In Zürich, I saw no drunken Bolsheviks at the Cafe Odeon. Down the block at the Terrasse Restaurant, there were no anarchists partying with war deserters. This wasn’t 1916.
Yet in the river, the swans were a feature still left over from more than a century earlier. They lilted on the surface of the water, seemingly unfazed by the spring rain. Present since the 1800s, the swans were glorious symbols of today’s Zürich, a global epicenter of high finance.
My amble along the waterfront road, known as the Limmatquai, took me right past the Odeon and the Terrasse, joints I knew from various 20th-century art history books, yet neither resembled their previous incarnations as hangouts for revolutionaries of all flavors, especially the confrontational troublemakers of the Dada art movement — my sole reason for scouring this neighborhood. I was here to raise their ghosts.
In 1916, as the butchery of World War I surrounded Zürich, the neutral city attracted exiles from every adjacent land, including those who birthed Dada, a creative coalition whose anarchic glee resurfaced in various art movements and subcultures over the next 100 years. As the Great War and the ensuing belligerent nationalism began to reconfigure Europe, this incendiary stew of artists joined forces to ridicule the war and ignite the Dada movement. In terms of geography, creativity and the psyche, they were refugees. Outcasts. Rabble rousers. Finding their way to an old Zürich neighborhood, Dada’s cofounders transformed Oppositional Defiant Disorder into creativity. They combined literature and sound to make a racket on stage. They insulted audiences, wore idiotic-on-purpose costumes and wrote manifestoes attacking everything bourgeois. In one case, they cut up newspaper articles, tossed them into a hat, and created nonsense poems from the resulting mess. They were also the first to tear up magazine photos and collage them together — all as a way of returning art to its rightful place, inseparable from life. Countless academics and critics traced Dada straight to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Basquiat, and Banksy. If not for Dada, we wouldn’t have photo montage, cosplay, punk rock, or the Gong Show, and I certainly wouldn’t have written hundreds of my own snarky newspaper columns to satirize the established order in suburban wasteland America.
Nowadays, no one comes to Zürich for this kind of history. The city is characterized by bankers, the insurance industry, and $5,000 wristwatches. Here I found some of the wealthiest streets in Europe.
Although I did not travel to Switzerland to learn how Dada might inspire the transformation of future refugees into artists, somehow, that’s where my mind went. As the global refugee crisis continued to worsen, as political leaders continued to use migrants as political pawns, I continued to fixate on the Dadaists, perhaps because they found a way to harness their exile and their violent surroundings and turn it all into creativity. Plus, the history was so much fun.
I studied Dada in college. In arts academia, I wanted to be like the Dadaists but could not find a suitable tribe of agitated performative troublemakers, so I buried myself in books about Dada history. They became my heroes. I was nostalgic for an era that I was never even alive to witness.
Despite its influence, Dada was a short-lived movement. Following the war, the participants all went their separate ways, with most of them overcoming their hostility and developing into more productive artists. They became sculptors, dancers, art collectors, publishers, and writers.
Now more than a hundred years later, just being here in Zürich gave me hope for alternative creativity in the realm of extreme capital. I didn’t care about Swiss watches or $200 fondue tram rides around the lake. This was a radical art pilgrimage and although I was here to honor those artists many decades after they launched their esprit de corps in this very neighborhood, I kept mentally applauding how they transformed the refugee condition into a strategy for creative practice.
***
After visiting Dada-related sites all over Zürich for several days, I met Juri Steiner, an art historian who curated many Dada exhibits. We convened for lunch at Hiltl, officially the world’s oldest vegetarian restaurant, founded in 1898, a massive two-story colossus just down the street from Rudolf von Laban’s former dance studio.
At lunchtime, businessfolk stormed in and out the front door, seemingly nonstop. With the April weather still delivering blitzes of rain, umbrellas lay strewn about the entryway.
Upstairs we found a tiny two-seater by the window, even though the place was jammed and noisy with an orchestra of clinking plates, glassware, and various machinery from the kitchen. Every customer seemed to switch effortlessly from German to French to English and back.
