Johannes Baader
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Das große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama:
DEUTSCHLANDS GROESSE UND UNTERGANG
durch Lehrer Hagendorf
oder
Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte
des Oberdada
Verlegt bei PAUL STEEGEMANN, ERNST ROWOHLT und
KURT WOLFF (Hannover, Berlin und München)- Dadaistische Monumentalarchitektur in fünf Stockwerken, 3 Anlagen, einem Tunnel, 2 Aufzügen und einem Cylinderabschluß.
Beschreibung der Stockwerke:
Das Erdgeschoß oder der Fußboden ist die prädestinierte Bestimmung vor der Geburt und gehört nicht zur sache.
- I. Stockwerk: Die Vorbereitung des Oberdada
- II. Stockwerk: Die metphysische Prüfung
- III. Stockwerk: Die Einweihung
- IV. Stockwerk: Der Weltkrieg
- V. Stockwerk: Weltrevolution
- Ueberstück: Der Cylinder schraubt sich in den Himmel und verkündet die Wiederauferstehung Deutschlands durch Lehrer Hagendorf und sein Lesepult. Ewig.
- The complete text of 'Deutschlands Größe und Untergang', is published in the Dada Almanach, edited by Richard Huelsenbeck (Erich Reiss Verlag : Berlin 1920) 91-95 [online source: Digital Dada Library]. The text is reprinted in Oberdada. Schriften, Manifeste, Flugblätter, Billets, Werke und Taten (Gießen-Lahn 1977) 91-93.
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- As this description makes explicit, the structure of the assemblage was directly related to Baader's book project The Fantastic Life Story of the Oberdada. The chapters of the 'virtual' book simply transformed into the 'floors'. A month before the opening of the Dada-Messe, Baader informed the press that his manuscript was lost ["im Wagen der Straßenbahn zurückgeblieben"]. There is no indication that a manuscript really existed.
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- Timothy O. Benson
'Mysticism, Materialism, and the Machine in Berlin Dada', in Art Journal 46.1 'Mysticism and Occultism in Modern Art' (Spring 1987): 46-55 [Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776842].
- Hanne Bergius
'Architecture as the Dionysian-Apollonian Process of Dada', in Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfahrt (eds.), Nietzsche and An Architecture of Our Minds. Issues and Debates (Getty Research Institute : Los Angeles 1999) 115-139.
- Michael White
'Johannes Baader's The Great Dio-Dada-Drama. The Mysticism of the Mass Media', in Modernism-Modernity 8.4 (2001): 583-602. Project MUSE. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
- [abstract] The First International Dada Fair held in Berlin in 1920 holds a most significant place within the history of the 20th-century avant-garde. It marks the point where modernist practices of fragmentation, disruption and shock were aimed directly at the German public by utilizing the strategies of contemporary journalism and advertising. Political protest was combined with attack on the exalted status of art, the death of which was famously proclaimed by one placard at the exhibition. A German soldier's uniform with a pig's head was hung from the ceiling, provoking legal action and ensuring good tabloid coverage. The walls of the exhibition rooms were covered with posters and banners which competed for attention with the more traditional paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz, although their subject matter - crippled war veterans and urban disorder - was suitably confrontational. Photomontage, a new medium recently seized upon by the dadaists, was prominently placed, recycling imagery from the illustrated press for satirical or absurd ends. And in the midst of all this could be found a tower of found objects, newspapers, and textual fragments assembled by Johannes Baader. Baader's assemblage, destroyed soon after the exhibition, can be interpreted on two main levels: first, as a representation of modernity, and, second, as autobiography. Baader's method of conveying the symbolic ideas imbedded in Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was to use visual strategies adopted from montage and related to film narrative techniques.
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- IMAGE CREDITS
banner: Double portrait of Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, 1919. Photograph after lost original [Musée d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris].
- left: photograph of Baader's Große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama at the 'Erste Internationale Dada-Messe' (July 1-August 25, 1920). Photo: Archives Andréi B. Nakov, Paris.
There is a second photograph of the Große Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama at the 'Erste Internationale Dada-Messe', published in Tilburgsche Courant (1920). This copy is in the Collection Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet [source:Michael White, (2001) 583-602].
SECONDARY LITERATURE