany,that might have affected the dadaist activists during or just before the outbreak of World War I.Certainly there are faith- ful mentions of both Tristan Tzara and the three brothers Marcel,Jules,and Georges Janco having been 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 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 city at the same time,together with almost as E N many political refugees,professional revolutionaries,and anarchists,among them O R a certain Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov,who just one year later staged the Bolshevist coup E T P d’état in Petrograd and thus became known worldwide as Lenin.But the fact that A H C halfthe first dadaist group was Romanian is nevertheless remarkable enough that this fact needs an explanation beyond what can be labeled merely a coincidence. What did they do in Zurich,those five Romanian intellectuals? Who were they, why did they choose Zurich of all cities in Europe,and what had they done before they decided to settle down in that town on the shore of Zürichsee? And in what way was their dadaism at the stage of Cabaret Voltaire influenced by their Romanian background,if it was at all? According to the American art historian S.A.Mansbach,1muchof modernism was undeniably born on the eastern margins of industrial Europe—constructivism in the tsarist Empire,uniquely creative forms of cubo-expressionism in Habsburg Bo- hemia,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 in- sistent social applicability were articulated—philosophies that would fundamentally define the modernist mission universally.Western scholars have long viewed the 1916 display of dadaism at the Cabaret Voltaire as an original event,indeed as a defining phenomenon in the evolution of modernism.Yet,says Mansbach,though failing to giveany substantial evidence of his arguments,this milestone may be interpreted otherwise from the perspective of Romania.Bucharest and Ias¸ihad 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 traveled to Switzerland, they,according to Mansbach,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,says Mansbach,what Western artists and audiences—and a succession of historians—witnessed as authentically novel inZurich was actually an intermediate stage in the history of Romanian mod- ern art.Further,dadaism was a form of radical expression that would later attain some of its most imaginative actualizations in Bucharest (and Ias¸i)—as well as power- fully expressive variants in Zagreb and Belgrade—rather than in Berlin,Hannover, Rotterdam,or New York,where its development has been primarily chronicled. Why is it like this? Can we trace any patterns of influences back to their own, not yet discovered cultural origin? 3 (cid:2) INTRODUCTION 2
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