His best friend thought Friedrich was lucky. His family had a good home and enough money, and in Germany in the early 1930s, many were unemployed. But when Hitler came to power, things began to change. Friedrich was expelled from school, and then his mother died and his father was deported. For Friedrich was Jewish.

"Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer's birthplace," writes Hans Richter, the artist and filmmaker closely associated with this radical movement from its earliest days. Here he records and traces Dada's history, from its inception in wartime Zurich to its collapse in Paris in the 1920s, when many of its members joined the Surrealist movement, to the present day when its spirit reemerged in the 1960s in movements such as Pop Art. This absorbing eyewitness narrative is enlivened by extensive use of Dada documents, illustrations, and texts by fellow...