As I listened, I was reminded of what I’d read about those old Dada performances, where people stood on stage reciting unrelated poems in many different languages, all at the same time. By doing so, the Dadaists commented on their own geographic displacement, their own exile. With the war raging around them, they were refugees with no country or politics to call their own. The Dadaists pretty much invented this technique of simultaneous performance poetry. They were seeking a new collective language. They were homesick.
As we waited for the server, I turned and looked at the next table, wondering if the skinny-suited couple sitting two feet away with a $95 bottle of Chardonnay at lunch knew any of this Dada history. They probably didn’t.
By sheer chance, my meeting with Steiner landed on the day of Sechseläuten, the annual Zürich spring festivities featuring street parades and conservative military-style processions by old-school guild-house clubs wearing costumes from the Middle Ages — the polar opposite of Dada. From our window table, we heard everyone gathering outside in the plaza, even over the multilingual din of chattering customers. I looked out the window and down at the street to see guild members in full historic uniforms, either from the parade or on their way to the parade. There were horses. And tubas.
Steiner ordered a faux tartare and I went for a vegetable curry stew, which made me feel homesick. Just thinking about Dada and revisiting the history, especially how those artists were homesick, somehow validated my own homesickness. Maybe this emotional void explained my perpetual traveling.
Steiner was an expert in Dada history, so he knew every street corner where every radical artist spent time a century earlier. I confessed feeling bizarre, just by how much this history may have indeed spawned snarky writers like myself, and how being here in Zürich inspired me.
“This is the reason why people travel,” I said to him. “To find your tribe. Even if the tribe is 100 years earlier. Or, at the least, to remind yourself that we outcasts are all in the same skin.”
Honoring Dada artists like Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara was a quest, I told him. A counterculture pilgrimage. I could inspire other writers to keep going and never give up and always know their tribe is out there, somewhere.
Steiner laughed out loud as I said these things. He was part of the tribe too, he said. That’s why he organized historical Dada events, although he wasn’t really an “organizer” per se. The whole mess was intentionally decentralized.
“There are still a lot of artists here now,” Steiner said. “And so, we wanted a network of institutions motivated to collaborate with no one central brain.”
I then plowed through my vegetable curry before Steiner even made a dent in his tartare. He ate slowly and decisively. The restaurant was loud, and we could still hear a multitude of conversations in many languages.
Outside our window, down below on the street, the annual Sechseläuten gathering snaked its way through the streets of Zürich. Military bands carried their instruments. Guild members and their families marched in full regalia as they made their way in the pouring rain. Each April they did this, year in and year out.
“Dada is not like Sechseläuten,” Steiner said, motioning with his head toward the window and down at the parade. “It’s not repetition, the same thing over and over again, every year. If you do something for a hundred years, it just dies.”
I asked him why Dada history seemed apropos of the times. Quite a few similar problems seemed to be brewing in Europe these days, war refugees and all. In recent years, terrorist attacks unfolded in Brussels, Madrid, and several other places. The same belligerent nationalism, we both agreed, was starting to percolate in response to the refugee issue.
“Dada was orchestrated by immigrants,” Steiner reminded me. “Nowadays there’s an inclination to view the migrant issue as an ‘either-or,’ a ‘for-or-against’ issue. Black or white. The conservatives want to close the borders entirely. Dada was a statement on the other side. It was created primarily by immigrants.”
Leading up to the time Dada started, Steiner explained, Switzerland was possibly the first democratically socialist country. When Italian immigrants came to build the railroads, they were given worker housing, for example. The Swiss were good at this type of thing, good at managing mass immigration. And Dada could only have begun in Zürich, he said.
“It wasn’t about the banks and the money and wanting to profit off the rest of the world,” Steiner said, in reference to what Zürich was normally known for. “Dada belongs to an alternative Swiss history.”
For context, he brought up the 50th-anniversary plaque on the side of the Cabaret Voltaire building, the venue where Dada started in 1916. Fifty years later, in 1966, original Dada artist Jean Arp returned to design a marble and bronze marker, a strange egg-shaped plaque on the side of the building.
Steiner explained that the plaque’s dedication in 1966 increased public awareness. That’s where this interest in alternative history started germinating. Most Zürich residents in 1966 claimed zero knowledge of Dada.
