© Copyright Gwendolen Webster
THE RECEPTION OF THE MERZBAU
(For details of the references and citations in this article, please e-mail the author at
g.webster@t-online.de
.)
Introduction
To begin with, I must explain that in this lecture I will focus less on the
reception of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau as a whole than on a few of the many
legends and misconceptions that have arisen in descriptions and analyses of
the Hannover Merzbau since the artist’s death in 1948.
First of all, I‘d like to recap briefly on the history of this most enigmatic of
20th century art works. The beginnings of what has come to be known as
the Hannover Merzbau can be traced to a number of sculptural assemblages
in Kurt Schwitters’ studio dating from the early 1920s. In its later stages the
Merzbau took the form of a sculptural environment that during the 1930s
expanded into various areas of the family home in Hannover. Despite the
labelling of Schwitters’ abstract work as ‘entartet’ [degenerate] from 1933,
and despite the threats Hitler issued to the former avant-garde at annual
Nuremberg Party conferences, Schwitters remained in Hannover until 1936.
By this time, however, he had become highly concerned not only about his
own future, but also about that of the Merzbau. He bombarded friends in
exile with letters in an attempt to gain a commission to build a Merzbau in
the US, and also contacted the Swiss collectors Annie and Oskar Müller-
Widmann, evidently in the hope that, as friends and patrons, they would
permit him to construct a Merzbau in the grounds of their house in Basle.
All these efforts, however, were in vain. Schwitters left Hannover in January
1937 and in autumn, began on a second Merzbau in Oslo that was almost
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complete when he fled from invading Nazi troops in 1940. During his time in
Norway, he also inhabited a hut on the Norwegian island of Hjertoya, for
which he designed an interior that displayed many of the characteristics of
the Merzbau, though he never referred to it as such. In England in mid-
August 1947 he began on a third Merzbau, the Merz barn, which was left
incomplete on his death. Schwitters regarded the Merzbauten as his
Lebenswerk [life work] and even a new domain of art, and in their time they
certainly represented an unprecedented idea that preoccupied him for nearly
thirty years, that is, most of his working life.
Fig. 1.The ruins of Waldhausenstrasse 5 after the bombing. Kurt Schwitters Archive,
Sprengel Museum Hannover,
Sadly, little remains of these works today. In exile in wartime London,
Schwitters was distressed to hear that the Hannover Merzbau had been
destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943.
'My studio and the work of my
life does no more exist,’ he wrote. ‘For what did I actually live? I don't know.’
In 1951, three years after his death, the Oslo Merzbau was destroyed by fire.
The third Merzbau in the English Lake District now stands empty, as its
original contents were either destroyed or removed to other locations. The
hut in Moldefiord has more or less been left to rot since 1940.
© Copyright Gwendolen Webster
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Fig. 2. The hut on Hjertoya.
Photo: author.
In any discussion of the Merzbauten, we are faced with a number of special
difficulties. Standard methods of investigation and critical appraisal remain
problematical because so little remains of their original substance; we seem
to have no point of reference by which we can analyse these works or judge
the analyses of others. While the example of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ show that
art works do not have to survive to be open to fruitful discussion, the
Merzbauten present a different case in that they were continually changing.
In Hannover, a sculptural assemblage developed into a complex of columns,
then into a single-room - later multi-room – environment over a period of
thirteen years, and in exile, Schwitters continued to explore various concepts
of the original work. In effect, the term Merzbau applies to a series of works
erected in various countries over three decades. Bearing in mind the
problems of timescale, the lack of originals and a body of written and visual
evidence that is imprecise, patchy and frequently contradictory, I’d now like
to focus on some of the legends that have grown up round the Hannover
Merzbau in the post-1945 reception.
Early Reception
Up to the 1960s most references to the Hannover Merzbau were tucked away
in notes, asides or at the back of exhibition catalogues. Early commentators
evidently found themselves at a loss for terms to define the work or locate it
in some kind of recognizable context. We find vague phrases such as ‘open
sculpture’, ‘a sculpture, which sprouted from the inside outwards’, ‘a series
of strange grottos built by Schwitters at the rear of his house’, ‘a sculptural-
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painterly collage construction’, ‘an utterly new medium of tremendous
impact and bizarre fantasy’, ‘a cathedral of things for things’, or simply
‘Schwitters’ house is said to have been very strange’. One rather longer
account speaks of ‘a model of a project for a monument to humanity, in
which all sorts of materials were to be used helter-skelter: wood, plaster, a
corset, musical toys and life-size houses in the Swiss style. Parts of the
monument were to move and emit sounds’. Another relates that ‘Schwitters’
house in Hannover was a maze of mining shafts from top to bottom [with]
tunnels spiralling from the cellar to the roof’.
