Dada and Degenerate Art in Weimar Germany, 1920–1937

Weimar Germany and the Roots of Dada

At the end of World War I, Germany found itself in a period of transition. Held responsible for the war and forced to pay reparations, the Weimar Republic was in a disastrous state. Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated, hyperinflation had decimated the value of the mark, and Berlin was fast becoming the vice capital of the world, with "New Woman" poster-girl Anita Berber taking pride in her position as the high priestess of immorality.¹ It was a new Germany in every respect — but not one destined to last. It was new in the sense that, for the first time in its cultural history, Germany was embracing the end: the end of the old order, of the old moral code, of the old art and moral imperatives. Life was short and falling apart at the seams as fast as the mark was becoming worthless. Jobs were being lost, and hunger and prostitution were soaring; the ideas of Freud and the Bauhaus were spreading, and if people could not find work they could at least drown their troubles in sex, drugs, and cabaret.

1920s Germany under the Weimar Republic was a decade of decadence and "degenerate" art (as the Third Reich would come to call it) — but it was also a celebration of both, as the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, held from June 30 to August 25, 1920, made abundantly clear. Dada had been born four years earlier in Zurich, Switzerland, at Cabaret Voltaire, opened by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Lenin had been in Zurich at the same time, departing only one year later to oversee the revolution in Russia (German authorities allowed his sealed railway carriage to pass without inspection). In short, revolution — in art and in government — was taking hold, and Germany was the nexus of it all.

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had fled Germany in 1915 following their criticism of the war (Ball fled partly to avoid military service — just one of the ways in which he was the exact antithesis of Hitler,² who not only served in World War I but was decorated with two Iron Crosses, the Bavarian Military Medal, and the Cross of Military Merit). Dada, for them and for Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, and the others who joined them at Cabaret Voltaire, was the artistic epitome of their rejection of everything connected to the established social order.

Dada's Philosophy and Its Key Voices

Tzara, for instance, would dress like a clown when reciting poetry — mingled with screams — on stage. It was cold, calculating, cynical, sarcastic, original, and anti-establishment to the core. Ball's sound poetry consisted of strings of nonsense words — babble — delivered while he was dressed like a caricature of a bishop of the church; it was another vivid example of the Dada movement in Switzerland. Raoul Hausmann was another sound poet, whose poems were "constructed abstractly from letters alone… with lines such as 'NVMWNAUR.'"³ Cabaret Voltaire thumbed its nose at the world of high art and everything connected to it — and soon it would extend its influence into Germany following the end of World War I, as the Germans surrendered, bowed their heads in submission to the Western powers, and gave up. Germany was being rolled over and left for dead — and Dada and the Degenerate Art Movement, rather than mourning the loss, celebrated it with glee and reckless abandon. Dada was nihilism dressed up in artistic pose.

If Otto Dix captured the visual essence of the new transition in German culture, Tzara captured its philosophical skullduggery in his Dada Manifesto. Dix reflected in his paintings the vampirism underlying the new code; Tzara embodied the hollow, smirking rage. Tzara, gleefully echoing Dostoevsky's Underground Man, asserted: "I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles" — relishing a Wilde-like wittiness common enough among the smart set. But the German Dadaists took the absurd to a whole new level. Tzara went on to expound: "I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense."⁴ In so doing he essentially laid out the doctrine of German Dada. Shakespeare's Iago could not have spun out a better philosophical treatise — nor Nietzsche, nor the Underground Man — though Tzara certainly must have found inspiration among all of them. It was this antithetical approach to all things ordered that crept into Germany after World War I and transformed a culture already receiving a beating both politically and economically.

Otto Dix and the New Woman

For Dix, the new German soul was what he saw beneath the surface of the skin, revealed in his Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) and The Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). Dix painted Berber as though she were a calculating old harlot — which was, of course, the image she liked to cultivate. Her portrait shows her with vivid red hair, a powdered white face, heavily applied make-up, and a tight, form-fitting red dress hiked up her thigh, a sneer in her eyes daring the viewer to make his move. Dix's portrait casts a lurid red glow over Berber, the backdrop drenched in globs of red and black; her eyes stare out beneath hoods of black mascara and her bored mouth conveys the requisite cynicism and ennui — one could only take so much pleasure in the thrill of being "bad" before the thrill inevitably wore off. There is a skeletal quality to her portrayal and a predatory snarl lurking in her expression.

Berber was the liberated woman of the 1920s — the cabaret girl, the famous dancer whose life of opiates, sex, and alcohol would lead her to an early grave. Famous German filmmaker Fritz Lang would model his anti-heroine of Metropolis after her — the wicked seductress of the German menfolk, who were captivated by her blatant eroticism and led like rats by the pied piper. Dix's portrait of Berber reflected this dynamic to a considerable degree.

His portrait of Sylvia von Harden did the same for her as his portrait of Berber did for the dancing girl. Harden was another "New Woman" — but of a more intellectual kind rather than of the entertainment variety. She was a journalist whose outlook was shaped by the ideals of the emancipated woman, liberated from the old patriarchal order that was now running for the hills (all, that is, except for young men like Hitler, who recoiled with intense disgust at what was happening in Germany at this time). Harden's New Woman was far more symbolic of the elitism that the identity was meant to cultivate: Harden herself changed her name from Lehr to von Harden, giving herself the character of upper-crust nobility — much as Lars von Trier would later adopt the "von" into his own name.⁵ (She was not alone in reinventing herself: George Grosz anglicized his first name from Georg to reflect his rejection of European bourgeois values, and John Heartfield anglicized his entirely from Helmut Herzfelde.)⁶ Harden also gave herself a physical makeover, cutting her hair short and sporting the androgynous bob — gender-bending linked to the sexually amorphous, homosexual, sexually liberated underworld that Berber so conspicuously inhabited. Harden's own life was riddled with sexual dalliances, and having a child out of wedlock, as she did, was almost part and parcel of being progressive in those years.⁷

The idea of matrimony as something sacred — connected to childbearing and the fostering of a family — would be a theme in some of the portraits by Hannah Höch, for instance in Immortal Life (1924) and The Bride (1924–7), both representative of the deep social strain overwhelming the Weimar artistic consciousness. Dix's portrait of Harden also hinted at this strain: it exaggerates the woman's features and essentially caricatures its subject. Her hands and fingers are elongated like the vampire in Murnau's Nosferatu — another Weimar cinematic masterpiece, like Lang's Metropolis, which captured the tone, mood, and decline of German society, with the vampire lurking as an undead predator in the shadows, stalking his victims unawares. Dix's portrait of Harden could be called a study in vampirism in Weimar society through the persona of one of its more celebrated journalists.