“The plaque made the step from local Dada to global Dada,” Steiner said, nibbling at his tartare. “It made a significant contribution. The younger generation then realized they had another heritage in Zürich. This was an important moment. Because [at that time] the activity that started taking place was more of a student intellectual approach to Dada. It was a milestone. 1966. For 50 years there [had not been] a lot of involvement.”
Two years later, the 1968 student riots erupted in Paris, where Dada slogans were found amongst the graffiti. Art history, student intellectualism, and radical politics intertwined. Dada’s influence resurfaced and exploded. There was no strategic center from which the influence was disseminated. No one led the charge per se, but Dada’s protopunk disruption reverberated over the decades, underneath the surface and between the cracks of 20th-century countercultural movements ever since.
Steiner was trying to reinvigorate that dedication to alternative history. He seemed optimistic.
“The Reformation was an apocalyptic time,” he said. “Dada was an apocalyptic time. When power changes heavily, or mentally — I don’t know if this is a thesis in the making — but it seems Switzerland was always strong in those moments. Moments of crisis. We don’t like crises, but in times of crises, it seems Switzerland was usually good.”
I could sense that the legend would inspire me forever. I was naturally drawn to this stuff. Zürich, the last place anyone would expect radical art history, contained multitudes of it.
After finishing our meal, we went back downstairs and I plucked my umbrella from the pile. Steiner gave me a few copies of homemade Dada newspapers he had distributed, replete with inflammatory Dada-style dialog. The Dadaists invented what we now call ‘zines’ — do-it-yourself fan magazines — so Steiner repackaged the idea for the current Zürich masses and their $35 salads. What a concept. I tucked the papers away in my bag and saved them for later. We both went outside to say our goodbyes and I wandered off back toward my hotel.
***
In the rain, I sauntered along the Limmatquai right where the river flowed into downtown Zürich. I walked much slower than usual. The umbrella only kept my torso dry. The bottoms of my pants and my shoes were soaked.
The swans remained on the water. They were regular characters here. They had street cred. Or river cred. So, I hung out with them for several more minutes.
While fighting off the rain with my umbrella, I looked across the river. On the other side of the water, various buildings with painted window frames and jiggered roofing rose up into the gunmetal sky overhead.
Dormant boats were tied to their slips. Each one was covered with a blue tarp, resting like a weary traveler.
Standing there with the swans, I came to see the beauty in tracing generations of creative snark all the way back to the Dadaists. Since they did eventually transform their sadness and horror and carve out more productive artistic paths, maybe their journeys could inspire other refugees to transform their own predicaments via creative practice, somehow.
When I got back to my hotel room, I pulled out the do-it-yourself newspaper Steiner had just given me. I unfolded the whole thing on top of the bed. It looked like an old punk zine, but in tabloid-size format, even bigger than The Wall Street Journal or the German business papers I’d seen around town.
The description of Dada, as Steiner wrote it, was better than any tourist guide to Zürich:
The act of creatively criticizing all established concepts of art, literature, philosophy, and politics was baptized in this city. By purposefully applying illogicality, idiocy, amateurism, and the game of chance, the Dadaists defied the madness and absurdity of their time. Even today, this avant-garde movement remains code for the radical art experiment by which platitudes and commonplaces are blown up and challenged; and irony, humor and satire deployed to confront a world operated by rational principles on a superficial level only—a strategy still valid in the ultra-complex 21st century.
Those words felt like a soothing brain massage. I was refreshed. Rejuvenated. It was better than any $400 spa treatment.
After tossing the paper onto the bed, I pulled back the curtains and looked out the window of my hotel room. The rain still blitzed diagonally across the landscape. Despite the drab gray horizon, this was the best Zürich trip in the world.
Yet even though my trip was coming to a close, the struggle wasn’t. As future years unfolded, the refugee crisis would most likely become much worse. Global leaders would persist in manipulating refugees and migrants for political gain. What to do?
In any case, from now on, any time a heartbreaking story came my way, I’d harken back to my favorite Zürich trip for inspiration. Maybe if everyone studied the Dadaists, then more forms of alternative creativity just might emerge — this year, right now, and forever more.
I kept looking out the window. Far off in the distance, through the rain, I spotted several swans on the lake. They were serene as usual. No matter what Zürich turned into, no matter who migrated where, the swans would always be here.•