These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch's works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and continuing through to today.

[7] In 1915 she returned to Berlin, where she entered the graphics class of Emil Orlik at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts.

The influence of this early work and training can be seen in a number of her collages made in the late 1910s and early- to mid-1920s in which she incorporated sewing patterns and needlework designs.

Hausmann's hypocritical stance on women's emancipation spurred Höch to write "a caustic short story" entitled "The Painter" in 1920, the subject of which is "an artist who is thrown into an intense spiritual crisis when his wife asks him to do the dishes.

In 1926, she began a relationship with the Dutch writer and linguist Mathilda ('Til') Brugman, whom Höch met through mutual friends Kurt and Helma Schwitters.

[13] Though her work was not as acclaimed after the war as it had been before the rise of the Third Reich, she continued to produce her photomontages and exhibit them internationally until her death in 1978, in Berlin.

Many Dada pieces were critical of the Weimar Republic and its failed attempt at creating a democracy in post-war (WWI) Germany.

The main artists involved in the movement in Berlin include George Grosz, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann.

George Grosz and John Heartfield were against Höch exhibiting with them in the 1920 First International Dada Fair, for example, and only allowed her participation after Raoul Hausmann argued for her inclusion.

The images Höch used often contrasted this look, or used it to make a point about society, such as in the piece Das Schöne Mädchen ("The Beautiful Girl").

She explicitly addressed in her pioneering artwork in the form of photomontage the issue of gender and the figure of woman in modern society" (The Art Story).

[19] In these montages, Höch gathered images and text from popular forms of media, such as newspapers and magazines, and combined them in often uncanny ways, which were able to express her stances on the important social issues of her time.

The role that women played in Dada has been the object of research in recent years, including in scholarly works by Ruth Hemus,[20] Nadia Sawleson-Gorse[21] and Paula K.

[23] Hans Richter described Höch's contribution to the Dada movement as the "sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.

This led to these truly Strinbergian dramas that typified the private lives of these men.”[17] Höch was the lone woman among the Berlin Dada group.

Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber were also important figures in Zurich, while others, including Beatrice Wood and Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, participated in New York.

Höch also wrote about the hypocrisy of men in the Dada movement in her short essay "The Painter", published in 1920,[24] in which she portrays a modern couple that embraces gender equality in their relationship, a novel and shocking concept for the time.

She was also critical of the institution of marriage, often depicting brides as mannequins and children, reflecting the socially pervasive idea of women as incomplete people with little control over their lives.

Höch worked for the magazine Ullstein Verlag between 1916 and 1926 in the department which focused on design patterns, handicrafts, knitting and embroidery, artistic forms within the domestic sphere which were considered appropriate for women.

"The pattern designs Höch created for Ullstein's women's magazines and her early experiments with modernist abstraction were integrally related, blurring the boundaries between traditionally masculine and feminine modes of form and expression" (Makholm).

"She now drew on this experience and on a large body of advertising material she had collected, in images that were unprecedented in their insights into the way society 'constructs' women" (Hudson).

[25] Höch considered herself a part of the women's movement in the 1920s, as shown in her depiction of herself, alongside multiple political and cultural figures, in the large-scale photomontage Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands ("Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany") (1919–20).

This piece combines images from newspapers of the time mixed and re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement.

From an Ethnographic Museum (1929), one of Höch's most ambitious and highly political projects, is a series of twenty photomontages that depict images of European female bodies with images of African male bodies and masks from museum catalogues, creating collages that offer "the visual culture of two vastly separate civilizations as interchangeable—the modish European flapper loses none of her stylishness in immediate proximity to African tribal objects; likewise, the non-Western artifact is able to signify in some fundamental sense as ritual object despite its conflation with patently European features.

They attempted to push art to the limits of humanity and to convey the chaos in post-war (World War I, which did not yet have this title) Germany.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife is "an explosive agglomeration of cut-up images, bang in the middle of the most well-known photograph of the seminal First International Dada Fair in 1920" (Hudson).

[25] This photomontage is an excellent example of a piece that combines these three central themes in Höch's works: androgyny, the "New Woman" and political discourse.

"Her androgynous images depict a pleasure in the movement between gender positions and a deliberate deconstruction of rigid masculine and feminine identities" (Lavin).

The images show individual figures without hair or defining features, in long gray shifts, filing across barren pastel landscapes.

Highlights included Staatshäupter (Heads of State) (1918–20), Hochfinanz (High Finance) (1923), Flucht (Flight) (1931), and many works from the series From an Ethnographic Museum.