FLUiCHTe - Tzara/Schwitters 1940
Note on above recorded text collage:
In the very same year of 1940 Merz-dadaist Kurt Schwitters and Dada-surrealist Tristan Tzara both put their terrible experience of fleeing from Nazi persecution in a text with the very same title in their respective languages (German and French): Flucht by Schwitters and La Fuite by Tzara.
Both had been prominent figures in Dada thinking. In 1940, however, neither Schwitters nor Tzara apply dadaist techniques to write about their respective flight sufferings. Although the two texts are very different in length, form and breadth of content, I felt tempted to condense the core aspect of the experience of flight as a war consequence into one poem. Therewith in a way reuniting the two men who knew each other well, but didn’t have a chance to meet again after 1936, when Schwitters left Nazi Germany initially for Norway before in 1940 having to flee from there to Britain.
The impulse to create this collage came not least under the impression of the present situation of the flight of hundreds of thousands of people in Europe again 80 years on - fuite sur fuite s’est amassée (Tzara).
FLUiCHTe began as a collage comprising two different languages (German and French). In the undertaking of the task, the idea of a unifying language came up to carry the storyline and English suggested itself as I created this text collage for public performances in Britain. Like many poetic texts this one too will resonate most if read aloud.
The poem will be published in the next edition (Nr 25) of Dada/Surrealism
a journal of the University of Iowa
https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/dadasur/
