Totenklagen e Klangfiguren. L’esperienza della guerra nelle poesie sonore di Hugo Ball e nel dadaismo zurighese

The article aims at exploring the artistic and literary performances of Dada-Zurich (1916) and at considering its subversive approach to the linguistic and artistic tradition as a response to World War I. According with Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory about the crisis and decadence of the modern society, and with Kandinskij’s total work of art, the “interact” aspect of Dada, its simultaneous use of different languages and different genres, such as poetry, painting and music, should break up the old system of values, in order to create a new one by regressing to an ancient, primitive and archetypical stage of human being. The article will focus especially on Hugo Ball and on the analysis of some of his sound poems as a representative example of the new scene of avant-garde art and culture. In his attempt to find the “archetype” in art, Hugo Ball’s poems evoke a mystical union between words and images, which is supposed to disclose a sacred and uncorrupted world and to overcome the world crash of the epoch and the modern “necrophilia”.