Staging the carnivalesque: seditious strategies in print and performance from Simplicissimus to Berlin Dada, 1896-1920

Abstract

‘Staging the Carnivalesque’ offers a revised reading of the print culture and performance of Berlin Dada, adopting an interdisciplinary approach to bring new or overlooked archival sources to light. The thesis considers unexplored points of contact and divergence with German humour magazines (Witzblätter) that emerged in the late nineteenth century, predating the formation of the Berlin group. It also undertakes a close analysis of performances by the Berlin Dadaists, as these events, while frequently cited in scholarly discussions, are rarely examined in depth.

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on magazines edited by the Berlin Dadaists, illustrating how the vernacular sources of Wilhelmine Witzblätter partly paved the way for the ‘ludic form’ and satirical techniques found in Berlin Dada’s avant-garde magazines. Analysis of montage and photography in the earlier Witzblätter evidences how these high-circulation commercial magazines informed some of the core aesthetic tenets of low-circulation Dadaist-edited magazines, such as their experimental design, figurative visual satire, and photomontage. Equally, a comparison with the restricted and regulated media of the Witzblätter more clearly illuminates modes of criticality developed in Dada magazines. I argue that the Berlin Dadaists developed Witzblatt strategies into ‘medial critiques’, defined in the thesis as critiques deployed through the medium of an artwork to question or disclose systems of ideological knowledge production.

In Chapters 3 and 4, surviving newspaper reports are cross-referenced to reconstruct audience spectatorship and Dadaist bodily performance seen in some of the group’s most well-attended performances, such as at their matinée at the Tribüne theatre in 1919, and the 1920 ‘Dada tour’. Thorough evaluation of the reportage reveals how the Berlin Dadaists often portrayed their performances in their own accounts in order to satisfy the avant-garde imperative to épater les bourgeois (shock or scandalise the bourgeoisie). Discrepancies between Dadaist accounts and the reportage prompt a reappraisal of what function Dada performances served for their audiences. A focus on the group’s dance and mime enables a further reassessment of Berlin Dada’s engagements with corporeality, a discussion whose parameters are usually confined to their representations of cyborglike automata or the figure of the Kriegskrüppel (war cripple).

Each chapter addresses a different carnivalesque archetype or leitmotif: ‘fools’, ‘kings’, the ‘carnivalesque crowd’, and the ‘grotesque body’. This thematic structure is tailored to engage with two bifurcating modes of reception enjoyed by the group: the widespread use of carnivalesque imagery and nomenclature by contemporary critics reporting on Dada performances, and the enduring application of literary scholar and philologist Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ by scholars of Dada. The thesis both extends and critically interrogates this discourse in Dada studies.