British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Berlin Dada and Jewish Identity

Michael White

The Berlin Dadaists, active in the city from roughly 1918 to 1923, are considered one of the most paradigmatic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde groupings. Their engagement with the public through outrageous manifestoes, performances, exhibitions and journals has consistently been linked to the torrid political situation in Germany immediately after the First World War. Many Berlin Dadaists were also members of radical political parties, such as the German Communist Party, and nearly all were forced to flee the country in the 1930s. However, it has always been difficult to establish the direct political effectiveness of Dadaist activities, which often made a feature of absurdity, paradox and bluff. In my study I wanted to explore how the Dadaist’s self-presentation and how they were perceived by others may have been disturbing for other reasons. Having been interested in the internal dynamics of the group for a while, I had been intrigued by the appearance of anti-Semitic commentary within it, which sat peculiarly with the later branding of Dada as ‘Jewish’ by Nazism. An investigation of this discourse in and around Dada has allowed me to get some purchase on its significance that does not fall back into unhelpful polarisations of ‘radical’ versus ‘conservative’, ‘avant-garde’ ‘versus academic’. It demonstrates the appeal of Dada to those for whom a singular identity was problematic as much as it troubled those who wished to assert such a thing.

Several of the Berlin Dadaists came from Jewish backgrounds. However, my aim was not to establish whether any of the individuals I was interested in should or should not be regarded as a ‘Jewish’ artist. What I wanted to uncover were the ways in which Jewish identity could be affirmed, rejected or adopted by artists and also ascribed to them by others. This required quite extensive archival research to retrieve the kind of information previous scholars had not considered of particular significance. Fortunately, the archives of many important individuals connected to the Dada group have been returned to Germany and are held at institutions including the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, the Berlinische Galerie, and the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin. I also consulted archival material in the US where many of the Dadaists had spent the last years of their lives. As I made my way through the manifold documents Dada has left behind, two figures emerged as providing the richest perspective onto my study, George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann, each for a different reason.

Widely regarded as the most significant artist to have emerged from the Dada group, Grosz also had the largest public profile, his notoriety increased by the three highly publicised prosecutions during the 1920s. What I have been able to track is the manner in which a particular type of Jewish identity became ascribed to Grosz, who was not Jewish by birth. In the critical writings on him, he is characterised frequently as a self-hater, a view that developed not just from outside of Dada but operated within the group as well. I have traced its origin to the early collaboration between Grosz and the writer Franz Jung on an illustrated novel, the paranoid main character of which shared Grosz’s surname and with whom he also appears to have identified. The problem of identification and misidentification then became the principal motif in Grosz’s visual output. A product of anti-Semitic discourse, the concept of self-hatred is identified with Jewishness as a form of double consciousness and mental illness. I wrote this research up in my article ‘The Grosz Case: Paranoia, self-hatred and anti-Semitism’ published in the Oxford Art Journal in 2007.

I then traced the narrative a bit further and considered the prosecution Grosz faced for blasphemy in the late 1920s, many documents pertaining to which I consulted at the Landesarchiv in Berlin. Although not driven exclusively by anti-Semitic concerns, they certainly played a role in court proceedings and lead to Grosz being caricatured in the right wing press as a Jew, contributing to the prominence given to him in Nazi propaganda and the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition of 1937. This I wrote up as the essay ‘“Not another Blasphemy Trial!”: The prosecution of George Grosz and political justice in Weimar Germany’ published in a collection titled The Trials of Art in 2007.

Unlike Grosz, Raoul Hausmann did indeed have Jewish parentage but his writings and correspondence contain ambivalences about it. Some of his satirical writings play directly with anti-Semitic rhetoric, such as blaming Jews for the loss of the war. My research on this artist has revealed how access to circles of Jewish intellectuals was crucial to his intellectual formation and in particular to discussion of neo-Kantian concepts. I am now in a position to show how this line of thinking, which had many prominent Jewish supporters in Germany at the time, offered Hausmann a way of reconciling Judaic and Christian traditions, adopting concepts from philosophers such as Salomo Friedlaender and Ernst Marcus. The latter in particular has proven very useful for a consideration of how this might relate to Hausmann’s art practice; the production of collage and assemblage works which are such a feature of Dada art, provided Hausmann with a means to explore ways beyond the problem of representation. I have presented this research in papers given in the UK and the US and it will be published in the form of an essay, ‘Space, Time and Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head: Dada and Jewish Neo-Kantianism’ in a collection of essays on Dada I am editing.

The grant I received from the British Academy has allowed me then to open up a whole new dimension in studies of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Germany broaching questions which have much wider ramifications in respect to the formation of national artistic traditions and the figures that disturbed such categorisation. Its impact on the field has to stimulate new thinking about the social networks the art world relies upon and how they facilitate the expression of complex identities.