Dada East: The Romanians of the Cabaret Voltaire (review)

Dada, a globalized art movement, has in the last ten years or so generated a genuinely global field of research. Once confined in the United States largely to Francophone interests, and in Europe to national domains matched between scholar and subject, Dada is now commonly investigated as an avant-garde tendency that set down roots around the planet. Exhibitions such as "Dada Global" (Zurich, 1994), "Dada: L'arte della negazione" (Rome, 1994), and the Paris version of the most recent survey, "Dada" (seen also in Washington, D.C., and New York, 2005–2006), include contributions from Antwerp to Tokyo to Zagreb. Parallel to these museum undertakings, a herculean ten-volume series, completed in 2005 under the guidance of Stephen Foster at the University of Iowa, has diligently mapped the extent of Dada in all locations where the word or its advocates made an appearance during the decade spanning roughly 1915 to 1925.

Other projects, including the installation and catalog for the Dada exhibition in its Washington and New York versions (and in which the author of the present review had a part), have sought expressly to elucidate the coherence of the movement across national and continental boundaries, if decidedly not across the globe. These latter undertakings, outstanding among them Richard Sheppard's Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), eschew the monographic and the anecdotal to elaborate a definitional analysis of Dada in its canonical instances.

Between these two types of effort lies a set of problems awaiting resolution by future Dada scholars. How did the core of Dada, as understood today (Switzerland, Germany, France, New York), interact with what might be called a Dada diaspora? Were those relations of "center" and "periphery" understood as such in their day, or did places that now seem peripheral hold their own influence at the time? Did individuals in these other places come to Dada through sources and impulses different than those proposed for the canonical city centers; or did they, in response to these same sources and impulses, arrive at noncanonical ideas that still fit under the label Dada? To what degree should accepted operational theses about international Dada be revised to reflect the steadily accumulating wealth of new factual material? Or, on the contrary, to what degree should the current theses be left intact and manifestations elsewhere be returned, after considered evaluation, to the margins of modernist cultural history?

Dada East: The Romanians of the Cabaret Voltaire, by the Swedish scholar Tom Sandqvist, makes a remarkable first candidate to answer these varied questions. I say "first," for Gerald Janecek's excellent introduction to the Iowa volume on "Dada East" (Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka, eds., The Eastern Dada Orbit [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998]), like the essays that follow it in that book, are limited by length in their ability to address such broad comparisons. Nevertheless, Janecek proposes certain hypotheses of signal importance to defining Dada in central and eastern Europe. Janecek suggests that Dada, outside of Russia, was largely an imported phenomenon; that it took hold only equivocally, and relatively late in the life span of Dada internationally; and that the Dadaist critique of Western civilization was confronted with a rush of optimism for the West in places suddenly released from the yoke of empire and eager to build a new, modern national consciousness.

Sandqvist, who has the space of a monograph in which to develop his positions, says much that goes against Janecek's proposals. His study follows "back home" the supporting cast of his earlier work, Kärlek och Dada (Love and Dada, 1998), which centered on the couple Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings at and around the Cabaret Voltaire, the ur-site of world Dada. Five Romanians joined the cohort in Zurich—as Sandqvist notes, an impressive portion of the cabaret's membership. His task is to trace the roots of those five Romanians—Aaron Segal (Aron Sigalu), Marcel Janco (Iancu) and his brothers Jules (Iuliu) and Georges (George...