Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened Cabaret Voltaire at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich, creating a small performance space for refugee and antiwar artists. The cabaret’s mixed evenings of poetry, music, and improvisation became the earliest public setting in which “Dada” took shape as an anti-nationalist, anti-traditional arts stance.
A one-issue magazine titled Cabaret Voltaire was released in Zürich, documenting the early circle’s writings and visual work. Publishing made Dada portable: it could travel beyond the cabaret, be read repeatedly, and be shared across borders.
At a public Dada gathering in Zürich, Hugo Ball presented a short manifesto laying out a new, deliberately unstable approach to art and language. The event helped move Dada from improvised cabaret nights toward a named movement with declared intentions.
Tristan Tzara began editing the journal Dada, turning the movement into an ongoing print project rather than a single venue. Regular issues helped define Dada’s voice through short manifestos, experiments in typography, and a mix of art and text.
Richard Huelsenbeck delivered a major early Dada talk in Berlin, helping form a local nucleus around artists and writers who wanted sharper political confrontation. Berlin Dada soon developed its own tone—more directly tied to revolution, propaganda, and the street-level conflicts of the postwar city.
Tristan Tzara wrote and published Manifeste Dada 1918, a more aggressive manifesto that rejected stable definitions and promoted contradiction as a method. The text became one of the movement’s best-known statements and helped unify scattered Dada activity through a shared rhetorical style.
The Club Dada’s first large public event combined poetry, lectures, and provocation in a mainstream art setting, intentionally pushing toward scandal. This performance model treated the audience’s reaction—confusion, anger, laughter—as part of the artwork.
In Zürich, Dada issue no. 3 appeared with more radical typography and freer page layouts than earlier issues. The journal’s design choices mattered: Dada treated the printed page as a performance space where angle, scale, and collage could disrupt normal reading.
The single-issue magazine Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (“Everyman His Own Football”) was published by Malik Verlag with photomontages by John Heartfield and drawings by George Grosz, then quickly confiscated by police. The seizure showed how Berlin Dada’s print tactics—mocking politics and media formats—could trigger state response and make censorship part of the story.
The Berlin group launched Der Dada, giving Club Dada another platform for short, sharp texts and graphic experiments. This publication helped coordinate a local identity and promoted Dada’s mix of manifesto language, collage thinking, and media parody.
Richard Huelsenbeck edited the Dada Almanach in Berlin, assembling texts and images that presented Dada as a broad, cross-border network rather than a single city scene. As a record and advertisement at once, the almanac helped stabilize Dada’s history even while Dada mocked “official” histories.
The First International Dada Fair (also called the Internationale Dada-Messe) opened at Dr. Otto Burchard’s gallery in Berlin, packed with paintings, photomontages, posters, and satirical objects. By staging an “anti-art” exhibition that copied and mocked the art market, Berlin Dada turned publishing, installation, and public insult into a single event.
When the Dada Fair ended, it left behind a clear picture of Berlin Dada’s most public phase: confrontational, media-savvy, and strongly political. The fair is often treated as both a high point and a turning point, because it concentrated the group’s methods—shock tactics, montage, and satire—into one widely discussed moment.
By the early 1920s, the main Dada journal moved away from its Zürich base and later continued in Paris, reflecting how the movement’s center of gravity was changing. This shift mattered for Zürich and Berlin: it marked Dada’s transition from a local wartime cabaret network into a wider European avant-garde scene, where new movements soon competed for attention.
Dada in Zurich and Berlin: performances, manifestos, and publications (1916-1923)