At the first International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, visitors looked up to find a stuffed effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head hanging from the ceiling. This episode traces how Dada grew from the Cabaret Voltaire, opened in neutral Zurich in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, into a movement that rewired modern art, music, and pop culture. We look at the cardboard masks, simultaneous poems in four languages, and sound poetry designed to cleanse language of propaganda, and the competing origin stories for the word Dada itself.

The conversation follows the movement to New York, where Duchamp’s ready-mades and the 1917 urinal titled Fountain dismantled centuries of art theory, and to Berlin, where George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch turned photomontage into a political weapon. We examine the marginalization of women like Hennings, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and possibly the true creator of Fountain, the philosophical war between Tristan Tzara’s destruction and Kurt Schwitters’s constructive Merz, and the 1923 theater riot where André Breton broke a writer’s arm with a cane before splitting off to found Surrealism.

• Why the Dadaists saw logic and rational discourse as the tools that justified the war
• How a ready-made forces the viewer’s brain to switch from beauty to analysis
• The 1917 letter suggesting Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven conceived Fountain
• Tzara’s cut-up technique and its path through Burroughs, Bowie, and Kurt Cobain
• From Frank Zappa to an Ultraman alien named Dada: the movement’s long afterlife