Early life and Simbolul years Tzara was born in
Moinești,
Bacău County, in the
historical region of
Western Moldavia. His parents were
Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke
Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock ( Zibalis). In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing
Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague
Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer. Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established
Symbolist authors, active within
Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor
Adrian Maniu (an
Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included
N. Davidescu,
Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo,
Emil Isac,
Claudia Millian,
Ion Minulescu,
I. M. Rașcu,
Eugeniu Sperantia,
Al. T. Stamatiad,
Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, and
Constantin T. Stoika, as well as journalist and lawyer
Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism,
Alexandru Macedonski. '' circle in 1915. From left: Tzara,
M. H. Maxy,
Ion Vinea, and
Jacques G. Costin Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping
Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian
Paul Cernat sees
Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's
modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as
Ion Minulescu and
Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the
Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in
Gârceni,
Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the
Romanian Kingdom kept out of
World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal
Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature
Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an
anti-war and anti-
nationalist current, which progressively accommodated
anti-establishment messages.
Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's
Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915,
Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's
Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem
Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl"). In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother, Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the
local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the
Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a
pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the
interwar period. It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the
German Hugo Ball, an
anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife
Emmy Hennings, a
music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the
Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for
performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like
Hans Arp,
Arthur Segal,
Otto van Rees, and
Max Oppenheimer, and
Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret". According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national
folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer
Richard Huelsenbeck.
Birth of Dada plaque commemorating the birth of Dada It was in this milieu that
Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a
monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on
stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the
Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of
Alfred Jarry,
André Gide,
Christian Morgenstern,
Jean-Pierre Brisset,
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Jacques Vaché,
Marcel Duchamp, and
Francis Picabia. In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote:
"[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale'' [French for 'international magazine']."'' Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist
Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "
hobby horse" and a
German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the
Kru languages of
West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified
Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various
Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada
vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater." He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen
Louis Aragon,
André Breton,
Paul Éluard,
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and
Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. He was at the time the lover of
Maja Kruscek, who was a student of
Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering. As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian
Futurists, rejecting the
militarist and proto-
fascist stance of their leader
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist
Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara. The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the
Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist
Giorgio de Chirico and with the German
Expressionist journal
Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of
Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the
Austro-Hungarian Expressionist
Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with
Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet
Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly
left-wing disciples in the German Empire —
George Grosz,
John Heartfield,
Johannes Baader,
Kurt Schwitters,
Walter Mehring,
Raoul Hausmann,
Carl Einstein,
Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother
Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled
Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate
collage works of Schwitters and
Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada. As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola,
Rafael Lasso de la Vega,
Igor Stravinsky,
Vicente Huidobro,
Francesco Meriano and
Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the
Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the
bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (
see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a
duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist
Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the
Allies and
Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective
propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918
Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems"). A major event took place in autumn 1918, when
Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of
391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his
nihilistic views on art and reason. In the
United States, Picabia,
Man Ray and
Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and
anti-art into the
stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by
Susanne Perrottet,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of
Käthe Wulff,
Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and
Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated
Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show. Following the November 1918
Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and
Otto Flake began publishing
Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of
communist revolutions, in particular the
October Revolution and the
German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the
Constructivist-inspired workshop
Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem
Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada ,
Jane Heap, and
John Rodker , French nationalist newspaper in the 1920s,
archives Charmet. In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and
Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine
Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-
Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down
Boulevard Raspail through a
triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. When Picabia began publishing a new series of
391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." At around that time, he met American author
Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple
Robert and
Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces). Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or
Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were
Jean Cocteau,
Paul Dermée and
Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by
hoaxes and
false advertising, announcing that the
Hollywood film star
Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the
Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the
working class. Tzara's melody,
Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's
Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage. The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian
Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter
Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists
Camil Petrescu and
Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an
agent of influence for the
Central Powers during the war.
Eugen Lovinescu, editor of
Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation , site of the 1921 "Dada excursion" By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with
Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers. Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst,
Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at
Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group,
Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or
Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in
Tyrol"). Tzara also visited
Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause. Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper
Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing
Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems.
Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to
esotericism and fascism. In March, Breton initiated the
Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and
Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the
Supreme War Council. responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in
Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the
Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions." In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included
Erik Satie,
Theo van Doesburg,
Serge Charchoune,
Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
Marcel Duchamp,
Ossip Zadkine,
Jean Metzinger,
Ilia Zdanevich, and
Man Ray. During an associated soirée,
Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play
The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which
Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date. Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his
391, enlisting collaborations from
Clément Pansaers and
Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first
Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the
Constructivist artist
El Lissitzky on the magazine
G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the
Yugoslav-
Slovenian magazine
Tank (edited by
Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play
Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of
Serge Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the
Seven Dada Manifestos.
Marxist thinker
Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends. In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by
Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine
Integral, where
Ilarie Voronca and
Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "
permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego". In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married
Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned
Austrian architect
Adolf Loos, a former representative of the
Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of
Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to
The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by
Eugene Jolas's magazine
transition in reply to Stein's memoir
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a
megalomaniac. The poet became involved in further developing
Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and
Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "
exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend
René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War Alarmed by the establishment of
Adolf Hitler's
Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of
anti-fascism, and was close to the
French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by
Kurt Schwitters in
Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals,
ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the
Republican forces. Alongside
Soviet reporter
Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited
Madrid, which was besieged by the
Nationalists (
see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems
Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against
Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved. Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism,
Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of
Utopia, which combined communist messages with
Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the
party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies. However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer
René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist
Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of
William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with
Bolshevik leader
Vladimir Lenin. Historian
Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with
Stalinism and shunned
Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of
socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes. He was in
Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat
Varian Fry, were seeking to escape
Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-
totalitarian socialist
Victor Serge, anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright
Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet
René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and
Benjamin Péret, as well as artists
Max Ernst,
André Masson,
Wifredo Lam,
Jacques Hérold,
Victor Brauner and
Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new
card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights. In December 1944, five months after the
Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to ''
L'Éternelle Revue'', a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard,
Elsa Triolet,
Eugène Guillevic,
Raymond Queneau,
Francis Ponge,
Jacques Prévert and painter
Pablo Picasso. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to
socialist realism. as part of a tour of the emerging
Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in
Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and the
Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist
International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based
Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries). In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate
Nazım Hikmet, a
Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a
cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by
Louis Durey and
Serge Nigg). His works of the period include, among others:
Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946),
Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946),
Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), ''De mémoire d'homme'' ("From a Man's Memory", 1950),
Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and
La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by
À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and
Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956
Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read
Irish author
Samuel Beckett's manuscript of
Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer
Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author
Attila József. and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend
Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years In October 1956, Tzara visited the
People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of
Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the
Soviet Union. In August 1960, one year after the
Fifth Republic had been established by
President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (
see Algerian War). Together with
Simone de Beauvoir,
Marguerite Duras,
Jérôme Lindon,
Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed
Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result,
Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned
French Broadcasting Service. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the
Cimetière du Montparnasse. ==Literary contributions==