In the middle of the First World War, the literary-artistic movement DADA (French for "rocking horse") was born in Zurich. The name was chosen at random from the Dictionnaire Larousse and the random was to remain a defining characteristic of Dadaism. Provocative nonsense, the worthless, the absurd was part of the artistic programme, with which the Dadaists attempted to revolt against conventional bourgeois society, which had been called into question by the war, as well as against all conventional conventions in art.
