Hannah Höch, pioneering Dada photomontage artist, was born in Gotha, Thuringia, Germany.
Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch on November 1, 1889, in the small town of Gotha, in the Thuringia region of Germany. She was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family; her father worked for an insurance company and her mother was an amateur painter, an early influence on Hannah's artistic sensibilities.
As was common for girls of her class and era, Höch's formal education was cut short so that she could help care for her younger siblings, delaying her entry into art school until her early twenties. Despite these constraints, her childhood in provincial Gotha planted the seeds for a creative career that would eventually place her at the center of one of the twentieth century's most radical art movements, Berlin Dada.
Höch would go on to become the only woman formally embedded within the Berlin Dada circle, pioneering the technique of photomontage as a tool for social and political critique, particularly addressing gender, media culture, and the tumultuous politics of Weimar Germany. Her birth in a relatively conventional, small-town setting stands in stark contrast to the boundary-breaking, avant-garde work she would later produce in Berlin, making her life story one of significant personal and artistic transformation.