Little wonder that it seemed almost impossible in these years to make any
sense of the no longer extant Hannover Merzbau, and with few exceptions, it
was dismissed as a bygone historical curiosity until the advent of the neo-
Dada movement in the 1960s brought a new interest in Schwitters’ work.
With it came the beginnings of a Merzbau mythology that freely exploited the
work’s obscurity. As an example, an article of 1960 entitled ‘The Merzbau,
Pantheon of Dadaism’ described it as a work that had hardly even been seen,
a mixture of ‘abstract hermitage, ghost’s playroom, atomic witches’ kitchen
and space ship interior,’ featuring ‘rescued secret photos’ that were in fact
neither rescued nor secret. In addition, Schwitters’ contemporaries began to
publish their own very hazy recollections of the Hannover Merzbau, adding
to the confusion that already existed.
Schmalenbach, Elger, Elderfield.
The art historians who first tried to make sense of the burgeoning Merzbau
mythology were Werner Schmalenbach, Dietmar Elger and John Elderfield,
who all undertook detailed research (now often forgotten) into the
Merzbauten. One of their most important tasks, as they saw it, was to clear
away the many legends surrounding the Merzbau, and Elderfield’s statement
in his major study of Schwitters (1985) may be seen as representative of the
aim of all three art historians:
Once the development of the Merzbau is removed from the realm of myth
and fanciful exaggeration, what it loses in fantasy it gains in credibility. To
learn the facts of its development is to make the Merzbau fully available
for analysis and evaluation.
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Schmalenbach, Elger and Elderfield all realised that to recover the
Merzbauten for analysis, it was of fundamental importance to establish as
neutral a framework as possible - i.e. a temporal and spatial chronology - by
which to clarify the contours of their development. With regard to the
Hannover Merzbau, the first question they raised – and one that at first may
seem almost simplistic - concerned its location. Certainly it was situated in
the Schwitters’ family home in Waldhausenstrasse 5, Hannover, but exactly
where it began and its final extent have, surprisingly, not been satisfactorily
determined even today. If we examine the reports of eyewitnesses (the
majority of whom were writing many decades after the event), they are
unanimous that the first columns were situated somewhere in this house,
but they locate them variously in the cellar, in the attic, on the ground floor
(which was the apartment of Schwitters’ parents), on the first floor and on
the second floor (whose front apartment was occupied by Kurt and Helma
Schwitters and their son Ernst).
Fig. 3. Waldhausenstrasse 5, c. 1926.
Kurt Schwitters Archive, Sprengel
Museum Hannover.
The façade of Waldhausenstrasse 5 is perhaps deceptive, for this was far
more than just the family home: during much of the 1920s and 1930s, six
families lived here, not including resident maids whose rooms were in the
attic. Plans and documents relating to the house in Hannover City archive
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show that the amount of space available for an artist’s studio was in fact
very limited. There was no room for a Merzbau on either the first or second
floor, and there is not the remotest foundation for Hans Arp’s tongue-in-
cheek declaration that Schwitters ‘succeeded in totally merzing his house’,
(although even today, variations of this tale regularly appear in descriptions
of the Merzbau).
Schmalenbach, Elger and Elderfield tackled many of the problems
surrounding the Merzbau’s extent, presenting sufficient evidence to show
that it originated on the ground floor of the family house, that is, not in
Schwitters’ own apartment but in that of his parents. From here it spread to
a second room, to an adjacent balcony, to the space under the balcony and
to one or two rooms in the attic. (There may also have been subsidiaries in
the cellar, although this was vehemently denied by Ernst Schwitters in later
years.) It did not break through the ceiling (as Hans Richter and Kate
Steinitz had maintained), and no tenants were ever ejected to enable
Schwitters to extend the work to another floor. It also emerged from their
analysis of Schwitters’ construction method that the layering process of the
Merzbau involved far more than simply concealing objects within geometrical
plaster casing; grottos and formal structure were created in parallel.
Fig. 4. A letter from Schwitters showing
his parents’ apartment on the ground floor
of Waldhausenstrasse 5. The hatched
sections represent the Merzbau. Kurt
Schwitters Archive, Stadtbibliothek
Hannover.
Elderfield in particular succeeded in differentiating between the Merzbau (a
word first invented by Schwitters in 1933) and the initial section known as
The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, or KdeE. While this is often regarded as
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synonymous with the Merzbau itself, Elderfield discovered that the KdeE
constituted only part of the main room, i.e. the section to the left of the
entrance, between the doorway and a large window that took up much of one
wall. In addition, Elderfield revealed that most of the constructions in the
first Merzbau room were not flush with the walls, so that they had an
exterior, accessible by means of hidden stairs and ledges. In the light of new
evidence, the Catalogue Raisonné has now provided us with a more accurate
plan of the main room that confirms many of Elderfield’s findings.
