Tenderenda der Phantast: Ein Roman, der zum Theater des Geistes wird
Tenderenda the Fantast: A Novel that Becomes Theater of the Mind

Summary/Abstract: This article explores Hugo Ball’s novel Tenderenda der Phantast as an intermedial text, written between 1914 and 1920, in a period marked by the First World War, exile in Switzerland, and Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada. The novel embodies the essential components of a total artwork — text, music, dance, and painting — translated into language and recombined in an experimental structure. Fragmentary in form and hybrid in genre, Tenderenda consists of prose, hymns, sound poetry, dialogues, and stage-like directions, which together create a performative textuality. Through these devices, the work not only destabilises silent reading processes but also simulates a “theatre of the mind,” where the reader is invited to re-stage a synaesthetic performance.Central motifs such as dance, musicality, grotesque imagery, and the leitmotif of death evoke the structure of a Totentanz. By examining its multimedia strategies and its tension between chaos and order, I argue that Ball’s text can be read as a literary Gesamtkunstwerk, which transforms language into a “magical complex image” and redefines the act of reading as an imaginative performance. In this way, Tenderenda reshapes perception and thought, pointing toward the possibility of cultural renewal and broader social transformation.

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