WALTER MEHRING — Mais où sont les neiges Dada… Lecture invitation, Goethe-Institut, Paris, 1966

Goethe-Institut, 17 avenue d’Iéna, Paris (XVIᵉ), Tuesday 25 October 1966, 21 heures. Original invitation to a lecture by Walter Mehring, organised by the Association pour l’étude du mouvement Dada. Single-colour typographic printing on cream card stock, 13.5 × 10.5 cm. Unprinted verso.

Condition: Very good. Light age toning, faint spotting and minor edge and corner wear.

A writer, poet and political cabaret author, Mehring was closely associated with Berlin Dada and contributed to publications including the Dada Almanach. By 1966 he had become one of the movement’s surviving witnesses, looking back across the distance created by exile, war and the disappearance of its original networks.

The lecture took place during the year of Dada’s fiftieth anniversary, when the Association was actively converting the movement’s dispersed history into publications, exhibitions and archives. Its members had issued the Revue de l’Association pour l’étude du mouvement Dada in 1965 and helped organise the anniversary exhibition shown in Paris and Zurich in 1966–67.

Mehring’s handwritten draft for this exact lecture is preserved by the Getty Research Institute. The archive describes it as an account of his Dada activities, publications and the movement’s aftermath, including precise biographical recollections and a reference to a portrait of him by Robert Delaunay.

A single evening announced on a small card; the spoken recollection survives elsewhere as manuscript, while the invitation records when and where that memory entered public circulation.

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