Fig. 5. Plan of the main Merzbau room. Above, John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London
1985, p. 167. Below: revised plan from the Kurt Schwitters Catalogue Raisonné.
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It might be assumed that there is little remaining research to be done on the
chronology of the Hannover Merzbau. Yet if we look at the accounts of
Schmalenbach, Elger and Elderfield more closely, their theories on the
spatial and temporal evolution of the Merzbau in the 1920s vary
considerably, so that despite their investigations, they did not succeed in
drawing up a standard chronology that provides a reliable framework for
interpretation. If three art historians can come up with such different
versions of the development of the Merzbau, then it seems pertinent to
examine the reliability of the sources on which they based their conclusions.
Eyewitness evidence
One of the most problematical areas of Merzbau reception is what precisely
constitutes evidence. More than once, we find the memory of one brief visit
treated as a definitive account, one vague reminiscence taken at face value
as an authentic report, one art historian’s supposition becoming another’s
indisputable fact. It is, moreover, often forgotten that visitors witnessed the
Merzbau at various stages of its development. What is usually regarded as
eyewitness evidence is better understood as interpretation, for most of
Schwitters’ contemporaries did not write about the Merzbau till many years
later, in an entirely different (i.e. post 1945) context and often enough not
even in the writer’s native country or language.
As there is only time here to quote a few examples, I have chosen just three
- those of Hans Richter, Kate Steinitz and Alexander Dorner. Richter’s
account, one of the most important eyewitness reports in terms of its
subsequent impact on Merzbau reception, appeared in the mid-1960s in his
book ‘Dada – Art and Anti-Art’. Resident in the USA since 1941, Richter had
experienced professional difficulties in the McCarthy era
and was concerned to play down both the political
dimension of Dada and his own role in the revolutionary
politics of his time. Given this background, it is not
unexpected to find that his chapter on Schwitters (under
the misleading title of Dada Hannover) presents him as
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an ideal example of a Dadaist, harmless, amiable, but nonetheless authentic
- ‘in reality,’ he writes, ‘HE was the total work of art’. In Richter’s account,
recorded about forty years after the event, the Merzbau features as a bizarre
but basically innocuous work, with ‘caves’ (he uses neither the term grotto
nor Cathedral of Erotic Misery) mainly containing tiny, bizarre souvenirs
‘pilfered’ from Schwitters’ colleagues and acquaintances, so that in effect, he
portrays the Merzbau as little more than a mischievous, if occasionally
repellent, documentation of friendship. Richter’s statements are inconsistent
with what is known of the early chronology of the studio, yet his description,
the most innocuous of all those by Schwitters’ contemporaries, is one of the
best-known passages on the Merzbau, perhaps because it is in easily
accessible form and is available both in German and English. Its credibility
and evident lacunae are seldom questioned, as is the fact that it bears little
relevance to the 1933 photos of the work. Richter’s account is also the
primary source of one of the most durable Merzbau legends, the
Deckendurchbruch, i.e. the column’s supposed penetration of the ceiling.
Kate Steinitz’s memoirs, likewise published in the 1960s and translated into
English, have also become one of the standard sources of information on the
Merzbau. Steinitz’s chapter on the Merzbau rapidly drifts off into
speculations about Schwitters’ affairs with other women, but before this, she
makes tantalising mention of ‘very secret caves’, mysterious interior
compartments of the column that she describes as ‘probably’ seen only by a
few friends. She draws her own conclusions that these contained dubious
sexual material, although also admits that she never saw them. Although
three early visitors to Schwitters’ studio also record him as behaving
strangely about some of the column’s content, the idea that he actually
concealed certain grottos from visitors can clearly be traced to Steinitz’s
vague account. I will return to this point later.
As a final example, I’d like to cite the memoirs of Alexander Dorner, first
published in English in 1958 and later translated into German. These are an
often-quoted source, but again, are not as clear-cut as we are frequently led
to believe. Dorner, who had publicly criticized Schwitters in the early 1920s,
probably visited his studio at about the same time as Richter, but his verdict
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was very different (and, incidentally, does not seem to have been shared by
any of Schwitters’ contemporaries). As an avowed supporter of the
Constructivist movement, Dorner condemned Schwitters’ Merz column
outright, claiming that:
the free expression of the socially controlled self had here bridged the gap
between sanity and madness. The Merzbau was a kind of fecal smearing -
a sick and sickening relapse into the social irresponsibility of the infant
who plays with trash and filth.
