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Richard Huelsenbeck Quotes

Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck was a German writer, poet, and psychoanalyst born in Frankenau, Hessen-Nassau.

Huelsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of World War I. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February 1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire. In January 1917, he moved to Berlin, taking with him the ideas and techniques which helped him found the Berlin Dada group. 'To make literature with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream,' he wrote in 1920. His ideas fitted in with left-wing politics current at the time in Berlin. However idealistic Huelsenbeck and his companions were, their challenge 'Dada is German Bolshevism' had unfortunate repercussions later, when the National Socialists denounced all aspects of modern art as Kunstbolschewismus.

Beginning in 1933, Huelsenbeck was repeatedly investigated by the Nazi authorities. He was forbidden to write and rather than remaining in 'internal exile', he managed to get an immigration visa to the United States in 1936. He changed his name to Charles R. Hulbeck and practiced medicine and psychoanalysis at the Karen Horney Clinic in Long Island, New York. In 1970 he returned to the Ticino region of Switzerland.

Huelsenbeck was the editor of the Dada Almanach, and wrote Dada siegt, En Avant Dada and other Dadaist works.

Huelsenbeck's autobiography Memoirs of a Dada Drummer gives detailed accounts of his interactions with many key figures of the movement.

Of his music, Hugo Ball wrote, "Huelsenbeck has arrived. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm . He would best love to drum literature & to perdition."

Until the end of his life, Huelsenbeck insisted, "Dada is still existing," although the movement's other founders might not have agreed. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. April 1892 – 30. April 1974
Richard Huelsenbeck photo
Richard Huelsenbeck: 10 quotes0 likes

Famous Richard Huelsenbeck Quotes

“The professors of zoology gather in the meadows
With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows
the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead
Again thou hauntest castle and grounds
The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds
(And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)”

Richard Huelsenbeck

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“That is the lavender landscape Herr Mayer was talking about
when he lost his eye
Only the fire department can drive the nightmare from the drawing-
room but all the hoses are broken…”

Richard Huelsenbeck

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess
The cockatoo under the skirts of the Spanish dancer
Sings as sadly as a headquarters bugler and the cannon lament all day…”

Richard Huelsenbeck

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip
Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow
They beat time with a coffin lid
If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers
out of the trolley car it's a great age…”

Richard Huelsenbeck

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“Have you seen the fish that have been standing in front of the
opera in cutaways
for the last two days and nights..?
Ah ah ye great devils – ah ah ye keepers of bees and commandments
With a bow wow wow with a bow woe woe who does today not know
what our Father Homer wrote…”

Richard Huelsenbeck

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

“As Arp and I are sitting in the large living room of my house on Central Park in November 1958, we try again and again to understand the significance of Dada for ourselves and for others. Many elements surfaced in me and in the 'Fantastic Prayers' [his poems Phantastische Gebete, Zurich 1916] at the same time; resistance against the 'civilization' we live in, fury about a purely factual world which leaves out personality and thus creative power, the means of irony and underlying religiousness. Ball turned religious during the times of dadaism, Arp is a religious person today, and I have always been one, without wanting to realize it, perhaps without knowing it.”

Richard Huelsenbeck

Quote in his 'Preface' by Richard Huelsenbeck, New York, November 1958, in Phantastische Gebete; published by Arche Verlag, Zurich, 1960 (transl. by Johannes Beilharz, 2000)

Richard Huelsenbeck Quotes

“The dissection of words into sounds is contrary to the purpose of language and applies musical principles to an independent realm whose symbolism is aimed at a logical comprehension of one’s environment.... the value of language depends on comprehensibility rather than musicality”

Richard Huelsenbeck

as quoted in The Sound of Poetry / The poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin; University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 310, note 22
a critic on the sound-poetry of Dadaist Hugo Ball

“There is a difference between sitting quietly in Switzerland [Dada in Zurich] and bedding down on a vulcano, as we did in Berlin.”

Richard Huelsenbeck

quote from his later memories on Dada; as quoted in Looking at Dada, eds. Sarah Ganz Blythe & Edward D. Powers - The Museum of Modern Art New York, ISBN: 087070-705-1; p. 4
Huelsenbeck left in 1917 neutral Swiss (Zurich) for war-torn German Berlin]

“Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions... I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation.”

Richard Huelsenbeck

Quote of Huelsenbeck, in 'Dada Lives', Transition no. 25 (Autumn 1936), as cited in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (1951)

“[ Tinguely is a] Meta-Dadaist… [who had] fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion.”

Richard Huelsenbeck

Quote of w:Richard Huelsenbeck (1961), as cited in Calvin Tomkins (1965) Ahead of the game: four versions of avant-garde, p. 160

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