Dada is the blastocyst for a new type of human being: eclipsing Christianity’s medieval moral ballast of sin, Dada negates the meaning of life to date, a culture gone to rot.

DADA was born in Zurich and Huelsenbeck brought the message to Berlin, where the coterie behind Franz Jung’s Freie Strasse were ready to carry the can for a campaign of outrage.

The first soirée on 12 April 1918 was still quite an eclectic affair but its effect on an audience in the grip of epileptic anger was immense and direct. The most sacred values of the bourgeoisie were all declared bankrupt.

The Berlin where DADA arrived had clung desperately, despite the war, to its cultural norms. Zurich’s timid pussyfooting will suffice no longer, damn it!

I was always coming up with new ideas for our soirées but I was never offended if the other DADAists didn’t take them up.

Every day we invented fresh news gags, typing them up at night and delivering them to the editor’s bureau before six in the morning so they could go to press that afternoon.

DADA had to remain indigestible.

To hold the fort I decided with Grosz and Heartfield to organise the ‘Great International DADA Fair’ in Berlin in summer 1920. As the flame was lit one last time, the photomontages, assemblages and posters on show surpassed anything seen before.

And the art in all that? Watch out, that is going active too. No more aesthetics; I no longer bow to any rules, neither of ‘truth’ nor of ‘beauty’. I am following a new direction, defined in part by the order of my body.

DOWN WITH THE GERMAN PHILISTINE!

It struck like lightning: one could – I saw it instantly – compose pictures entirely from snippets of photographs.

I started making pictures from coloured paper, newspaper cuttings and posters, and added photos from the press and cinema.

In my innovative zeal I also required a name for this technique. Together – George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Hannah Höch and I – we decided to call the products photomontage.

The name came about because we hated playing the artist; we saw ourselves as engineers (hence our love of boiler suits) and we claimed that what we did was construction, montage.

This was the history of the invention of photomontage. It was above all myself, Johannes Baader and Hannah Höch who devised and developed the new technique.

When all is said and done, letter poems are there to be seen, looked at – so why not make posters with them? On different coloured paper and in big block letters?

So off to Robert Barthe’s printshop, into Dennewitzstrasse, and chop-chop tackled the new poetic form.

Thanks to a sympathetic compositor the job was easily done by reaching at whim and random into the tray of big wooden poster letters and setting whatever came out, and it was clearly good.

A little f first, then an m, then an s, a b, oops, now what? A great écriture automatique with question marks, exclamation marks, and even a pointing-hand icon!

Really, the compositor was very intelligent, for without him it would never have worked!

And so four different posters were laid out, then printed on brick-red, green and yellow paper – it looked fabulous.

Two of these posters were in lower case and two in upper case – OFFEAH and so on.

Big, visible letters, letterist poems, and more than that. Right away I said to myself optophonetic! Different sizes for different emphasis! Consonants and vowels, excellent for squawking and yodelling! Naturally these letter-poster-poems were crying out to be sung! DA! DADA!

The sound poems weren’t trying to achieve anything. DADAist poetry wasn’t trying to achieve anything. It bridged the gap between a wooden spoon, a cow, a rail track, a noise and a figure of speech, long before surrealist theory arrived.

My book is called "HYLE "because we are but matter. One cannot write about mere matter through self-contemplation. If one has it, one knows one cannot know everything.

Reflect, recall, yes, to be here, here, here, there you are, lying in that bed, in this room, there and there on the ground, on a North Sea island – and you can be: yesterday, or a year ago, an hour ago, in Berlin, or in the Dolomites, you foresee yourself, young, old, being, being: here! yet somewhere else – you are someone else in the same instant, being YOU and nothing but you. Pull out old chunks of yourself, ones that fell off long ago, yesterday, living now – death, life, presence, absence, all at once – that is memory.

The round onion of time unrolls. Sheath of encircling skins, one skin, many in sequence.

Lost I sit here seeking time
space and span
far and wide.

Over the island wind blusters, rain crashes, sulphur storm thunder-flashes. Plunges people, deeds, objects into spreading fanfolds of tension, discharge, dispels the day’s meaning. Fluid of disruption, turmoil. Hubbub; liquescence drenches all. Action blossoms like a flower, yellow and wild.

Opposing voltage from Heaven and Earth forced hordes of clouds over sandbanks. They released their energy at night in lightning, thunder, blazing open the darkness, crashing through it; whirring of downpours, whirring of downpours.
Safe under roof and drape in the pale glow: Servants’ Masque at the Red Cliff. Tumultuous din of dancing couples. Scraping of shoes on planking floors to the squeaky grumble and grunt of trumpets. Around them beer, schnaps and grog pour into glasses and mouths that spew out pent-up excess in a drunken drinking surge.

Footsteps on floors springy like rubber, absolute silence, no breeze stirs (the edge dunes are a shield) making time forgotten. Now and then a marshy channel must be crossed – on the other side feet slide deep into squidgy mud, tinting shoes dark grey and brown.

Harking, sniffing. Quietness. Nothing.

The tiny scullery that was a kitchen reeked of mushroom, crayfish, herb cheese, tomato. In the semi-darkness smells were more intensive, emanated broadly. They fluoresced, shimmered, warm and after the dark red flame of the little petrol stove wibbly-wobbly wide. Odours flowed in the wake of warmth from stool-placed plates and filled the space with tasted facts. Brown dark margins with jumbled shelving, saucepans, buckets formed three sides of a room around a window shining softly blue green purple in the evening twilight, and through the open door to the bigger room beyond the flame of the petrol firefly cast sallow red light in patches on the ceiling, floorboards, walls.

Art? Philosophy? Politics? Fire insurance? Or a state religion? Is dada really energy? Or is it nothing at all, i.e. everything?

The DADA movement was total rupture with the past, especially with the ruling ideas of the 19th century, but also with those of the 17th and 18th.

The DADA movement was total rebellion against all habits, every belief and all privileges.
DADA was the relativity of relativity.
And so DADA freed itself of all conventional boundaries.
DADA wanted nothing but to bring on the PREsent moment.
DADA was conflict with EVERYTHING.
Tucked into New Consciousness.
But what is it to be DADA?
If not to sit on a hobby-horse called Scandal yet not be a scandal itself.
DADA was nothing but a great multi-coloured soap bubble with which nobody identified; it was nobody and much less a thing or a cause.
Nobody could grasp DADA, not even with the uncommon attitude toying in the unconscious of those who cared for DADA.
DADA was active without existing.
For: DADA is more than DADA.

DADA was also, alongside many others, a protesting stance against bourgeois and intellectual traditions. NeoDADAism certainly is not: it is casual about its existence, following familiar examples, simple and easy. Too easy, sometimes so easy that plagiarism might be the word. The sound poems of certain NeoDADAists imitate the first sound poems of 1916 to 1920 right down to the typography.

They do not want to attack anything, shatter anything, mock anything, they are not protest, they merely show that the recipe has done the rounds and that they ‘know’ how it is done.

DADA fell from heaven like raindrops – but nobody can explain the rain.

The NeoDADAists have learnt to imitate the falling but not the raindrops.

Rain has no method, DADA had no method.

Manifest Morgenröte

We must free ourselves from everything we know already.
What we know was yesterday.
We must see today and anticipate tomorrow.
What will be is necessary. What is will be unnecessary.
Yesterday was, is over.
Today lingers still, will pass.
Tomorrow is the present of Now.
To be means to make tomorrow happen.
The new, great morrow is our material today.