‘Jugendbewegung’: Gerhard Scholem as a figure of the German avant-garde

The purpose of this essay is to examine one of Gershom Scholem’s most obscure undertakings, a proto-Dadaist and antiwar text that he published, together with a few friends, during the first year of World War One. As is shown, this project has drawn heavily from the work of one of the leading avant-garde poets, later among the founding members of the Dada movement in Zurich, Hugo Ball. Discussed side by side, the works of Gershom Scholem and Hugo Ball offer a unique view onto the anti-war sentiment and the need for experimental language in an attempt to express a disdain so profound and fundamental that words and sentences seem unable to capture.