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So far this chapter has considered some different potential meanings and understandings of imagination that Höch could have been influenced by in formulating her own concept of imagination. It has briefly explored some of the contested history of imagination, including two key moments, firstly, in Aristotle’s writing, when imagination becomes a human faculty, and then in the modern period when Kant’s revolutionary shift overturns the idea of imagination as secondary to reason and sensation. The second part of this chapter will focus in more detail on the how this debate was reflected in art, and how Höch’s work intervenes. Additionally, it will consider how concepts of imagination are relevant to transformation and therefore to Höch’s proposal that she can change people’s perception through her work.

Following Kant, responses to the idea of a transcendental imagination fall into roughly realist and idealist groups, with realists focusing on sensation and idealists on spiritual and visionary sources of image. The aim here is to explore how this divide manifested itself within Berlin Dada and other art movements with which Höch was associated, and how, subsequent to a combination of political events and the philosophical context, the theorisation of imagination became aligned with different aesthetic approaches. I argue that this offers an interpretation of Höch’s work differing from those resulting from a biographical approach or one based exclusively on the social context.

In order to concentrate the discussion more closely on Höch’s immediate context, two related pairs of concepts at the heart of the Berlin Dadaist imagination will be considered. These are: matter and image, via the proxy separation between material and spirit. Physical matter was a current topic of debate in the early 1900s in Berlin, for example, in the writing of Bergson and in the new discoveries in physics by Albert Einstein. In Matter and Memory, 1896, Bergson defines image as ‘a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the “thing”

and the “representation” ’ (Bergson, 2005, p.10) [1896]. There is some evidence Höch was familiar with Bergson’s writing; Richard Sheppard notes that Höch’s library included a copy of Bergson’s Das Lachen [1900] (Sheppard, 1979b, p.203 n.65).

Bergson’s understanding of perception is in opposition to an idealist claim that objects do not exist unless they are perceived. Although there were divisions and nuances, the Dadaists tended to reject the transcendental in favour of material, although, as will be seen, the picture is complex. In their engagement with aesthetics in relation to the

Ideal, to subjectivity and matter, Berlin Dada was critical of Kant, with Raoul Hausmann treating Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself as ‘an object of mirth’

(Sheppard, 2000, p.176). Sheppard explains also that Richard Huelsenbeck was

‘contemptuous of Kantian metaphysics’ (Sheppard, 2000, p.176). Sheppard explains Dada’s treatment of reality as stemming from their critique of modernity. This involved a rejection of the idea of reality as being anthropomorphic, with humanity at the pinnacle. It also involved a rejection of the humanist belief in the supremacy of reason. It did not represent, however, a complete opposition to reason. Dadaists opposed the view that reason is at the apex in a fixed model of reality, and preferred a dynamic model in which reason is engaged by perception and unconscious drives (Sheppard, 2000, pp.175–182). Dadaists ‘assimilated the view of several leading psychoanalysts that reason needed first to understand and then to guide, as far as that was possible, the unconscious drives within human nature’ (Sheppard, 2000, p.181).

In Sheppard’s analysis of Dada, rejection of Kantian metaphysics relates to an engagement with psychoanalysis, Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche (Sheppard, 2000).

Hausmann and Johannes Baader aligned Dada with Mach’s anti-metaphysical philosophy (Benson, 1987b, pp.9–10). Höch demonstrates a degree of opposition to the Ideal when she explains that the purpose of the official photographs of the Prussian army, which superimposed heads onto uniformed bodies was ‘to idealize reality, whereas the Dada photomonteur set out to give to something entirely unreal all the appearances of something real that had actually been photographed’ (Höch, 1959b, p.69). Sheppard writes that Dada was a ‘very specific and penetrating attack on post-Renaissance Humanist culture’ (Sheppard, 1979b, p.175). Hausmann stated that Dadaist were against humanism (Benson, 1987a, p.55, n49). Sheppard explains that this opposition to humanism stemmed from a political objection to the art of classical humanism, which was seen either as conservative or removed from politics (Sheppard, 2000, p.346).

Höch and the other Berlin Dadaists identified a political position from the divide between idealism and realism. Höch’s Mausoleum für eine Utopie (‘Mausoleum for a Utopia’), 1967, Figure 13, suggests a pessimistic attitude towards the utopian ideas associated with German Idealism. Berlin Dadaists opposed idealism because they viewed it as leading to the elevation of particular individuals as more able to perceive and understand, which they saw as hierarchical, elitist, and ‘apolitical’ in the sense of being reactionary or leading to authoritarian conclusions. Further, the First World War and subsequent events in Germany had shattered utopian ideals for some artists,

through their preference for contact with found material in their art. Höch’s processing of photographs as relics of reality is characteristic of an anti-idealist strand. Wassily Kandinsky, by contrast, took an anti-materialist approach, prioritising spiritual revolution, writing that:

Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of

materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip (Kandinsky, 2006, p.6).

In counterpoint to the transcendental art of Expressionism, the Berlin Dada group emphasised the empirical and the material above the intuitive and spiritual.

Höch connects a call for revolutionary art with particular aesthetic choices and practices. In 1921 she signed an open letter, appearing in Der Gegner II and published in Berlin by Malik Verlag, in which a group of artists opposed the Novembergruppe leadership’s lack of commitment to ‘the Revolution’ (Dix et al., 2003, p.269) [1921].

