<P> "Berlin was a city of tightened stomachers, of mounting, thundering hunger, where hidden rage was transformed into a boundless money lust, and men's minds were concentrating more and more on questions of naked existence...Fear was in everybody's bones "- Richard Hülsenbeck </P> <P> The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups . Their activity and art were more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities . The intensely political and war - torn environment of Berlin had a dramatic impact on the ideas of Berlin Dadaists . Conversely, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically - driven, less political nature . </P> <P> In February 1918, while the Great War was approaching its climax, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and he produced a Dada manifesto later in the year . Following the October Revolution in Russia, by then out of the war, Hannah Höch and George Grosz used Dada to express communist sympathies . Grosz, together with John Heartfield, Höch and Hausmann developed the technique of photomontage during this period . </P> <P> After the war, the artists published a series of short - lived political magazines and held the First International Dada Fair,' the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920 . As well as work by the main members of Berlin Dada--Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Huelsenbeck and Heartfield--the exhibition also included the work of Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter, Johannes Baargeld and others . In all, over 200 works were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written on the walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937 . Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition lost money, with only one recorded sale . </P>

Berlin dada artists created a variation on collage called