If we look at this account more closely, however, it is not as straightforward
as it might seem. Dorner did not write this himself, and his opinion is not
quoted but reported by Samuel Cauman, whose biography of Dorner
appeared in 1958, shortly after Dorner’s death. Cauman, who makes an
arcane reference to Schwitters as 'one of the seven founders of Dada’,
attaches no date to this episode, but claims it took place after Dorner
attended a Nolde exhibition in Braunschweig (an event of which I have found
no record to date). Cauman twice uses the word Merzbau, although Dorner
must have seen it at a relatively early phase, well before it became a
sculptural environment and well before Schwitters invented the term
‘Merzbau’ in 1933; according to this description it was no more than a tower
located in the cellar and had hardly progressed beyond the stage of a large
sculptural assemblage.
The gaps in the evidence
If the eyewitness reports of the Merzbau present a number of anomalies,
then the gaps in the evidence, equally neglected in the reception history, are
even more problematical. Schmalenbach, Elger and Elderfield assume that
the first Merzbau room was more or less complete in the 1920s, even
considering it may have been modelled on the kind of Constructivist
Demonstration Room advocated by Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitsky in
the early 1920s. Indeed, the majority of analyses of the Hannover Merzbau
consider it in terms of early 20
th
century avant-garde movements (mainly
Dada, Expressionism and Constructivism), either in terms of the impact of
these movements on the Merzbau or with regard to its perceived deviations
from avant-garde models.
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Fig. 6. Sophie Täuber-Arp, Hans Arp, Theo
van Doesburg, Aubette, Strasbourg 1927-
8, reconstruction. Schwitters saw the
Aubette as a work in progress in early
April 1927.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c
ommons/a/a1/060611_006.jpg)
Yet one of the most puzzling aspects of the Hannover Merzbau, commented
on solely by Elderfield, is that in the 1920s (as far as I have been able to
ascertain) Schwitters made no reference to it at all. As Elderfield remarks, for
such a keen self-publicist as Schwitters, this was truly remarkable. It is even
more remarkable when we draw up a list of the opportunities available to
Schwitters to publicize his columns. In the late 1920s, the eminent architect
Hans Hildebrandt corresponded with Schwitters and also gave him an entry
in the second edition of his comprehensive Handbook of 19th and 20th
Century Art (1931). It would have been a unique opportunity for Schwitters
to advertise his studio constructions, but there is no allusion to them in
Hildebrandt's book, and none in the Hildebrandt-Schwitters correspondence
until 1933. His correspondence of 1926 with the collector and gallery owner
Galka Scheyer, whom he had known personally before she moved to the
USA, included no attempt to interest her in his studio (as happened four
years later). Between 1928 and 1930, Schwitters gave illustrated lectures on
contemporary design in art, architecture and typography, but nowhere in his
slides and lecture notes, which show Constructivist interiors such as
Lissitisky’s Abstraktenkabinett and several examples of his own work, is
there a reference to his studio or to any columns.
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Fig. 7. A leaflet of 1930 advertising one of
Schwitters’ lectures on design in art,
architecture and typography, with (above)
some of his slides. Kurt Schwitters
Archive, Stadtbibliothek, Hannover
Even if Schwitters wished to conceal the work from the public for some
reason (difficult in itself, as it stood in his studio), we find nothing on it in
his personal letters, even those to his patron and especial confidante
Katherine Dreier. Throughout the 1920s, Schwitters sent Dreier detailed
accounts and explanations of current projects, future plans and personal
and professional difficulties, but made no mention of a column or anything
similar.
If, is as generally assumed, the Merzbau was an avant-garde work that was
more or less complete by the end of the Twenties, Schwitters’ own Merz
periodical, which appeared between 1923 and 1932, would surely have been
an ideal outlet to make it known. Yet even here Schwitters refrains from any
allusion to it until the last but one Merz magazine, Das Veilchenheft,
appeared in 1931.
Das Veilchenheft
It is, then, not until the start of the new decade that Schwitters decided to
make the existence of his studio constructions public, in a text that for many
art historians serves as the ultimate guide to the Merzbau and the key to the
aims of its creator. This passage, however, requires as much caution as
other sources. It appears in Merz 21, Das Veilchenheft, an anthology of
Schwitters’ literary work entitled ‘A Collection of Merz Poems of All Kinds’.
