Hannah Höch: Dada Art and the Weimar Republic

Hannah Höch was an artist most known for her work between the wars—the Weimar period, in which the Dada movement came to the fore to challenge the sensibilities and pretensions of the early twentieth century. Dada was as much a protest against the bourgeoisie as it was a slap in the face of the rising Fascist movement. Hitler despised the Dadaists, and the Dadaists despised him. Höch counted herself among the Dadaists during the Weimar period—a period in which art and life came into intense conflict while the universal stage was being set for the final showdown between the new and the old in World War II.

For that reason—and because Höch's art gets to the heart of the changes that society was undergoing during that time of upheaval—she is the focus of this paper. She represents the woman's perspective in a time fiercely dominated by men, and her perspective is one in which the superficiality of the era comes under the fire of her intense scorn. This paper examines Höch's background, training, influences, achievements, and contributions to art history, including five works that help demonstrate her talent and importance.

Hannah Höch was born in Germany in 1889. She studied in Berlin briefly before joining the Red Cross at the beginning of World War I. However, her stint there was short-lived, and she returned to Berlin to enroll in the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. There she met members of the Dada movement, and by 1917 she had become a Dadaist herself (Makela; Gaze). Dada was like the artistic equivalent of a middle finger directed at everything—the ruling class, new ideas, the self-importance of art. It functioned like a wrecking ball, smashing the pomposity of the people, organizations, and belief systems that were proliferating at the time. The war did nothing to slow Dada down; in fact, it enhanced it, pushing the Dadaists toward ever more aggressive tactics.

During the war, many Dadaists had fled to Zurich to establish Cabaret Voltaire. Hugo Ball with his sound poetry, Tristan Tzara with his Dada Manifesto and clown poetry, and Raoul Hausmann—another sound poet and the man who introduced Höch to the Dadaists at the National Institute—were all there, relishing their cynical takes on the modern world, pompously anti-pompous in their own way (Altshuler).

Höch thus received her foundational training at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts, but her training in Dada came directly from the movement's founders—Hausmann, Tzara, Jean Arp, Otto Dix, and others. Tzara helped develop the artistic credo that Höch and the Dadaists would embrace, and it was full of the deliberate self-contradictions that the Dadaists deployed to mock: "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" (Tzara). It was acerbic and cynical, simultaneously serious and not serious. Dada was a giant sneer at polite society, and also somewhat reckless in its disregard for the foundations of modern civilization and the institutions of art. Höch absorbed it all; in lieu of extensive formal training beyond what she received at the National Institute, Dada served as her true induction.

Influences surrounded Höch from every direction—not only the artistic influences of the Dadaists in her immediate circle, but also the Weimar environment that took shape following the end of World War I. Berlin became the vice capital of the world, with its cabaret nightlife introducing figures like Anita Berber to the public. Goebbels defined the city as "sin, vice and corruption." Berber was the original embodiment of the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle (pre-rock-and-roll). Meanwhile, the concept of the Neue Frau, or "new woman," was emerging in the Weimar Republic—an idea that cast the modern woman as androgynous and socially equal to men. Höch set out to mock and deconstruct this idea while simultaneously asserting her own feminism. She embraced the punk spirit of Berber, unleashing everything inside her on the modern century. Instead of expressing it through dance and performance in Berlin's cabarets, Höch did so through art—which would eventually catch the eye of the Third Reich.

Höch also spent time working for the publishing company Ullstein Verlag, where she developed her trademark photomontage style. She spent roughly a decade there, both during the war and afterward as the Weimar Republic was taking shape. The position gave her the opportunity to perfect her craft through collage work, building on the skills she had acquired at the National Institute and laying the groundwork for the style that would make her famous.

