1886 - 1927

Born in Pirmasens (DE).

Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a year after moving there with his wife, Emmy Hennings. In doing so, he helped launch (and according to some accounts, named) the Dada Movement. After authoring one of the first Dada manifestos and some landmark sound poems, he grew disenchanted with how Dada was evolving, broke ties with the movement and relocated to the Swiss countryside with Hennings, where he wrote one of the first studies on the work of Hermann Hesse.