Hugo Ball

After withdrawing from Dada, he worked as a political journalist and cultural critic. Following his return to Catholicism in 1920, he increasingly devoted himself to Christian mysticism, hagiography, theology, and the history of German intellectual culture.[2][3] His best known works include the "Dada Manifesto", the Dadaist nonsense poem "Karawane," the poetry collection 7 schizophrene Sonette, the edited diary Flight out of Time, the Christian anarchist polemic book Critique of the German Intelligentsia and the novels Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor and Tenderenda the Fantast. His later works include Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), devoted to three early Christian saints and mystical writers, and a biography of his friend Hermann Hesse (1927).

• Name — Hugo Ball • Born — 22 February 1886 • Birthplace — Pirmasens, Germany • Died — 14 September 1927 • Place of death — Sant'Abbondio (Gentilino), Switzerland • Occupation — * Author • poet • dramatist • journalist • Field — Poetry • Movement — * Expressionism • Dada

Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany, and was raised in a middle-class Catholic family.[4] His father was a shoe manufacturer.[5] From 1895 to 1901 Ball attended the Königliches Progymnasium in Pirmasens. At his parents' wishes he subsequently began an apprenticeship with a leather merchant, but abandoned it for health reasons.[6] He then completed the qualifications necessary for university study at the humanistic gymnasium in Zweibrücken.[7] He studied sociology and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Heidelberg University, beginning his studies in 1906. His university studies also included German literature and history.[8] In Heidelberg he attended lectures on Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche and developed a dissertation project entitled Nietzsche in Basel. Although he worked on the project for several years, he did not submit it, and left university without a degree in 1910. The dissertation manuscript was eventually published in 1978. Nietzsche remained an important influence on Ball's early thought.[9]

In 1910, Ball moved to Berlin in order to become an actor and collaborated with Max Reinhardt. He studied at the acting school associated with Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, where his training encompassed acting, directing, dramaturgy, and theatre administration. Ball later recalled the period from 1910 to 1914 as one in which virtually everything in his life was connected with theatre. His first book, the tragicomedy Die Nase des Michelangelo, was published by Ernst Rowohlt in 1911. During the 1911–12 season Ball worked as a dramaturg at the municipal theatre in Plauen. He then joined the Munich Lustspielhaus, subsequently known as the Münchner Kammerspiele, where he worked between 1912 and 1914. According to the Hugo Ball Society, the theatre adopted the name Münchener Kammerspiele at Ball's suggestion. Ball became part of the German Expressionist literary and theatrical milieu. Among the figures important to his development were the dramatist Frank Wedekind, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and the poet Hans Leybold. He became personally acquainted with Wedekind through the Munich production of Franziska and promoted contemporary theatrical work while employed as a dramaturg. With Leybold, a close friend, Ball wrote collaborative poems under the composite pseudonym Ha Hu Baley.[10] He published poetry, prose, criticism, and theatrical writing in magazines including Revolution, Die Neue Kunst, Die Aktion, Jugend, and Phöbus. Ball and Kandinsky planned an almanac intended to supplement or continue the artistic programme associated with Der Blaue Reiter, but the outbreak of the First World War prevented the project from being completed. Ball met Richard Huelsenbeck in the Munich avant-garde milieu and also became acquainted with Emmy Hennings, a poet, actress, and cabaret performer.[11]

At the beginning of World War I, Ball tried joining the army as a volunteer, but was denied enlistment for medical reasons. Later in 1914, intending to visit a wounded friend at Lunéville, he travelled toward the war zone and gained a direct impression of conditions near the front. His experiences intensified his disillusionment with the war. He later wrote: "The war is founded on a glaring mistake – men have been confused with machines." Following the wartime closure of the Münchner Kammerspiele, Ball returned to Berlin, where he worked as an editor and journalist. His political interests became increasingly radical. He read Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, and developed a particular interest in Bakunin's critique of the state. Ball also worked on a book of translations of works by Bakunin, which never got published during his lifetime. Material from this project was eventually issued as Michael Bakunin. Ein Brevier in the scholarly edition of Ball's works. In Berlin, Ball and Huelsenbeck organized literary events with an increasingly anti-war character. Ball's pacifism was strengthened by the deaths of writers and friends in the conflict, including Leybold. The two participated in a broader Expressionist and bohemian milieu centred partly on venues such as the Café des Westens. Although interested in anarchist philosophy, Ball nonetheless rejected it for its militant aspects, and viewed it as only a means to his personal goal of socio-political enlightenment.[12] Anarchist ideas nevertheless remained important to his criticism of militarism, nationalism, political centralization, and the modern state.

