Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948)

Illustration by Laslo Antal

It wasn’t a promising start to a career. In 1917, Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), 30 years old, newly married, and a mediocre graduate of the Dresden Academy of Art, signed up to study architecture in his home town of Hanover. It was more a matter of parental pressure than conviction; his prospects were dim, and they worsened in 1919. Punishing war reparations imposed on Germany thwarted any hope of improving the country’s desperately overcrowded cities, and for years architects were confined to projects on paper. Schwitters abandoned his studies and, backed by Berlin’s avant-garde Sturm Gallery, turned to abstract art. He became the century’s greatest master of collage. 

Collage is an inadequate term here, for from 1919, Schwitters developed the technique into a personal philosophy he called Merz. Merz was, in effect, an intermedial revolution that embraced a steadfast commitment to deploying found (that is, worthless and discarded) matter from Schwitters’ immediate environment in his diverse activities as sculptor, writer, designer and performer. Merz became a standpoint from which he rose to the challenges of his troubled and volatile times – and an approach that ran entirely against the grain of a polarised age. 

To take an example of Schwitters’ Merz architecture: Haus Merz, about 4.5cm high. No fantasies on paper here, and no use of standard materials like clay or plaster. Schwitters fashioned his model from found objects: a button, a spinning top, cog wheels and cheap board for a roof. Today, when tiny houses of recycled refuse are common currency, Merz models might well be welcomed as stimulating explorations of materials and methods. In 1920, against the backdrop of the old German Empire’s staggering stylistic superfluities, Merz art worked like a slap in the face. German culture was supposed to provide a looking glass that reflected the superiority of the German people. What stared back at them from the Merz world was literally rubbish. Rather than question fraudulent traditions, critics launched protracted attacks on Schwitters’ art as seditious, schizophrenic and ‘unGerman’. Unfazed, he declared his materials were ‘pure German, collected on German rubbish heaps’.

Thanks to Schwitters’ networking skills, he rapidly made contact with like-minded colleagues in the post-war years, when the avant-garde movement was gearing up for a new beginning. In 1918, the socialist architect Bruno Taut had announced his aim of uniting the arts: ‘Everything will be one thing: architecture.’ Taut insisted that architecture should obliterate disciplinary boundaries and embody the whole field of visual and applied art. Such ideas found an echo in Schwitters’ statement in 1922 that of all the arts, architecture came closest to the idea of Merz, and indeed, his work progressively accommodated the built environment. As Merz was essentially a recycling principle for which any material might serve, he suggested that ageing buildings, ugly ones included, need not go to waste, but could be integrated into new designs. Schwitters was completely out on a limb with this proposal, for none of his colleagues proved enthusiastic about assimilating unglamorous, outmoded substance or irksome environmental factors into their state-of-the-art projects. 

Haus Merz, 1920

In 1923, a new world opened up for Schwitters during a tour of the Netherlands. Through his friend Theo van Doesburg, he met leading Dutch architects such as Gerrit Rietveld and encountered a style that was soon to reach Germany. As the inflation crisis of 1921–23 subsided, Germany’s socialist-led municipalities began to commission Modernist housing estates, while architects mulled over the niceties of standardised building methods and affordable, hygienic accommodation for workers. Very much in tune with the avant-garde practitioners’ perception of themselves as harbingers of a new social order, Schwitters devoted his energies to direct intervention in public life, publishing the first of a series of books to propagate the ideas of avant-garde architects (though the venture proved too costly to continue) and promoting an international, functional style relevant to all aspects of everyday existence. Out of Schwitters’ Merz graphic design agency rolled posters, logos, catalogues, advertisements and, from 1929, all Hanover city council’s DIN-normed printed matter, from school reports to possession orders. In the late 1920s, he worked for a government organisation researching new building technologies and became involved in prestigious architectural schemes such as the Karlsruhe Dammerstock estate.

In autumn 1927, Schwitters visited the Netherlands expressly to study new architectural projects. What really took his fancy, though, was Hugo Häring’s meticulously planned farmstead of Gut Garkau, where no space was wasted and Schwitters noted gleefully that the cowshed was the most lopsided building he’d ever seen. The great fascination of contemporary art and architecture lay for him in what he described as ‘a new experience of space’ that blurred distinctions between interior and exterior and interacted with its surroundings. It was such visionary interpretations of space as an architectural force field that Schwitters tried to communicate to the public between 1928 and 1930, when he toured Germany to lecture on design. At the same time, he incorporated the idea of flowing space into the constructions in his Hanover studio, resulting in a groundbreaking sculptural interior made of refuse that in 1933 he christened with the name Merzbau. 

