author
Emmy Ball-Hennings
1885–1948
A pioneering voice of early Dada, she moved between poetry, performance, and cabaret with a life shaped by hardship, reinvention, and artistic daring. Best known as a co-founder of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, she helped give one of the 20th century’s most radical art movements its human spark.
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About the author
Born Emma Maria Cordsen in Flensburg, Germany, Emmy Ball-Hennings was a poet, singer, actress, and cabaret performer whose work crossed literary and performance worlds. Reliable sources describe her as a co-founder of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich with Hugo Ball in 1916, placing her at the center of the beginnings of Dada rather than at its edges.
Before and alongside that role, she built a reputation as a performer and writer in German-speaking bohemian circles. Accounts of her life emphasize both her artistic range and the instability she lived through, and that mix of vulnerability and boldness runs through how she is remembered today.
She died on August 10, 1948, in Sorengo, near Lugano, Switzerland. Although Hugo Ball is often foregrounded in standard histories of Dada, Emmy Ball-Hennings is increasingly recognized as one of the movement’s essential founding figures and one of its most compelling literary personalities.