At the end of this anthology appears an essay entitled ‘Ich und meine Ziele’
[Myself and My Aims], whereby it is unclear if this is an appendix or yet
another Merz poem. Here Schwitters alludes to a single discrete column that
he calls the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, although on examination, this text is
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Fig. 8. Das Veilchenheft, cover. Kurt Schwitters Archive, Sprengel Museum Hannover.
primarily concerned with quite different topics. Ostensibly it reads as a kind
of manifesto in which Schwitters focuses on abstract art, typography and
political developments in Germany in the crisis-ridden year of 1930, so that
the relevance of the passage on the column to the remainder of the essay is
not at all apparent. In this lengthy documentation of Schwitters’ aims and
attitudes in 1930, we may also note the extraordinary omission of his own
art movement of Merz, used only once as a suffix. In its professed rejection of
all dogma, Merz had provided Schwitters with a resilient aesthetic framework
that he identified with his own person: as he had written succinctly in the
previous issue of his Merz magazine, ‘Now I call myself Merz’. Indeed, the
very title of this essay conflicts with his statement that ‘Merz has no
programme with predefined aims, on principle’. It might at least be expected
that he would introduce his column, whose development, he states, parallels
his aesthetic maturation over seven years, as the epitome of the structural
equilibrium and dynamic adaptivity of Merz. Instead, the KdeE is presented,
not in terms of the Merzgesamtkunstwerk that Schwitters had once declared
his goal, but, albeit ambivalently, as an incongruous combination of Dada,
Cubism and the Gothic.
In many art-historical accounts of the Merzbau, this passage is not only
discussed entirely out of context, but also very selectively. Some elements
such as Persil advertisements, the insignia of the city of Karlsruhe and the
piece of lignite have seldom been subjected to analysis, while it is not
uncommon for the bottle of urine, the Great Grotto of Love and the sex-
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murder cavern to be taken as representative of the supposedly macabre and
repulsive aspects of the whole. Schwitters’ disclaimer is likewise often
ignored; having listed part of the column’s content, which he attributes to
the year 1923, he then expressly distances himself from it on the grounds
that it is outmoded and ‘literary’. Within its overall context, then, the
passage on the KdeE turns out to be more resistant to interpretation than is
generally assumed.
Fig. 9. The Blue Window in the Merzbau
as photographed in 1933, showing the
table for the guest book below right and
above it, a section of the Cathedral of
Erotic Misery. Kurt Schwitters Archive,
Sprengel Museum Hannover.
It may be surprising to find that although this description of the Cathedral
of Erotic Misery has been the subject of much art-historical theorizing, we
have no evidence to show what it looked like in 1930. In 1983, Harald
Szeemann commissioned a reconstruction of the Hannover Merzbau, now in
the Sprengel Museum Hannover, on the basis of photos taken in early 1933,
and this at last has given us some idea of the appearance of the Cathedral of
Erotic Misery at that time, but even today, it remains the least photographed
section of the Merzbau.
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The passage on the column in ‘Ich und meine Ziele’ was not Schwitters’ last
word on his studio constructions, but when, in 1933, he published a further
text on them, he seems to be talking about a quite different work. This is a
more sober piece, with no mention either of grottos or a column or a
Cathedral of Erotic Misery.
The Merzbau is the construction of an interior from sculptural forms and
colours. In the glazed grottos are Merz compositions arranged as a cubic
volume and which blend with the white cubic forms to form an interior.
Each part of the interior serves as an intermediary element to its
neighbouring part […] sometimes I have taken a form from nature, but
more often I have constructed the form as the function of different lines,
parallel or crossing. In this way I have discovered the most important of
my forms; the half-spiral.
This text, taken in conjunction with the evidence of contemporary
photographs and letters, indicates that it was not until 1931/32 that
Schwitters transformed the constructions in his studio into a unified
structure that absorbed the original columns almost entirely into what we
might now call a sculptural environment. In 1933, Schwitters removed his
studio to the adjoining room and gave this work the name Merzbau. While
his studio had never been a private place – he issued printed invitations,
colleagues were invited to contribute grottos to the columns and there were
two guest books to record visitors’ reactions - it nonetheless seems that
during the early 1930s, his sculptural interior enters an entirely different,
more public phase. Schwitters has the room photographed by a professional,
adds an art exhibition and employs three or four workmen to help him. He
builds a library in a corner, uses the Merzbau as a theatre, publishes an
article on it in a French journal and invites gallery owners, dealers, patrons,
and anyone else potentially interested in giving this unsaleable work some
publicity, with all the difficulties this involved after 1933. It is a remarkable
anomaly of Merzbau reception that most commentaries concentrate on the
period when Schwitters did not mention it at all, and most disregard the
decade when it took shape as a coherent work and he began to publicize it in
earnest. Ironically, Schwitters fled Germany at the point when the Merzbau
reached the height of its fame – that is, when photos of the work were
exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Merzbau legends
Despite the researches of Schmalenbach, Elger and Elderfield, Merzbau
legends continue to be disseminated and even embellished, both in general
and in specialized publications. Two of the most resilient are Richter’s long-
disproved story of the Deckendurchbruch, which still features in numerous
commentaries, and the location of the Merzbau in Schwitters’ living quarters.