In May 1915 Ball emigrated with Emmy Hennings to neutral Switzerland. Ball later explained to his sister that he had left Germany because he wished to continue developing abroad and because the war and contemporary "patriotism" contradicted his convictions. The couple settled initially in Zürich and lived in considerable poverty. During the first months of exile, Ball and Hennings supported themselves through writing and whatever theatrical or variety work they could obtain. Ball at one point used identification papers issued in another name and came into conflict with the Swiss authorities.[13] In October 1915 Ball and Hennings found work with Ernst Alexander Michel's itinerant Maxim variety ensemble, Ball working principally as a pianist and writer. They subsequently attempted to establish their own Arabella Ensemble. Ball later drew on his experiences among itinerant entertainers in his novel Flametti oder Vom Dandysmus der Armen.

At the end of January or beginning of February 1916, Ball and Hennings rented a room in the Meierei tavern at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zürich in order to establish an international literary and artistic cabaret. On 5 February 1916 they opened what was initially advertised as the Künstlerkneipe Voltaire and soon became known as the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball and Hennings initially presented changing programmes rather than working with a fixed ensemble. The artists who soon gathered around them included Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara, who became the principal members of the emerging Zürich Dada group. Sophie Taeuber-Arp and dancers connected with Rudolf von Laban also participated in the cabaret's activities. The Cabaret Voltaire combined poetry, cabaret songs, piano music, dance, theatrical sketches, masks, manifestos, noise, and experimental forms of recitation. The participants presented both their own work and that of a wider European avant-garde, including writers and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The international character of the cabaret was particularly significant during the First World War. Artists from different countries, including countries fighting one another, performed together in neutral Switzerland. The deliberately heterogeneous programmes challenged conventional distinctions among literature, music, dance, theatre, and visual art. Ball himself presented the cabaret's internationalism in explicitly anti-war terms. In an account of its founding, he described the project as an attempt to bring together independent artists and to leave "the War and Fatherlands behind". The Cabaret occupied the back room of Jan Ephraim's Holländische Meierei at Spiegelgasse 1, which had previously hosted the literary cabaret Pantagruel in 1915.[14] In May 1916 Ball edited and published a magazine and programme booklet with the same name, Cabaret Voltaire. The publication documented the emerging movement and contains the earliest surviving printed documentation of the word Dada. As co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and editor of a magazine with the same name, Cabaret Voltaire, in Zürich, Ball led the early Dada movement in Zürich and is one of the people credited with naming the movement "Dada," by allegedly choosing the word at random from a dictionary. Accounts of the origin of the name differ. One widely repeated version holds that Ball and Huelsenbeck encountered the French word dada, meaning a child's hobbyhorse, while consulting a French–German dictionary. Ball himself emphasized the word's multiple possible meanings in different languages. His companion and future wife, Emmy Hennings, was also a member of Dada. More recent scholarship has emphasized that Hennings was not merely Ball's companion but a co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and one of its most important performers.

