SOURCE: An introduction to Critique of the German Intelligentsia by Hugo Ball, translated by Brian L. Harris, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. vii-xl.

In the following essay, Rabinbach analyzes Ball's polemic against German nationalism in Critique of the German Intelligentsia, establishing the work's historical contexts and noting its themes and anti-Semitism.

I

Hugo Ball's Critique of the German Intelligentsia is simultaneously a historical document and a provocation. A passionate indictment of the German intelligentsia for its chauvinism in the First World War, the Critique is also an extraordinary instance of the messianic politics that inaugurated our epoch. Above all, it is the consummate performance of an extraordinary career that, in only a few years, took Ball from Munich's expressionist avant-garde to the founding of Dada in Zurich, to theological anarchism and antiwar politics in Bern, and, only a year and a half later, to the spiritual refuge of the...