Witness History

BBC World Service

Witness History is a short BBC World Service podcast about history that takes you inside big moments from the past through first-hand testimony and archive. Each weekday, in around nine minutes, we revisit one moment that helped shape the world and hear it through the voice of someone who was there. Scientists, artists, campaigners, soldiers, leaders and everyday people tell their true stories. When you subscribe to Witness History, you’ll be taken inside turning points in world affairs, from West Africa’s fight back against Boko Haram in 2015, to the behind-closed-doors talks that led to the US-Cuba “thaw” and the surp...

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Witness History

Episodes (1000)

Friday Dada: The birth of an art movement
Thursday South Sudan celebrates independence
Wednesday Seveso Disaster

Witness History

Jul 10, 2026
10¼ minutes
5 MB

In 1916, Zurich was a beacon for refugees. Fleeing the death and destruction of World War I, artists and free-thinkers from all over Europe fled to the neutral Swiss city. And it was here that the people who would start the art movement Dada came together. In a rare interview from 1959, held in the BBC archive, Richard Huelsenbeck describes how the group of young artists and pacifists shared a despair about the war and a disgust for bourgeois values. At the Cabaret Voltaire, he and the Romanian French-born poet Tristan Tzara, the French sculptor Jean Arp...

Witness History

Dada: The birth of an art movement

BBC World Service

00:00 -10:17