Final relaxation

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Last Loosening is a Dadaist text by Walter Serner from 1918. In aphoristic form, the manifesto protests against all attempts to preserve meaning and create meaning.

Emergence

Serner, who emigrated as a pacifist in 1914 from Germany to Switzerland and after the Dadaists to Hugo Ball was, wrote in 1918 in his travels between Zurich, Geneva, Lugano, Paris and Italy the manifesto in 1920 under the title Last easing manifest dada published has been. It was published in the Silbergäule series by the Hanoverian publisher Paul Steegemann . The last loosening appeared in a greatly expanded form in 1927 as part of a seven-volume complete edition with the subtitle "A handbook for impostors and those who want to become one".

content

In aphorisms from a line to over a page in length, Serner spreads typical Dadaistic senselessness. For example, the 6th aphorism begins with

“It is common knowledge that a dog is not a hammock; less that without this delicate hypothesis the grease fist would fall off painters; and not at all that interjections are the most appropriate: Weltanschauungen are mixtures of vocabulary. "

At the end of the chapter "Blague" the author says with the last two sentences of the 58th aphorism:

“I'd love to hear that these pages are the LAST crap that's been written. I would be very happy."

On April 9, 1919, Serner performed parts of Last Loosening at the Dada soiree Non plus ultra in Zurich. There was an uproar in the audience and Serner was chased off the stage.

The literary scholar Jörg Drews called Last Loosening a “brilliant analysis of the age of perfect nihilism”. Ernst Jünger mentioned reading several times in his diaries Seventy Gone Away , and the title became for him a ' key word ' for epoch-making phenomena of disintegration.

expenditure

  • Final relaxation. manifest dada . Hanover / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich: Steegemann , 1920, reissued by Andreas Puff-Trojan in Manesse Verlag Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7175-2148-8 (online see web links)
  • Final relaxation. A handbook for impostors and those who want to become one (extended edition, 1927)
  • Walter Serner's books. Cassette in seven volumes . Berlin: Steegemann, 1927
  • The entire work. Volumes 1-8, 3 supplement volumes . Ed .: Thomas Milch. Erlangen, Munich: Renner, 1979–1992, Vol. 7: Last Loosening. A handbook for impostors and those who want to become one (1981)
  • Collected works in ten volumes . Edited by Thomas Milch. Munich: Goldmann, 1988, Vol. 9: Last Loosening. A handbook for impostors and those who want to become one

Web links