Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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In the political and social chaos of Germany after the Great War, in the bewildering onslaught
of sensory input that had come to define modern life, under the psychic assaults of losing a first
born child and a life-long burden of epilepsy, making art was a force against dissolution for the
artist Kurt Schwitters. “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil,” Schwitters recalled. “What
I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…
Then suddenly the glorious revolution was upon us… I felt myself freed and had to shout my
jubilation out to the world. Out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this, because we
were now an impoverished country. One can even shout with refuse, and this is what I did,
nailing and gluing it together… New things had to be made out of the fragments.” 1
The Armistice of November 11 th , 1918 ended World War One. The German military forced
Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate and in January 1919 they held elections which brought the liberal
Social Democrats to power. But it was an uneasy alliance of old and new, accompanied by
ongoing riots, strikes, assassinations, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the hyperinflation which
created economic havoc in Germany throughout the 1920s.
Yet in 1918, the thirty-one year old Kurt Schwitters lived with his well-to-do parents in the
bourgeois and provincial city of Hanover, as he had all his life and would continue to do until
driven out of the country by the fascists in 1936. He had married his cousin Helma Fischer in
1915, had a son who died only days after birth in September 1916, and two years later had a
second son, Ernst, who remained close to his father throughout their lives. Schwitters’ friend
Käte Steinitz described the odd atmosphere of Hanover at that time: “In fact, there was shooting
in the streets of Hanover in those days. Revolutionists tore the golden epaulets from the uniforms
of high officers. But legend has it that through it all the revolutionists scrupulously observed the
civic regulation: ‘Keep off the grass.’ There was a little bloodshed, to be sure. A workman’s and
soldiers government was established, but the lawns, border, and flower beds remained intact.” 2
Steinitz’s warm recollections of Schwitters also portray his affability and his eccentricity.
“One day I saw Kurt’s bicycle leaning up against the wall of a house in an old part of Hanover…
It was then the best guinea-pig shop in town… I entered the shop because I saw Kurt bent over
the counter. He was negotiating a sale to the shopkeeper of one, two, three, four, five guinea
pigs, which he pulled one by one out of his coat pockets. ‘Helma says we have enough guinea
pigs at home,’ he explained to me, ‘and besides Ernst needs Greek and Roman lead soldiers to
play with.’” 3 He took the proceeds down the street to the
toy shop.
Kurt Schwitters launched his artistic career in 1918-
19, pioneering the assemblage of all manner of nonartistic
refuse, mostly gathered from the streets, with
expressionistically handled passages of painting. In
the same way, he composed stories, plays, and poetry in
disjointed collages of words and fragmentary phrases and
even performed abstract vocal works like his 1919 Sonate
in Urlauten (Sonata in Primal Sounds). “New art forms
out of the remains of a former culture,” 4 he said. “I called
my new manner of working from the principle of using any
material MERZ. That is the second syllable of Kommerz
1
Kurt Schwitters, “Kurt Schwitters,” 1930,
in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed.
Friedhelm Lach, volume 5, DuMont, Cologne
1981, p. 335; cited in Dorothea Dietrich,
The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition
and Innovation, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge 1993, pp. 6-7.
2
Käte Trauman Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters: A
Portrait from Life, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles 1968, p. 25.
3
Ibid., 26.
4
Kurt Schwitters, “Daten aus meinem Leben,”
1926 in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische
Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, volume 5, DuMont,
Cologne 1981, p. 241; cited in John
Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, The Museum of
Modern Art & Thames and Hudson, New York
1985, p. 12.
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SCHWITTERS: Tending the Enchanted Garden · by Jonathan Fineberg