DADA

Dada, a movement in art and literature which celebrated the irrational, was born in 1916 in tranquil, neutral Switzerland while the rest of Europe was engulfed in World War I.  There in Zurich a group of aesthetes gathered at the Cafe Voltaire.  This mixed bag of poets, painters, and war protesters included Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Hulsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara.  They decided to respond to the madness around them by creating an art movement based on nihilism and irrationality, one that would repudiate traditional artistic values and conventions and would shock and outrage bourgeois sensibilities.  Tristan Tzara, a Romanian-born poet and the group's leader, would later publish a series of seven manifestos ("I am neither for nor against, and I do not explain, for I hate sense") and the first poems and essays in the anarchically scrambled language that the movement espoused.


from  Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, SMITHMARK Publishers, 1995