In 1916, Zurich became a refuge for artists and free-thinkers fleeing the death and destruction of World War I, and it was there, at the Cabaret Voltaire, that Dada took shape. The city’s role was simple enough: a shelter from slaughter. The war kept grinding on, and a group of young artists and pacifists gathered in exile to answer it with something that refused the usual rules.
A refuge built from war's wreckage
Richard Huelsenbeck, speaking in a rare 1959 interview from the BBC archive, described the mood plainly. The group shared despair about the war and disgust for bourgeois values. That’s the social order speaking for itself, and the answer from the room was not obedience. It was rupture. Huelsenbeck’s account places Dada where it began: among people pushed together by catastrophe, looking at the respectable world that had produced it and finding nothing worth preserving.
At the Cabaret Voltaire, Huelsenbeck, the Romanian French-born poet Tristan Tzara, the French sculptor Jean Arp and Romanian-Israeli artist Marcel Janco experimented with performances marked by spontaneity, chance and absurdity. The work was a departure from convention and confronted audiences directly. No polished cultural ministry language here. No solemn national project. Just artists and pacifists using performance to break the frame that war and bourgeois respectability had built around them.
Against the respectable order
The article’s own language makes the stakes clear. Dada was not a decorative style for galleries and patrons. It was a departure from convention, and it confronted audiences directly. That mattered because convention, in this moment, meant a Europe tearing itself apart while its ruling classes kept the machinery of death running. The movement’s refusal of neatness, order and polite meaning was part of its force. It didn’t ask permission from the institutions that had already failed everyone else.
From Zurich, the aesthetic spread across Europe and to New York City, later influencing Surrealism and punk. The route matters. What began in a refuge from war did not stay trapped in one room or one city. It moved outward, carrying its anti-bourgeois charge with it, and left traces in later movements that also rejected the official culture of their time. The BBC episode, produced and presented by Josephine McDermott, preserves Huelsenbeck’s account of that beginning, when art and refusal were still tangled together in the same act.
What the archive keeps
The 1959 interview is rare, which is fitting. Institutions love to archive revolt once it’s safe to file away. But Huelsenbeck’s description still cuts through the varnish. He didn’t describe a movement born from grants, ministries or polite debate. He described young artists and pacifists in Zurich, in 1916, sharing despair about war and disgust for bourgeois values, then turning that into performances built on spontaneity, chance and absurdity.
That’s the whole thing in miniature. War produced the refuge. The refuge produced the gathering. The gathering produced a movement that refused the terms handed down by the people who had made the war possible in the first place. Dada didn’t solve the catastrophe. It answered it with mockery, rupture and a direct challenge to convention. And from that cramped, defiant beginning at the Cabaret Voltaire, it spread far beyond Zurich, carrying the stink of the old order with it.