Hugo Ball

(1886 - 1927)

At No. 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, across the street from the home of a Russian émigré friend named Vladimir Lenin, German poet and playwright Hugo Ball opened (with Emmy Hennings, who later became his wife) the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. The political philosopher Carl Schmitt visited Ball in Sorengo, Switzerland, in 1924. “Ball,” wrote Schmitt, “is the founder of Dadaism and therefore also of Surrealism, i.e., the first in the field of aesthetics to rightly attack, to desperately protest against, the Terror-Charakter of modern reality.” 

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