SOURCE: "A Case of Dadaistic Ambivalence: Kurt Schwitters's Stramm-Imitations and 'An Anna Blume,'" in The German Quarterly, Vol. XLV, No. 1, January, 1972, pp. 47-56.

In the following essay, Thomson evaluates the ambiguous nature of Schwitters's "An Anna Blume" as art and anti-art, sense and nonsense, serious poetry and parody.

The recent revival of interest in Dada, accompanying such essentially neo-Dadaist phenomena as pop art, "happenings," and the like, has raised anew the question—properly, for it is a central one—of the Dadaists' attitude to their activities. The question is usually put in the form of contraries: Art or anti-art? Sense or nonsense? Purposeful experimentation or purposeless play? The antithetical formulation reflects a fundamental characteristic of Dadaism, an ambiguity and ambivalence which is quite basic, affecting the very roots of the Dadaistic product. (To say "work of art" would prejudge the issue.)

Not surprisingly in a movement as...