Described as "a forceful commentary, particularly on the gender issues erupting in postwar Weimar Germany" (Blumberg), Höch's entry into the First International Dada Fair in Berlin proved to be one of the finest. Harris and Zucker note that it represented the political and social chaos of Germany after World War I. The collage captures the fragmentation occurring in Germany while simultaneously deriding all the factions involved in the political and social movements of the time. Everything included in the collage is there to be ridiculed. Höch was taking a swipe at Germany's leaders, its followers, its factions, its past, its present, and its future. The knife that cut the pictures was the knife of Dada, here represented loud and clear. While other artists made other splashes—like Duchamp with his Fountain—Höch kept it simple yet loud, like the true punk-rock artist she was.

The collage is housed at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie. Its value and importance lie in its character. As Makela notes, it humorously "unites representatives of the former Empire, the military, and the new, moderate government of the Republic in the 'anti-Dada' corner at the upper right, while grouping Communists and other radicals together with the Dadaists at the lower right" (25). Around them all are dancing girls, celebrating the fact that they will soon be voting as well.

The Bride represents the matrimonial union of the new woman and the same old man in his coat and tails. The new woman is distracted by ideas circling her head, suggesting that she is just as vapid as anything else in Germany at the time. The painting symbolizes what was superficial and inhuman about Weimar society. The bride has the body of a woman and wears a traditional white dress, but her head is ridiculously oversized—like a bobblehead. Her expression is comical: her face is frozen in surprise as she regards the strange orbs floating around her. Inside each orb is a message from society—a pair of wings, a wheel, a tear-streaked eye, a baby, a snake coiled around forbidden fruit. Each orb symbolizes the mores and expectations that the new woman still must face, since she is, after all, marrying a man and expected to go forth and multiply. The painting suggests that the new woman is still surrounded by all the expectations that defined traditional womanhood. Höch implies that the new woman was not liberated or equal in any meaningful sense.

The Bride is housed in the Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst. The piece serves as an important reminder of the realities of life in the Weimar Republic. As Makela and Boswell observe, it "features the white-clad figure of a bride surmounted by the incongruously large head of a frightened girl, who looks in horror at emblems of marital life that swirl menacingly around her" (15). For that reason alone it remains resonant today.

Immortal Life depicts, in a sense, the offspring of this union by representing a small child with a devious, almost demonic air—arms outstretched, a devilish grin on its face. Beside the child is a flower, and in the background looms a small, blood-red earth, indicating that the world's offspring is awash in blood and that childrearing is an unholy exercise. The snarling tone of the picture, with its hauntingly red backdrop, recalls the portrait by Dix of Anita the Dancer and suggests that the Weimar Republic harbors a horrific secret—one connected to innocence, children, and sexuality. It could signify, for instance, the disconnect between natural eroticism and the procreative dimension of sexual intercourse. By commercializing the erotic in cities like Berlin—through its cabarets, nightclubs, expressionist dances, and sexualized photography—the sex act had become something produced solely for pleasure, with no acknowledgment of its natural end: the reproduction of children. In this painting, Höch presents the missing element—the forgotten child, unwanted, unraised, unholy—the future of society.

Housed in a private collection, the work is significant because it showcases the acerbic quality of Höch's style more vividly than almost any other work. Its appeal is devastatingly bleak.

Höch returns to the theme of the new woman in this collage, which depicts the merger of womanhood with industrialization. The image juxtaposes the feminine and the masculine, producing a vision in which neither concept has a clear definition. The beautiful girl has a light bulb for a head and is surrounded by BMW emblems, a wheel, and a pocket watch. A face peers out from behind the composition, and a woman's wig sits atop it all. The overall impression is of a modern Germany in which femininity is displaced by false charm and materialism. The clock of time keeps ticking, and society, supposedly progressing forward, is haunted by a specter of reality that stares directly into the viewer's eyes as if to issue a challenge. This is one of Höch's works that most clearly suggests the inevitable collapse of German society.

This work is housed in a private collection. Its significance lies in what the image conveys about the de-womanizing of women: "Höch not only removed or obliterated the faces of the women in this photomontage but surrounded them with such signs of mechanization as a crankshaft, an I-beam, and an automobile tire" (Makela and Boswell 34).