14 - Canon Fire: Dada's Attack on National Literature

Summary

The papers presented at the Transnational Framings symposium (see Acknowledgments) and the essays in this volume have viewed the German-language literary field in the so-called Age of Nationalism from a number of angles, seeking to understand the literary and cultural world of German-speaking Europe during that period not as a self-contained, national literature and culture, but rather as part of an international or transnational cultural configuration. In this essay I will consider how, despite its manifest distortions as a literary-historical model, the notion of a national literature and culture exhibited surprising practical utility in the hands of a group hardly known for their fondness for nations, literature, or culture; I am referring, of course, to the Dadaists. Dada was not only a strikingly international movement, having been founded by expatriates of several European nations during the First World War in Zurich, from which it quickly spread across Europe and to other continents; its members also repeatedly invoked notions of national literature and national culture as targets of their satire and mockery. In this sense, perhaps ironically, these notions served a purpose, providing the Dadaists and other like-minded critics with an apparently unified target for their assault. For all its weaknesses as an analytical category, the idea of a national literature thus had a certain value, not only for its advocates, but also for its adversaries. This essay will thus examine how the concept of national literature and culture was productively turned on its head by the transnational antinationalism of the Dada movement.

It is hardly surprising or controversial to note that the Dada movement did not neatly conform to the paradigm of national literature that dominated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when the movement's German-speaking members were receiving their literary education. Even the most cursory summary of Dada generally characterizes it as a movement that reveled in nonsense and rejected art, war, and nationalism. In a passage from his retrospective account of the movement that has become canonical, Hans Arp writes: “Angeekelt von den Schlächtereien des Weltkrieges 1914 gaben wir uns in Zürich den schönen Künsten hin.