Few art movements have taken as sharp of a leftward turn as the Dadaists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Emerging from the global shock of World War I, the antiestablishment “disgust” that embodied Dada’s conception in Zürich quickly transformed into an expression of proletarian struggle after the Bolshevik Revolution. German artists like Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Georg Grosz, Richard Huelsenbeck, brothers John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde, and Johannes Baader developed sharp criticisms of capitalist revisionism in their expressive paintings, collages, and publications. They were such effective propagandists that their work was banned from public exhibition.

As the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) sought to manufacture consent around reformism, the Berlin Dadaists organized with the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), elevating their work from conceptual plaything to defined political commentary. The origins of the word “Dada” remain contested — some say it’s a nonsensical term, others point to a chance discovery in a French-German dictionary — but its political awakening reveals art’s potential for disrupting liberal malaise during times of crisis.