by Bev Richey
“There is one literary form into which we can compress much of what we think and feel: the manifesto. Tzara had enuciated this principle as early as 1916.”
10:27 am in News by Bev Richey
Berlin Dada in Action
In February 1918, in the Saal der neuen Sezession’, at a meeting sponsored by the eternally progressive I.B. Neumann, Huelsenbeck delivered his ,First Dada Speech in Germany’.
This began with the statement that the meeting was a demonstration of solidarity with international Dadaism, the international ‘artistic movement’ founded in Zurich two years before. He then launched into a ferocious attack on Expressionism, Futurism and Cubism, and heaped curses on abstract art, proclaiming as he did that all these theories had been defeated by Dada. He ended with a reading from his Phantastische Gebete.
Among the things Huelsenbeck said in this speech were these: 
From the day the Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors, we read and wrote manifestos. We did not only read them we spoke them as vociferously and defiantly as we could. The manifesto as a literary medium answered our need for directness. We had no time to lose; we wanted to incite our opponents to resistance, and, if necessary, to create new opponent for ourselves.
We hated nothing so much as romantic silence and the search for a soul: we were convinced that the soul could only show itself in our own actions. “ (p. 103)
Richter, dada art and anti-art; Thames and Hudson, London © 1965 &1997
