Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution

Last updated

The Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution was the name of the political party set up by the Berlin Dada movement following World War I.

The Berlin Dadaists supported the Spartacist rising of 1918-1919, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. When this revolution was crushed and Liebknecht and Luxemburg killed, the Dadas continued to seek power through democratic means. They were present at the Congress of the Weimar Congress but remained relatively politically powerless throughout the era of the Weimar Republic, during which time they did gain some infamy for their direct action campaigns and artistic innovations.

In the year 1919 in Berlin, the group outlined the Dadaist ideas of radical communism. [1]

Members included: Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, Tristan Tzara, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Hans Arp, Franz Jung, Eugen Ernst, A.R. Meyer and Richard Huelsenbeck. [2] Their shocking political tactics and social antics influenced many later counter-cultural movements, such as the Youth International Party and the Punk Rock movement.

Related Research Articles

Dada Avant-garde art movement in the early 20th century

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.

Rosa Luxemburg Polish Marxist philosopher and revolutionary socialist (1871–1919)

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the Spartacus League, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Born and raised in an assimilated Jewish family in Poland, she became a German citizen in 1897.

Communist Party of Germany Far-left political party active in Germany from 1918 to 1956

The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.

Council communism Form of libertarian Marxism constructed by the German Communist Party

Council communism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy. Strong in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1920s, council communism continues to exist as a small minority in the left.

German Revolution of 1918–1919 Political revolution in 1918–1919 in Germany

The German Revolution or November Revolution was a civil conflict in the German Empire at the end of the First World War that resulted in the replacement of the German federal constitutional monarchy with a democratic parliamentary republic that later became known as the Weimar Republic. The revolutionary period lasted from November 1918 until the adoption of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919. Among the factors leading to the revolution were the extreme burdens suffered by the German population during the four years of war, the economic and psychological impacts of the German Empire's defeat by the Allies, and growing social tensions between the general population and the aristocratic and bourgeois elite.

Hannah Höch German artist (1889–1979)

Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.

Leo Jogiches

Leon "Leo" Jogiches, also commonly known by the party name Jan Tyszka, was a Polish Marxist revolutionary and politician, active in Poland, Lithuania and Germany.

Johannes Baader

Johannes Baader, originally trained as an architect, was a German writer and artist associated with Dada in Berlin.

Anti-art Art rejecting prior definitions of art

Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art. The term is associated with the Dada movement and is generally accepted as attributable to Marcel Duchamp pre-World War I around 1914, when he began to use found objects as art. It was used to describe revolutionary forms of art. The term was used later by the Conceptual artists of the 1960s to describe the work of those who claimed to have retired altogether from the practice of art, from the production of works which could be sold.

Paul Levi German politician (1883–1930)

Paul Levi was a German Communist and Social Democratic political leader. He was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. After being expelled for publicly criticising Communist Party tactics during the March Action, he formed the Communist Working Organisation which in 1922 merged with the Independent Social Democratic Party. This party, in turn, merged with the Social Democratic Party a few months later and Levi became one of the leaders of its left wing.

<i>Die Rote Fahne</i>

Die Rote Fahne was a German newspaper originally founded in 1876 by Socialist Worker's party leader Wilhelm Hasselmann, and which has been since published on and off, at times underground, by German Socialists and Communists. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg famously published it in 1918 as organ of the Spartacus League.

Richard Müller (socialist) German socialist and historian (1880–1943)

Richard Müller was a German socialist and historian. Trained as a lathe-operator, Müller later became an industrial unionist and organizer of mass-strikes against World War I. In 1918 he was a leading figure of the council movement in the German Revolution. In the 1920s he wrote a three-volume history of the German Revolution.

Ernst Meyer (German politician) German politician (1887–1930)

Ernst Meyer was a German Communist political activist and politician and a general secretary of the KPD. He is best remembered as a founding member and top leader of the Communist Party of Germany and as the leader of that party's fraction in the Prussian Landtag. A political opponent of Ernst Thälmann, Meyer was moved out of the top party leadership after 1928, not long before his death of tuberculosis-related pneumonia at the age of 43.

During the First World War (1914–1918), the Revolutionary Stewards were shop stewards who were independent from the official unions and freely chosen by workers in various German industries. They rejected the war policies of the German Empire and the support which parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gave to these policies. They also played a role during the German Revolution of 1918–19.

Karl Liebknecht German politician and socialist revolutionary

Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht was a prominent German socialist and anti-militarist. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) beginning in 1900, he was one of its deputies in the Reichstag from 1912 to 1916, where he represented the left-revolutionary wing of the party. In 1916 he was expelled from the SPD's parliamentary group for his opposition to the political truce between all parties in the Reichstag while the war lasted. He twice spent time in prison, first for writing an anti-militarism pamphlet in 1907 and then for his role in a 1916 antiwar demonstration. He was released from the second under a general amnesty three weeks before the end of the First World War.

Spartacist uprising 1919 general strike in Berlin

The Spartacist uprising, also known as the January uprising (Januaraufstand), was a general strike and the accompanying armed struggles that took place in Berlin from January 5 to 12, 1919. It occurred in connection with the November Revolution that broke out following Germany's defeat in World War I. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, which favored a social democracy, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which wanted to set up a council republic similar to the one established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1914 Liebknecht and Luxemburg had founded the Marxist Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), which gave the uprising its popular name.

Johann Knief was a German communist newspaper editor, teacher and politician from Bremen.

Spartacus League World War I German Marxist revolutionary movement

The Spartacus League was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I. It was founded in August 1914 as the "International Group" by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD, as its left wing faction. During the November Revolution of 1918 that broke out across Germany at the end of the war, the Group re-established itself as a nationwide, non-party organization called the "Spartacus League" with the goal of instituting a soviet republic that would include all of Germany. It became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) when it was formed on 1 January 1919 and at that point ceased to exist as a separate entity.

Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany Former political party in Germany

The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany was a short-lived political party in Germany during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The organization was established in 1917 as the result of a split of anti-war members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), from the left of the party as well as the centre and the right. The organization attempted to chart a course between electorally oriented reformism on the one hand and Bolshevist revolutionism on the other. The organization was terminated in 1931 through merger with the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

Soviet democracy, or council democracy, is a political system in which the rule of the population by directly elected soviets is exercised. The councils are directly responsible to their electors and bound by their instructions using a delegate model of representation. Such an imperative mandate is in contrast to a free mandate, in which the elected delegates are only responsible to their conscience. Delegates may accordingly be dismissed from their post at any time or be voted out (recall).

References