On 23 June 1916 Ball presented a programme of his newly developed sound poems at the Cabaret Voltaire. These works included "Gadji beri bimba", "Karawane", "Seepferdchen und Flugfische", and "Totenklage". Instead of conventional vocabulary, they employed invented syllables, phonemes, rhythms, repetitions, and vocal patterns. Ball's theatrical background was crucial to their presentation. His poetry was conceived not merely as writing on a page but as performance involving voice, breath, costume, gesture, movement, light, and space.[15] A celebrated photograph depicts Ball in the geometric costume associated with his performance of "Karawane". The photograph bears the description "Verse ohne Worte im kubistischen Kostüm" ("verse without words in a cubist costume").[16] The cumbersome cardboard costume restricted his ordinary movements and contributed to the ceremonial quality of the performance. Ball later recalled that during one sound-poetry performance his recitation unexpectedly took on a solemn, almost liturgical cadence reminiscent of the Catholic Mass of his childhood. The episode has become important to interpretations of the relationship between the ritualistic aspects of Ball's Dada work and his later religious development. In 1916, Hugo Ball created the Dada Manifesto, making a political statement about his views on the terrible state of society and acknowledging his dislike for philosophies of the past that claimed to possess the ultimate truth. He read the manifesto at the first public Dada evening at the Zunfthaus zur Waag in Zürich on 14 July 1916. In the manifesto Ball aimed to legitimize the new artistic movement's ambition to not merely "write poetry with words", but to "write poetry out of the words", to create an entirely new language, because the old language was viewed as "doomed", and "ruined by the filthy hands of capital". The central thought of modernism since Baudelaire regarding that the language has to be fixed, is here given a distinctive critique of economy as a motivation.[17] The Dada programmes developed during this period went beyond Ball's individual sound poems. They included simultaneous poetry in which several performers recited different texts at once, bruitist or noise-based performances, vowel concerts, dances, and recitations accompanied by Janco's masks. Such performances made the Cabaret Voltaire an early centre for experiments combining literature with music, visual art, and bodily performance.[18] The same year as the Manifesto, in 1916, Ball wrote his poem "Karawane (poem)", a poem consisting of nonsensical words. The meaning, however, resides in its meaninglessness, reflecting a central Dadaist rejection of conventional semantic and aesthetic expectations. Some of his other best known works include the poem collection 7 schizophrene Sonette, the drama Die Nase des Michelangelo, a memoir of the Zürich period Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, and a biography of Hermann Hesse, entitled Hermann Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk (1927).

The first phase of the Cabaret Voltaire lasted only several months. In July 1916 Ball left Zürich for Ticino, where he worked on Flametti. He had already become ambivalent about the direction in which Dada was developing. In March 1917 Ball returned to organized Dada activity with the establishment of the Galerie Dada in Zürich. Working principally with Tzara, he helped organize a programme of exhibitions, lectures, performances, discussions, and other events. The gallery gave the experimental activities associated with the Cabaret Voltaire a somewhat more formal and pedagogical setting. The relationship between Ball and Tzara nevertheless became increasingly strained. Ball did not share all of Tzara's ambitions to transform Dada into a permanent and expanding international movement. Organizational burdens, financial difficulties, and personal tensions also contributed to Ball's withdrawal. At the end of May 1917 Ball left organized Dada activity definitively. His involvement with the Dada movement lasted approximately two years. Despite its brevity, his role in founding the Cabaret Voltaire, editing its publication, developing sound poetry, performing experimental works, and formulating an early Dada manifesto gave him a foundational place in the history of the movement.

After leaving Dada, Ball worked from 1917 to 1920 as a journalist for Die Freie Zeitung in Bern, eventually taking on editorial and publishing responsibilities. The anti-militarist newspaper brought him into contact with German-speaking political émigrés, including Ernst Bloch. Ball wrote political commentaries and essays dealing particularly with German responsibility for the First World War, nationalism, militarism, and the relation between intellectual culture and political power. His anarchist reading, especially his engagement with Bakunin, continued to influence his criticism during these years. This activity culminated in Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (1919). The work sought to explain the intellectual and cultural origins of the political catastrophe of the war, criticizing Prussian militarism, German nationalism, the modern state, and major currents within German religious and philosophical history. Ball later extensively revised the book. The rewritten version appeared in 1924 under the title Die Folgen der Reformation ("The Consequences of the Reformation"), reflecting the increasingly Catholic interpretation of German and European history that he developed after 1920.

