Zurich, that decorous Swiss city, is already preparing to celebrate next year the centenary of Dada. A preliminary brochure provides a map showing 80 sites in the city with associations to Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, Walter Serner, Hans Arp, and a few more, all of them fathers (and a mother or two) of Dadaism. Who, you ask, who? Forgotten, the whole lot of them, and yet they did their bit to shift contemporary culture.
In 1916, well over a million men were killed or wounded in the battle of the Somme. Whether pacifists or revolutionaries, those with alternatives to the world war then doing its worst found Zurich a safe and welcoming haven. One of the places marked on the map for next year’s visitors is the Café Odeon, a landmark because Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky treated it as an office and held debates there. Marginal men lost in fantasies like the Dadaists and longing to change the world without any likelihood of being able to do so, both of them were taken by surprise when they came to power in Russia a few months later. Artists and writers were at home in the Cabaret Voltaire, where they could put on plays, stage exhibitions, and write manifestos. The building fell into disrepair, but a few years ago an entrepreneur with an eye on the commercial possibilities of Dada restored it.
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