Abstract
In aplethora of memoirs, the Dadaists retrospectively interpreted and reinterpreted their own history. In the process, they also redefined their position between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. This paper traces how Raoul Hausmann and Richard Huelsenbeck, in their memoir texts between 1920 and 1972, claimed elements of an aesthetics of autonomy, which they had previously rejected, for their own oeuvre. At the same time, it will provide examples of traces of the authors’ historiographic authority in earlyDada research,which partly adopted the autonomyaesthetic revisions. The extensive memoir literature, which has not yet been examined as a genre in its own right,will be understood as a continuation of Dadaist media tactics by other means and thus rediscovered for future research.
