Most of the figures who were involved in Dada proved to be opportunists who for all their anti-art bluster never had any intention of abandoning art and went back to it the minute they could profitably resume their careers. The exception was Hugo Ball, who after the war abandoned the avant-garde, retired to a small Swiss village with Emily Hennings, reconverted to Catholicism and spent the last years of his short life “writing about early Christian saints, Byzantine spirituality, and theology.”