In June 1920, the German artist Georg Scholz received an urgent dispatch to his home in the small town of Grötzingen, near Karlsruhe—an invitation to show his work in the forthcoming First International Dada Fair in Berlin. This irreverent exhibition featured more than 170 objects that its organizers referred to as “products” (“Erzeugnisse”). [1] Large format text posters and oversized photographic portraits called down from the gallery walls and asserted that Dada was enormous, expansive, and...

In 1951, Tristan Tzara looked back upon Dada and its works and attempted to summarize the breadth of their aggression: “Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety.” [1] For Tzara, however, this had a specific goal: to “direct . . . [their] attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (Tzara, “Introduction,” 404). [2] In many ways, Dadaist poetry uniquely embraced and embodied these...