‘Schwitters declared his materials were pure German, collected on German rubbish heaps’ 

If Schwitters’ concept of Merz displayed an outward convergence with the reformist architectural discourses of the 1920s, his devotion to the unassuming and redundant found no takers. Undeterred, he adhered to his Merz perspective and never shied away from targeting the weaknesses of the new architecture of the day. With his lifelong aversion to the arrogant, pompous and pretentious, he couldn’t resist puncturing a few inflated egos in his essay on the new high-profile Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart. Its contributors included some of Europe’s most eminent architects, such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, who bagged the best site and the biggest budget and whom Schwitters called ‘a dangerous genius’. Le Corbusier’s Weissenhof house, Schwitters remarked, took neither its location nor the local climate into account – or was the great architect powerful enough to influence the weather? No one was spared in Schwitters’ incisive appraisal, in their tendency to promote themselves as priests and prophets, or in their assumption that the occupants of their model dwellings would eagerly dump their upholstery and purchase unnervingly angular furniture to match. 

Schwitters is usually celebrated for his collages

Schwitters was conscious of the perils of pursuing ideological aims – flat roofs had, for instance, become the touchstone of the progressive architectural canon – and saw that such intransigence exposed architects’ work to political instrumentation. Conventional German architects who were horror-struck by the very idea of an International Style had only bitter invective for Weissenhof. Rather than join the debate about providing adequate housing for an industrial society, they adopted a blatantly racist stance. Weissenhof’s prefabricated concrete modules, white facades and flat roofs were blasted as an act of treason, residential machines more suited to Jerusalem than Stuttgart. 

As opposing parties hardened their doctrinaire persuasions, the ultimately tragic inability of a new generation of artists to embrace the Weimar Republic’s democratic constitution became increasingly evident. Rebellious as they were, most still harboured the authoritarian prejudices of pre-war Germany; dialogue with the public never crossed their minds. It was just such deficits that Schwitters pinpointed in his whimsical review of a national design conference, taking those at the vanguard to task with his customary astuteness; it took Schwitters to interview baffled passers-by, parody the pontificating luminaries on stage and spot the double standards evidenced by a murky toilet glitzed up with lace trim and flowers in a beer mug.

Merz Barn at Elterwater

Credit: Gwyneth Alban Davis

As the 1930s began, Germany’s building programmes were wound down in the wake of the Great Depression. In 1933 the Nazis initiated radical urban reforms. Party headquarters replaced town halls, and city centres were flattened to make way for monumental ministries and parade grounds in which all traces of individual identity were to be eliminated. The Federation of German Architects promptly proclaimed support for the new rulers and expelled its Jewish members. In line with the Nazis’ monstrous classifications of waste and value, Schwitters was categorised as dispensable dross. His art was denounced as the dustbin naturalism of a subhuman creature conspiring to subvert the nation’s moral heritage and entomb the noble German spirit under mounds of filth named Merz. Schwitters left Germany forever in 1937. 

During his exile in Norway and Britain, often far from urban centres, he incorporated plentiful organic elements and forms into his work – whatever came to hand, for Merz had always implied a tireless engagement with his environment, however unfavourable. (His sculptures of leftover porridge during his Manx internment were legendary even in his own time.) Merz still dominated Schwitters’ mindset, and even after the Hanover Merzbau had been bombed to smithereens, he never forsook his belief that it exemplified a new domain of art – one he was prepared to ‘fight for … in desperation, as an animal for its child’. The only building he ever designed and built from scratch was the two-storey Oslo Merzbau, made of refuse and modelled on the original. In failing health and often in appalling circumstances, he created a Merz hut in Moldefjord (which has been dubbed ‘Dada’s Sistine Chapel’) and a Merz Barn in Elterwater in Cumbria, unfinished when he died in 1948. But he had no recourse to later terms like ‘environment’, and these universally misunderstood works of exile were left to rot for years; little has survived. 

A postage stamp celebrating his 100th anniversary was issued in 1986

The Merz legacy nonetheless gained momentum. In impassioned letters to Schwitters, his avowed disciple Aldo van Eyck outlined the need for injections of Merz into contemporary architecture, implementing these in his construction of over 700 site-specific playgrounds on derelict sites in Amsterdam, in the very type of interstices ignored in the grandiose designs of Weimar’s star architects.

At last we are catching up with Schwitters in creating a lifestyle from recycling. In addition, a new millennium has brought a new understanding of Merz in terms of transgressive structures and shifting articulations of space, summed up by Carola Giedion-Welcker’s description of the waste-full Hanover Merzbau in 1937: a ‘world of branching and building, where the imagination is free to climb at will’.