The Novembergruppe was, according to the signatories, ‘founded ostensibly by artists who wanted to realize a revolutionary desire’ (Dix et al., 2003, p.267) [1921]. It was set up as a radical art organisation, formed in response to the revolution in Germany of November 1918, following the end of the First World War (Harrison and Wood, 2003a, p.265). A draft Novembergruppe manifesto from 1918 insists on unlimited freedom of expression and demands the reorganisation of art education and the

‘transformation of museums’ from biased collections of works of scholarly value into

‘people’s art centres’ (Harrison and Wood, 2003b, p.266). However, by 1921 the revolutionary desire and commitment of the Novembergruppe was doubted by some of its members. The Novembergruppe was criticised by Dix et al, including Höch, for submitting to the authorities’ political demands that they exclude paintings by Rudolf Schlichter and Otto Dix in their annual November exhibition (Dix et al., 2003, p.268) [1921]. This was not a local dispute over the specific content of one exhibition, but extended to criticism of the ‘aesthetic-formalistic pedantry’ of the individualist Expressionism of some Novembergruppe members. The dissenters called for a new objectivity or non-objective art-as-protest (Dix et al., 2003, pp.268–269) [1921]. The criticism of the Novembergruppe connected revolutionary art to an emphasis on material and against idealism. They rejected some aspects of Expressionism, such as those described by George Grosz as ‘the old rigmarole about the sublimity and holiness and transcendental character of art’ (Grosz, 2003, p.273) [1920]. They also sought to associate art with the productive base rather than the superstructure of

institutions and culture to bring it into alignment with a Marxist (materialist) framework. Höch further connects the social order to aesthetics in a reference to the Monistenbund. Speaking about her friend Otto Freundlich, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, Höch recalled that:

Otto sympathized with us from the very start, because he shared our pacifist views, those of the Monistenbund, and also our determination to reject all the moral and aesthetic standards of the existing social order, which then seemed to us to be doomed (Höch, 1959b, p.67).

The Monistenbund was an organisation formed to combine science and religion, against idealist ideas of mysticism and transcendence. It was part of a movement that aiming to replace orthodox or traditional religion with science as a secularised spiritualism.

Positioning Dada and Höch as material realists, however, is not a straightforward conclusion. Timothy Benson argues in Mysticism, Materialism and the Machine in Dada, 1987, that Dada set about overturning Expressionist assumptions with almost an antithetical embrace of materialism in place of the spiritual emphasis of artists like Kandinsky, but what developed was an accommodation of materialism which nonetheless attempted to secularise spiritual and mystical beliefs (Benson, 1987a). Benson describes this as:

an exceptionally shrewd strategy that accommodated and promoted materialism and – contrary to materialism as a philosophy – served the secularization of the mystical beliefs among artists in a time of great artistic and social crisis (Benson, 1987a, p.47).

Expressionists and Dadaists shared anti-militarist ideas and rejected reactionary culture and economics, but they disagreed over an effective response. Dada is therefore both a rejection and a continuation of Expressionism; some Expressionist ideas were rejected as inconsistent with Dadaist aims and others were further developed.

In Dada the division between realism and idealism, consequent to the Kantian imagination, is reflected in tensions between the treatment of material and spirit.

Within Dada there were divisions between rational and materialist concerns and the irrational, psychic and mystical interests of some. Sheppard explains that:

Where Christian mysticism tends, in the end, towards a dualism, stressing a final distinction between God and Creation, soul and matter, Dada is, on the whole, monistic, affirming the unity of life-force and material world and the dependence of the human psyche on the rest of creation (Sheppard, 1979a, p.100).

The monistic idea that both spirit and matter comprise one substance resolves an apparent contradiction in the Dadaists’ position. Sheppard describes a complex relationship between materialism and spiritualism in Dada and a clear split. One group has an interest in mysticism, while still rejecting the Expressionist ‘cult of ecstasy’ for fear it would ‘destroy their sense of balance amid opposites, or take them away from the realities of society and politics, or lead them towards totalitarianism of one kind or another’ (Sheppard, 1979a, p.99).³⁶ Further, Sheppard identifies Berlin Dada as inclined toward an interest in mysticism: ‘The mystical interest is less evident in other Dada centres but it was certainly there in Berlin’ (Sheppard, 1979a, p.96). Sheppard argues that while Dada was not a religious phenomenon, it was ‘fed by an interest’ in mysticism and religion (Sheppard, 1979a, p.93). The Zürich artists Sheppard identifies as interested in mysticism are Arp, Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball and Tzara. All used religious imagery; Arp and Tzara both used the ‘mystical image of the dark light, the light that is so bright that it seems like a deep darkness’; Ball and Huelsenbeck used religious sounding language in their poetry (Sheppard, 1979a, p.95). Höch possessed a copy of a German translation of the Tao Te Ching (Sheppard, 1979a, p.96). Baader wrote a book titled 14 Letters of Christ. The mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal features in Friedländer’s Schöpferische Indifferenz (‘Creative Indifference’) (Friedländer, 2009b) [1918]. Benson writes that Hausmann and Baader were ‘vitally interested in the mystical understanding of conscious experience’ in spite of an abhorrence for the occult (Benson, 1987a, p.47). Sheppard points out that an interest in mysticism is not a uniform characteristic of Dada but is peculiar to one branch (Sheppard, 1979a, pp.92–100). He identifies a division between New York, Paris and Cologne Dada and elements of Zürich and Berlin Dada, centred on the issue of whether there is a pattern within the flux of reality. An interest in mysticism is found among those Dadaists who affirmed a secret pattern among the chaos of Nature (Sheppard, 1979a, p.98). The mystical strand of Dada, including Höch, searched for the divine within material.

36 The idea of balance amid opposites will be returned to in detail in Chapter two in a discussion of Friedländer’s concept of creative indifference, which finds a creative principle at the mid-point between polar opposites.

Figure 13.