These legends often appear in tandem, as in the assertion that Schwitters
‘built within his home the Merzbau [...] a Constructivist assemblage of
discarded junk that eventually pierced the ceiling’, or are further
embroidered, as in the following passage from a book on Installation Art:
Growing from an earlier assemblage, Cathedral of Erotic Misery, which
Schwitters constructed in his living room, Merzbau was literally a living
installation, occupied as it was by Schwitters, his wife and his children
[sic], who must have devised inventive ways to become one with
assemblage. Merzbau’s walls were carved into and then plastered over,
doorjambs were extended, and runways for a guinea pig were constructed
under ceiling planes that had been lowered at jarring cubist angles.
Cubist collage and Expressionism cohabited somewhat precariously in
Schwitters’ domestic experiment. Thwarted by lack of space, at one point
he moved the upstairs tenants out, cut the ceiling free and extended the
Merzbau through the floor above.
It is in the anecdotes and legends surrounding the grottos that it becomes
most difficult to separate fact from fiction. Many accounts of the Merzbau
emphasize their fetishist and sadistic nature, and in recent times their
content, or rather the little that is known of it, has been described in
increasingly macabre terms; according to some recent interpretations, the
Merzbau apparently contained little else than flasks of urine, hair,
fingernails and miscellaneous body parts. Needless to say, such statements
are based on a highly selective use of source materials that in themselves are
open to dispute. As just one example of excessive authorial licence, I’d like to
quote an article from a fine art journal that portrays the Merzbau as a
monstrous collection of material amassed by a Frankenstein-like Schwitters:
furtively collected and avidly displayed […] the violent and obscene images
of the Merzbau looked like the exposed viscera of the mind in a Freudian
textbook. Schwitters …was an excremental mystic […] his nocturnal
wanderings enabled him to feed the Merzbau more titbits […] it grew as
Schwitters’ coprophagous imagination fed it more blood […] Schwitters
must have relished the similarity of Merz to the French ‘merde’.
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Here I’d like to return to Kate Steinitz’s memoirs and her mention of ‘secret
grottoes’. Given the ambivalent nature of her account, their existence is at
least open to question, but they nonetheless appear in countless analyses of
the Merzbau, and it is above all around these supposedly hidden grottos
(which presumably were not identical with those publicized by Schwitters in
‘Ich und meine Ziele’) that many improbable legends have accumulated. How
concealed they were remains matter of debate. Often they are described as
having been seen only by a few of Schwitters’ friends, if at all, though the
supposition that they were kept secret rarely acts as a deterrent to a detailed
examination of their content.
Fig.10. Kurt Schwitters, untitled assemblage. This grotto,
measuring 9.3 x 16.8 x 7.2 cm., was said by Ernst Schwitters to
have been part of the Merzbau. It was badly damaged during
transport in 1956 and was reconstructed in 2004. Kurt
Schwitters Archive, Sprengel Museum Hannover.
At this point it is worth remembering Hannah Höch’s completely different
version of the secret grottos:
You could regard it as a special honour when Kurt Schwitters allowed a
guest to design a cave in his Merz column. Then he would put the whole of
his material at your disposal. Built-in secret depots opened up and he let
the material flood out all over the place to allow you as much freedom as
possible in your choice.
Höch, then, writes that the secret caves that she (in contrast to Steinitz)
actually saw, were no more than storage space for the rubbish Schwitters
collected at every available opportunity, his ‘Merz material’. As all her
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reminiscences accentuate personal friendships, her omission of the
‘souvenir’ caves as described by Richter and Steinitz seems remarkable.
What Höch does emphasize is the idea of Schwitters’ constructions as a
socio-political and above all collaborative work, to which she and other
colleagues were allowed to contribute. Höch’s descriptions have, however,
been ignored in Merzbau reception to date, possibly because her memoirs
have not been translated into English and did not appear in book form, and
it is not her prosaic hoards of hidden, as yet unsorted rubbish, but Steinitz’s
erotic grottos that have become a widespread feature of the Merzbau
reception, generally in conjunction with their presumed ‘perverted’ content.
