Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings were married German writers and performing artists who in 1916 cofounded the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Through wild soirées, avant-garde publications, and exhibitions, the couple established the foundations of Dada—an eclectic artistic movement with international offshoots that flourished in Zurich during the First World War. They drew upon their shared background in the German Expressionist cabaret scene to create a nexus of collective experimentation that subverted traditional artistic disciplines, promoting collaborations among artists working in various mediums and genres.

Before the war, both Hennings and Ball participated in a cultural scene in Germany where progressive intellectuals convened in nightclubs and via radical journals to foster new ideas about the role of the arts in modern society. They met in Munich at the Cabaret Simplicissimus, named after an eponymous literary magazine, in 1913. Hennings, who had worked as an itinerant vaudeville performer and singer for years, recited poetry at the venue and contributed poems to the publication. After receiving degrees in sociology and philosophy in Munich and Heidelberg, Ball studied acting in Berlin with the film and theater director Max Reinhardt. Like Hennings, he was connected to Expressionist circles in Berlin and Munich, and—along with other future Dadaists like Richard Huelsenbeck and Hennings herself—wrote for the short-lived German magazine Revolution, edited by his close friend the poet Hans Leybold.

When the war broke out, and peers including Leybold died in battle, Ball became a staunch pacifist and organized anti-war protests with Huelsenbeck in Berlin. In spring 1915, he and Hennings escaped to neutral Switzerland and settled in Zurich, where Hennings’s ten-year-old daughter Annemarie joined them shortly thereafter. Although Ball and Hennings struggled to make a living, occasionally performing with local theater companies, they found a community of fellow artists and intellectuals among the many exiles, refugees, and deserters who flooded the Swiss city during the war years. They befriended the Alsatian artist Hans (Jean) Arp; the Romanian poet and editor Tristan Tzara and his compatriot, the artist Marcel Janco; and the Swiss artist and design professor Sophie Taeuber (later Taeuber-Arp), among many others. Huelsenbeck, too, soon reached them from Berlin.

In February 1916, Ball reportedly managed to convince the owner of a café equipped with a small stage and a piano to let him and Hennings turn it into the Cabaret Voltaire. The venue, located at Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf neighborhood of Zurich, lasted only five months, but in that time promoted innovative approaches to art, music, dance, and poetry, as well as a generative intermingling of all forms of creativity. The makeshift nightclub hosted exhibitions of modern art, radical poetry readings, innovative dance performances, lectures on abstract art, and masked balls, which often devolved into late-night revelries. Paying homage to the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire and his satirical views on bourgeois attitudes, the cabaret was an extension of Ball’s previous pacifist activism as well as a laboratory for novel art forms. It became a gathering place for avant-garde artists and thinkers who believed that the worldview that had led to the horrors of the war should be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. Many of them also became involved in the parallel development of Dada.

Ball and Hennings conceived the Cabaret Voltaire as a space for the presentation of modern works by artists residing in Zurich and living abroad, emphasizing their group’s connection to a wider avant-garde art scene. For example, they hosted readings of authors such as Leonid Andreyev, Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, and Else Lasker-Schuler, often in translation and occasionally accompanied by handmade puppets crafted by Hennings. They also encouraged collaborative projects, such as the “simultaneous” poems that Tzara, Janco, and Huelsenbeck jointly recited, alternating meaningful words with drawn-on syllables, gurgles, and whistles. Janco created grotesque cardboard masks for members of the audience to wear, and it is likely that frequent attendees like the choreographer Rudolf von Laban and dancers Mary Wigman, Katja Wulff, and Suzanne Perrottet danced to music by Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, and other modern composers, played on the piano. Although the Cabaret held thematic evenings dedicated to national cultures—hosting, for instance, “Russian” and “French” soirées—its scope was transnational as well as interdisciplinary.

While disagreements about the mission and purpose of Dada soon drove Ball and Hennings apart from other early members of the movement, especially the entrepreneurial Tzara, the couple still contributed to projects that were central to its founding. The first written mentions of Dada appeared in the anthology Cabaret Voltaire, edited by Ball, which introduced the artistic output of the nightclub to larger audiences, reproducing poems and works presented there alongside others by artists and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. The anthology anticipated the release of an eponymous Dada journal, published a year later under Tzara’s direction. The couple were also involved in the opening of the Galerie Dada, which made its debut with an exhibition of artists associated with the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, on July 14, 1916, after the closure of Cabaret Voltaire. The program for the opening advertised “music, dance, theory, manifestoes, lyrics, pictures, costumes, masks”; according to the anti-hierarchical nature of Dada, it listed each contributing artist in alphabetical order. That evening, Ball read a manifesto that described the Dada movement as something “very easy to understand,” claiming that “to make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications.”

By the time Tzara published his own Dada manifesto in 1918, such conflicts had come to the fore, and Ball and Hennings had broken with the movement and left Zurich for good. Apart from brief stints in Bern and Munich, they resided for the rest of their lives in the southern region of Ticino, Switzerland, first in the village of Vira-Magadino and then in Agnuzzo. They developed a fascination with Catholicism and religious mysticism that drove them further away from the iconoclastic ethos of Dada. A few months before Ball passed away in 1927, he published Die Flucht aus der Zeit, a memoir based on his diary entries from 1910 to 1921, which underscores his and Hennings’s contributions to the birth of Dada. Heavily edited with the benefit of hindsight, the text chronicles the international avant-garde networks that Ball and Hennings helped to connect at a time when geopolitical borders were increasingly impervious, setting the tone for many posthumous testimonies on Zurich Dada that followed.