Ball married Emmy Hennings in Bern on 21 February 1920. After Die Freie Zeitung ceased publication, Ball and Hennings initially attempted to resettle in Germany, together with Hennings's daughter Annemarie. They soon returned to Switzerland. In July 1920 Ball returned to Catholicism. Rather than constituting an abrupt end to his intellectual activity, his religious reorientation began an intensive period of study. He became particularly interested in early Christianity, mysticism, asceticism, saints' lives, liturgy, religious conversion, and the relation between psychological and spiritual experience. His friend Paul de Mathies, a Catholic student chaplain and writer, played a role in this religious development.[19] Ball increasingly associated with strongly Catholic intellectual circles and studied early and medieval mystical writers. He also undertook lecture journeys in Germany and Switzerland. After returning to Catholicism in July 1920, Ball retired to the canton of Ticino, where he lived a religious and relatively poor life with Emmy Hennings. Their principal residence was initially at Agnuzzo, below Montagnola, and later at Sorengo near Lugano.

Ball's religious studies culminated in Byzantinisches Christentum. Drei Heiligenleben (1923). The book consists of three extended studies of John Climacus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Simeon Stylites. It combines hagiography, theological reflection, cultural criticism, and an interest in the transformation of consciousness through ascetic and mystical practice. Ball was particularly attracted to the apophatic tradition represented by Pseudo-Dionysius, to ascetic renunciation, and to religious modes of language that approached the limits of ordinary conceptual discourse. His religious research also involved contemporary discussions in psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry as he considered the relation between mystical experience and psychological explanation. Scholars have consequently debated the degree of continuity between Ball's Dada experiments and his Catholic writings. The two periods represent markedly different religious and cultural commitments, but recurring themes include the crisis of language, the limitations of rationalized modernity, ritual and performance, purification, negation, and the possibility of spiritual or cultural transformation.

Soon after settling in Ticino, Ball and Hennings became acquainted with Hermann Hesse, who lived at Montagnola. The acquaintance developed into a close friendship lasting until Ball's death.[20] Ball contributed to the journal Hochland during this time.[21] Among his contributions was a substantial 1924 essay on Carl Schmitt's Political Theology. Ball and Schmitt were briefly personally close during this period, although the relationship later ended.[22] From October 1924 until April 1926 Ball and Hennings lived for extended periods in Italy, including Rome and Vietri sul Mare near Salerno. During these years Ball continued writing for Hochland and revising his earlier writings. He also began the process of revising his diaries from 1910 to 1921, which were later published under the title Flight out of Time. These diaries provide a wealth of information concerning the people and events of the Zürich Dada movement.[23] Die Flucht aus der Zeit appeared in 1927. Although normally described as Ball's diary, it was extensively selected and edited from earlier material, making it both a documentary record and a retrospective interpretation of his intellectual development. The book encompasses not only the Zürich Dada period but Ball's movement through Expressionism, anti-war politics, anarchism, Dada, and religious conversion. During his final years Ball also wrote Hermann Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk. He composed most of the biography between October 1926 and March 1927, and S. Fischer Verlag published it in June 1927. Ball developed symptoms of serious illness in May 1927. An operation in Zürich on 2 July established that he was suffering from incurable stomach cancer. He died in Sant'Abbondio (Gentilino), Switzerland, of stomach cancer on 14 September 1927. He was buried in the cemetery of Sant'Abbondio on 16 September. Emmy Hennings, who died in 1948, and Hermann Hesse were later also buried there.

Ball's sound poetry constitutes one of his most influential contributions to the historical avant-garde. Rather than using language principally to transmit semantic meaning, works such as "Karawane" and "Gadji beri bimba" break words into phonetic and rhythmic materials and replace conventional vocabulary with invented sounds. The poems were inseparable from performance. Ball's theatrical experience made him attentive to voice, pacing, movement, costumes, lighting, and the physical presence of the performer. His Dada performances consequently occupied a space between poetry, theatre, music, visual art, and ritual. Ball's experiments responded to what he regarded as a broader crisis of language. In the political and cultural conditions surrounding the First World War, conventional language seemed to him compromised by propaganda, nationalism, journalism, commerce, and inherited philosophical abstractions. The destruction of conventional syntax and vocabulary could therefore function simultaneously as an aesthetic experiment and as criticism of the civilization that had produced the war. Ball's performance practice has subsequently been discussed as an important precedent for later sound poetry, concrete poetry, experimental theatre, and performance art.[24]