A different kind of legend appeared in the 1960s when the focus shifted to
the extempore aspects of Schwitters’ working method. The Merzbau was
described as a spontaneous work in metaphors that ranged far beyond both
the pre-war avant garde’s use of chance to undermine aesthetic traditions.
Richter wrote that the column ‘burst the room apart at the seams’, and Arp
described constructions ‘forcing their way upwards through [...] abysses and
fissures’.
1
Even the artist’s son Ernst, whose vantage point was generally
more dispassionate, alludes to ‘free-standing works that suddenly “grew”
together’. Werner Haftmann claimed that ‘the intention [of the Merzbau] was
for things to create a space of their own’, Schmalenbach that its upper part
‘formed itself in varying heights’; William Rubin that ‘anti-art materials left
the surfaces of [Schwitters’] collages and began to form the components of
the Merzbau [...] freestanding objects [...] began to merge with the furniture’,
Rosemarie Haag-Bletter cited the anecdote of the evicted tenants to
embellish her dramatic portrayal of the Merzbau’s development in terms of a
‘cancerous growth’ with ‘twisted tentacles’, while Patricia Falguières
described the Merzbau as a monstrous parasite that penetrated ceilings and
eventually filled the whole of Schwitters’ house. Such renderings generally
sidestep the physical evolution of the Merzbauten; in effect, potential debate
about levels of meaning is circumvented by shifting the focus to the
supposed autonomy of the material and its control of the artist.
1
Berlin 1989, 210: Jahns 1982: Richter 1965/1978, 153: Arp 1972.
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Finally, I would like to draw attention to Schwitters’ statement in the
Veilchenheft that the KdeE was ‘unfinished on principle’, a frequently quoted
catch phrase of Merzbau reception. On principle, Schwitters’ constructions
could indeed be extended indefinitely, but in practice, this was not an
essential criterion either of his columns or sculptural interiors. The
correspondence of Schwitters and his wife around 1932/33 often refers to
the ‘completion’ of the Merzbau, and Schwitters’ detailed listing of the
material, time and expenditure necessary for an American version, drawn up
in 1936, suggest that a Merzbau could indeed be finished. The importance
that Schwitters attached to this idea becomes even more apparent in his
period of exile, when he was gripped by ambitions for at least one of his
environments to pass down to posterity, making every effort to ensure their
completion in some form, even if, as in the case of Hannover, it meant
rebuilding the work from its ruins. The idea of a construction that is
‘unfinished on principle’ must therefore be qualified by Schwitters’ later
insistence on the desirability of completing at least one. That all remained
unfinished must be attributed to political and personal circumstance rather
than principle.
I’d also like to note that Schwitters’ remaining Merzbauten have likewise not
remained untouched by legends and misapprehensions. The most
unshakable of these is that the end wall of the Merz barn in Elterwater was
the only extant section when Schwitters died, a theory that John Elderfield
conclusively disproved as early as 1969.
Problems presented by translations
Some of the common misconceptions and uncertainties about the
appearance and location of the Hannover Merzbau may be traced to
inaccuracies and rephrasing in English renderings of German texts. These
inevitably augment the difficulties of reconstructing the Merzbau’s evolution
and of assessing Schwitters’ attitude towards the work. Again, there is only
time to give a few examples here.
Schmalenbach’s analysis of the Merzbau contains numerous errors in the
English version: for example the German Parterre [ground floor] is translated
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as ‘above ground floor’, klare Farben [bright colours] as ‘pastel colours’ and
Boden [attic] as ‘ground floor’. Schmalenbach’s original ein weltoffener Eremit
in seinem weltfernen Gehäuse [a cosmopolitan hermit in his unworldly cell]
is translated as ‘a refuge [sic] from the world in his own drawing-room’ and
his ‘so sehr die einzige Raison d’être des Merzbaus, dass der Mensch in ihm
keinen Platz mehr fand, und Raum um Raum aus ihm verdrängt wurde [this
was so much the raison d’être of the Merzbau that people had no place in it
any longer and were driven out of it room by room] becomes ‘the man who
made it was driven out of it’.
The English translations of Steinitz and Richter also deviate in part from the
German originals. It is, for example, instructive to compare the original
version of Steinitz’s memoir of Schwitters (1963) with the English rendering,
published five years later, not only because the latter contains translational
errors but also because of changed phraseology and textual additions.
Steinitz’s quotation of Schwitters’ statement that ‘zum Schluss wird die Säule
mit noch zehn anderen Säulen als riesige Form im Raum stehen’ is translated
as ‘finally the column will stand with ten other columns as gigantic forms in
space’, although the German Form is clearly singular. The account of the
caves is augmented by a melodramatic sentence lacking in the German: ‘In
each cave was a sediment of impressions and emotions, with significant
literary and symbolistic allusions.’ In 1961 Steinitz had written that ‘the
Column was a repository of Schwitters’ own problems, a cathedral built not
only around his erotic misery but around all the joy and misery of his time’.
