The following is written by curator Timothy Shipe
Among the International Dada Archive’s latest acquisitions are several issues of the Berlin journal Neue Jugend, founded in early 1914 by two student poets, Heinz Barger and Friedrich Hollaender.
Neue Jugend is a telling example of how the Berlin dadaists managed to elude wartime government censorship. The journal published five issues before its editors were drafted to fight when Germany went to war in August 1914. A sixth issue, distinctly pro-war in tenor, was published in December, after which the journal went silent. Meanwhile, the young writer Wieland Herzfelde served in the German medical corps in Belgium, returning to Berlin in early 1915, expelled from the military for insubordination and deeply disillusioned by the massive slaughter he had witnessed. In Berlin he joined a circle of young writers and artists who, like Herzfelde, were seeking an outlet for their growing pacifist sentiments. Their ingenious solution was to purchase publishing rights to the dormant Neue Jugend.
Because the last issue had been staunchly pro-war, the authorities paid little attention to the journal as it resumed publication in July 1916 with a staunchly anti-war and internationalist orientation. Herzfelde and his associates managed to produce numbers 7 through 12 before the authorities took notice and banned the journal in early 1917. But the editors had one more trick up their sleeves. Taking advantage of a legal loophole, they were able to recast Neue Jugend as a “weekly” in newspaper format. Two issues of this “Wochenausgabe” appeared before it, too, was banned. But it is these two issues, with their radical page layout and avant-garde content, that mark the beginning of a Dada sensibility in Berlin.
By this time, Richard Huelsenbeck had returned from Zurich, where he had helped found the Dada movement. Herzfelde and his colleagues eagerly adopted this new movement, giving it a more overtly political flavor. The final, June 1917 issue of Neue Jugend is considered one of the masterpieces of dadaist page design. Now, with the recent acquisition of nos. 1 and 2 of the first series and no. 1 of the “Wochenausgabe,” we are just one issue short of holding a complete run of this major Berlin Dada publication.