Tenderenda the Fantast was largely composed between the years surrounding the First World War and Dada, although it was not published in book form until 1967. The experimental prose work combines narrative, poetry, parody, grotesque fantasy, theatrical writing, and other literary forms. The work has often been interpreted as a distorted or disguised artistic autobiography of Ball's avant-garde period. Its episodes transform the world of Expressionism, cabaret, Dada, war, and spiritual crisis into a carnivalesque sequence of changing voices and personae.[25]

Ball's intellectual career passed through a succession of movements and commitments: Nietzschean cultural criticism, Expressionist theatre, anarchism and pacifism, Dada, political journalism, and Catholic theology and mysticism.[26] Although the transitions involved genuine changes and repudiations, recurrent concerns extended across the different periods of his work. These included the relationship between the individual and institutions, the authority of the modern state, mechanization and abstraction, the corruption and renewal of language, the role of art in cultural transformation, and the possibility of forms of community and spiritual order beyond contemporary political society.

Ball's poem "Gadji beri bimba" was adapted to the song "I Zimbra" on the 1979 Talking Heads album Fear of Music. Ball received a writing credit for the song on the track listing. The song contains these lines: Gadji beri bimba clandridi Lauli lonni cadori gadjam A bim beri glassala glandride E glassala tuffm I zimbra The complete "Gadji beri bimba" poem by Ball reads:[31] gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen bluku terullala blaulala loooo zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen gaga di bling blong gaga blung A voice-cut-up collage of his poem "Karawane" by German artist Kommissar Hjuler, member of Boris Lurie's NO!art movement, was released on an LP on the Greek Shamanic Trance label in 2010. "Karawane" was also set to music in 2012 by Australian composer Stephen Whittington, as an "anti-song cycle" of seventeen songs — one for each line of the poem, lasting approximately two minutes each.[32] The same poem and its historical context was used by Esa-Pekka Salonen for his 28-minute composition Karawane for mixed choir and orchestra.[33] Ball's prose works have also been adapted for radio. In 1999 Bayerischer Rundfunk produced an adaptation of Flametti oder Vom Dandysmus der Armen, with a text adapted by Michael Farin, music and direction by Klaus Buhlert. A two-part radio adaptation of Tenderenda der Phantast, directed by Farin with music by Franz Hautzinger, followed in 2016.

• Briefe 1911–1927. Mit einem Vorwort von Hermann Hesse. Benziger, Einsiedeln/Cologne/Zürich, 1957 • Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, Damals in Zürich. Dada. Briefe aus den Jahren 1915–1917. Arche, Zürich, 1977 • Hermann Hesse, Briefwechsel 1921–1927 mit Hugo Ball und Emmy Ball-Hennings, ed. Bärbel Reetz. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2003,

The city of Pirmasens established a Hugo Ball Collection in 1970. Its holdings include primary and secondary literature concerning Ball, Emmy Hennings, Zürich Dada, and related movements. The Hugo-Ball-Almanach, devoted to research on Ball and his context, began publication in the 1970s. The city has awarded the Hugo Ball Prize since 1990 to writers, artists, and scholars whose work is considered related to Ball's intellectual and artistic legacy. The Hugo Ball Gesellschaft was founded in Pirmasens in 1998. Since 2003 Wallstein Verlag, in cooperation with the German Academy for Language and Literature and the Hugo Ball Gesellschaft, has published a scholarly edition of Ball's writings and correspondence entitled[28] Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ball's papers are preserved within the Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball archive at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. The archival collection reflects the close biographical relationship between Ball and Hennings and contains manuscripts, correspondence, publications, photographs, and other materials.[29] A secondary school in Pirmasens bears Ball's name as the Hugo-Ball-Gymnasium. He is also commemorated by a star on the Walk of Fame des Kabaretts in Mainz. In 2016 Swiss Post issued a commemorative postage stamp reproducing the familiar 1916 photograph of Ball in his Cabaret Voltaire costume.[30] Since 2016, the Hugo-Ball-Kabinett at the Forum Alte Post in Pirmasens has presented a permanent exhibition devoted to his life and work.