Hugo Ball Add a review

Hugo Ball (German: [bal]; 22 February 1886 – 14 September 1927) was a German author, poet, dramatist, and journalist, and one of the principal founders of the Dada movement in European art in Zürich in 1916. Among other accomplishments, he was a pioneer in the development of sound poetry. With the poet and cabaret performer Emmy Hennings, whom he later married, he founded the Cabaret Voltaire, around which the Zürich Dada group formed.

Ball's career extended beyond Dada. Before the First World War he participated in German Expressionist theatre and literature; during the war he became a pacifist and was influenced by anarchist thought. After withdrawing from Dada, he worked as a political journalist and cultural critic. Following his return to Catholicism in 1920, he increasingly devoted himself to Christian mysticism, hagiography, theology, and the history of German intellectual culture.

His best known works include the "Dada Manifesto", the Dadaist nonsense poem "Karawane," the poetry collection 7 schizophrene Sonette, the edited diary Flight out of Time, the Christian anarchist polemic book Critique of the German Intelligentsia and the novels Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor and Tenderenda the Fantast. His later works include Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), devoted to three early Christian saints and mystical writers, and a biography of his friend Hermann Hesse (1927).