‘Behold the Buffoon’: Dada, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and the Sublime

Parodic humour was integral to Dada, and the influence of Nietzsche on dada is well known. However, the connections between buffoonery, Nietzsche and the anti-sublime in Dada have remained under-explored. This paper links key Dadaists in Berlin and Zà¼rich to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and to the Hanswurst – a tradition of German buffoonery – which Nietzsche deploys to counter the Schopenhauerian sublime.