16 A 1922 photomontage by his partner, Hannah Höch, includes a direct quotation from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homoamong her ‘proverbs’. 15 Despite Elizabeth’s success in promoting a Nietzsche cult and aligning it with anti-Semitism, Ecce Homo is a clear influence on the exiles from German militarism who were linked to Dada in Zürich, and also on the Dadaist critics of German culture and nationalism in Berlin.īall comments extensively on Ecce Homo, and we know that Hausmann himself owned a copy, along with three other books by Nietzsche. During the intervening years Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, edited the text (and the rest of his oeuvre) in such a way as to portray her brother as favourable to German nationalism – redacting those passages in which Nietzsche’s criticisms of Germany (and of her) were at their most extreme. Written in 1888, Ecce Homo was not published until 1908: eight years after Nietzsche’s death, and nearly twenty years after Nietzsche’s catastrophic nervous breakdown in January 1889 which left him completely incapacitated.
From the start, Nietzsche’s tone alerts us to the fact that we should not take his words at face value – as we certainly should not, given the falsehoods and crazy exaggerations that the text includes. 10 If so, it might help explain Ball’s (temporary) adoption of the role of the fool his joining of an itinerant vaudeville group and the eventual foundation of Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916: the event that is generally picked out as the origins of Dada as a movement.Įcce Homo – the book in which Nietzsche expresses his Hanswurst ambitions – is a half humorous and half megalomaniac autobiography, with chapter titles such as ‘Why I am So Wise’, ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ and ‘Why I am So Clever’. 9 Since in his Critique he discusses both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in some detail, we might speculate that some of the background that I am sketching in here would have been familiar to Ball. 8 There he claims that Nietzsche ‘sang the praises of foolishness ’ whereas Schopenhauer sang the praises of ‘cleverness ’. Not only had Ball – a German national who left Berlin for neutral Switzerland in 1915 – written an unpublished doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche, 6 he also refers to him extensively both in his Critique of the German Intelligentsia (1919) 7 and also in his Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary. Hugo Ball is sometimes described as the ‘father’ of Dada.
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