PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 182
Hans Leybold
THE YOUNG DADAIST
Hans Leybold was born into a middle-class family in Frankfurt am Main on April 2, 1892.
He was raised in Hamburg where he completed school at the age of nineteen.
Leybold then joined the German Army. In his compulsory year of conscription, young Hans impressed his superior officers so much that he was offered a commission and embarked on a military career. Taking a leave of absence to attend university, Leybold traveled to Munich to study German literature.
It was in Munich where Leybold found his place with a crowd of poets and authors responsible for the post-war Dada movement. These figures included Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Alfred Henschke (a.k.a. Klabund), Johannes R. Becher, and Franz Jung. But of all these influential people, it was Hugo Ball who became Leybold’s closest friend. Ball introduced Leybold to expressionism… and soon, the two men were producing poetry together under the pseudonym Ha Hu Baley.
Dadaism consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society. instead, they expressed nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. Such art spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaists also expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism. They maintained political affinities with the radical left and far-left wing.
In the company of these authors, Leybold experimented wildly with technique and imagery in his poetry. Influenced heavily by Alfred Kerr and Friedrich Nietzsche, Leybold sought simultaneously to develop his skills and deconstruct poetry itself. In doing so, his studies went neglected! Instead, Leybold began to edit and contribute to expressionist magazines (such as Die Aktion) and his own work, the short-lived Revolution. In the latter, Leybold and his colleagues issued their literary manifesto:
“Protect yourself against responsibilities! Hit out: against old household rubbish! And if some valuable piece gets torn up in the process: what does it matter? You respected people! You well-polished ones! You bigwigs! We ought to stick our tongues out at you! Boys, you’ll say. Old men! we’ll reply.”
DEATH AND LEGACY
In August 1914, the Great War erupted across Europe… and Leybold was immediately called up as an active reservist. Weeks later, he was seriously wounded during the five-day Siege of Namur (August 20-25, 1914). Leybold was evacuated to a casualty clearing hospital.
In Itzehoe (northwest of Hamburg) Leybold recovered rapidly from his wound. But on the night he returned to his regiment (September 8, 1914), Hans Leybold committed suicide with a gunshot to the head! His death was never fully explained, although rumors persisted that Hans had syphilis… and he had given up on survival following his wound at the age of only twenty-two.
The works of Hans Leybold were eventually collected many years after his death since he never had an independently-published book. Leybold is now recognized as an important influence on both Dadism and German expressionism.