‘Der Dadaist als Klassiker-Thema für einen großen Komödien-Schreiber’
Résumé
No later than 1927, Richard Huelsenbeck states: ‘Wir alten Dadaisten (...) sind welterfahren genug, um uns mit allem abzufinden, selbst mit unserer posthumen Glorifizierung.’ (‚Wozu war Dada da?’, Uhu). By publishing the first documents, the protagonists of the Dada movement were the first ones to pose the question of conveying Dada. After 1945, the question of its transmission and of its legacy becomes pressing, as many anthologies and memoirs are published, and more and more institutions and scholars begin to take an interest in the Dada movement.
Through a small number of case studies (Arp, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck), this paper examines the revival or reinvention of Dada in the fifties and sixties and takes the self-reflection determining Dada’s historicization as a starting point to explore some aspects of the historiography of Dada until today. One question to be addressed relates to the (productive) paradox of a negative, anti-genealogical aesthetics trying to be continued or transmitted: How did the aging Dadaists themselves – who refused history as well as theory – deal with the literary canon and a possible canonisation? Could they become ‘Klassiker’ of the avant-garde and still be radical in their experimentation with form? How did they react to the growing interest of publishers, journals and scholars for Dada, and how could the scholars deal with this paradoxical material? The paper will focus on the use of the categories of ‘avant-garde’, ‘modernism’ and their derivatives to reconstruct the various poetic, theoretical, and scientific discourses (Bürger, Foster, Asholt, van den Berg in particular) that constituted Dada and situated it in the literary history of the 20th century.