In her memoirs, the social component implicit in this last phrase is omitted,
so that the Merzbau is portrayed primarily as a personal drama and
projection of Schwitters’ inner strivings. Richter’s indistinct but impressive
picture of the Merzbau also differs in part in the English translation. The
latter doubles the amount of space the column occupied on his first visit, for
example; the German original states that it filled about a quarter of the
room, the English version about half the room.
My final example comes from a publication on the Merzbau in which the
author’s interpretation of Schwitters’ terminology occasionally leaves room
for doubt. Here, for instance, the analysis of the 1935 Erinnerung an Molde
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grotto is dependent on a misreading of its name, which according to the
author refers not only to the Norwegian town but also to mould, referred to
here as a symbol of life, love, death, decay and rebirth and a reminder of the
‘exceedingly visceral’ material in Schwitters’ 1920 studio. Till now I have not
found any German dictionary which lists the word ‘Mold’.
Fig. 11. Hannover Merzbau, Grotte in
Erinnerung an Molde [Grotto in Memory of
Molde]. Kurt Schwitters Archive, Sprengel
Museum, Hannover.
The task of checking translated material is clearly an arduous one and in
many cases unnecessary. Nonetheless, if a theory about the Merzbau is to be
based on a translated sentence or phrase, it is, as I hope I have shown,
advisable to examine the original text beforehand.
Conclusion
As a result of the paucity of original documents and photos, eyewitness
reports, important as they are to any analysis, created from the first a
plethora of misconceptions about the Hannover Merzbau. Many anecdotes
and legends attached to the Merzbau, whether in original or modified form,
seem inconsequential in themselves, but taken together, they are of
considerable significance. Their cumulative effect has resulted in a mounting
fund of speculative material that bears little relation to what is known of the
Merzbau (and its creator) and that has made art-historical analysis of it
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22
increasingly difficult. To start from one or more of the premises (despite all
the verifiable information to the contrary) that this was a largely
surreptitious and/or obscene artwork created by a half-crazed artist in his
private living quarters results in a picture of a work proliferating largely in
its own hermetic environment. This approach admits of few functional,
transformative or evolutionary processes and leads to a portrayal of the
Merzbau as a non-developmental, non-interactive construction. This in turn
largely obviates the need for chronological accuracy about the various stages
of its development. Thus the mountain of commentary that has accrued
since Schwitters’ death, while undoubtedly important in preserving and
evaluating the Merzbauten for posterity, has sometimes resulted less in
explanation and clarification than in the dissemination and fabrication of
considerable misunderstandings about these works.
Fig. 12. An unintentional misprint. Rudolf Jahns relates his memories of the Merzbau, FAZ.,
26.8.62.
Roger Cardinal was the first to undertake a comparative study of the
reception of the Hannover Merzbau. As one of the few commentators to
highlight the inconsistency of the sources, he also suggests that the Merzbau
has become its own reception, contrasting its actual fate with the robust
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myths that proliferate ‘as a disparate amalgam of recollection, hearsay and
conjecture’. In contrast, Cornelia Osswald-Hoffmann is highly critical of
writings on the Merzbau, arguing that most are dominated by speculative
discussions about the grottos. She dismisses analyses that rely too heavily
on eyewitness reports that she refers to as ‘demonstrably pure invention’ and
maintains that because the Merzbau no longer exists, this has resulted in an
accumulation of readings that constitute mere re-interpretations of
interpretations, so that writing on the work has become an independent
activity with a dynamic of its own, creating a new discourse that has little
bearing on the original.
In theory at least, there has been no justification for the perpetuation of a
Merzbau mythology since the publication of the three-volume Kurt
Schwitters Catalogue Raisonné, which provides a mine of information about
all the Merzbauten, with numerous photos, original documents, plans,
chronologies and commentaries. Nonetheless, we may have to accept that
Merzbau legends will continue to flourish, and I’d therefore like to conclude
by quoting Ernst Nündel, who took an indulgent view of Merzbau mythology,
regarding it as integral to the nature of Merz and even in accordance with
the artist’s intentions.
The Merzbau, destroyed in 1943, continues growing, in the memory of
those who saw it [...] in the speculations of art historians. To each his/her
own (concept of the) Merzbau. In this state it approaches the idea of Merz,
the idea of continuous recasting, of an artistic process without bounds,
without beginning and without end.
* * * * *
© Gwendolen Webster, 2007.
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