Schwitters belonged to a group of European artists who, at the end of World War I, broke down the traditional borders between art and non-art, visual art and non-visual art. Schwitters, a resident of Hannover and thus a long way from the Dadaist centers in Zurich and Berlin, became primarily known for his collages and assemblages using worthless everyday materials such as scraps of newspapers; the name he gave to such works, merz, was an accidentally cut part of the word Commerzbank. He was promptly declared "decadent" by the Nazis and went into exile first in Norway, then in England, where he was first interned in a camp for enemy aliens for more than a year; a milieu, however, that gave him a new audience. Dead in 1948, he did not see the new appreciation that began in earnest in the 1960s and made him an iconic figure among the modernists of the period between the wars.
Schwitters was as much a writer and performer as he was a visual artist, and the five weighty volumes of Das literarische Werk published by DuMont, Cologne, between 1973 and 1981, show that he kept writing even when, during the Depression and the war years, he had no prospect of getting his stuff published. Of the thirty-two pieces in this anthology, four German originals were printed in local daily newspapers, one in the avant-garde journal Der Sturm, and one, Die Scheuche, produced as a way-out children’s book in collaboration with three other artists; the basis of all the other pieces are manuscripts, most of them in the Kurt Schwitters Archive in Oslo.
It is not the first time that Schwitters’ texts appear in English. Kate Traumann Steinitz, who knew him well, included eighty pages of translated texts in her monograph Kurt Schwitters: A Portrait from Life (1968); the poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris filled a 240-page book with Schwitters’ Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics (1993), and in 1995, Per Kirkeby, an artist very much of Schwitters’ spirit and range of activities, provided a hundred pages of Norwegian Landscapes, the Zoological Garden Lotteries and Other Stories [1]. But nobody before Zipes, the fairytale specialist from the University of Minnesota, had collected, from the vast material available, the stories that might be classified as fairytales, and he shows that fairytale concepts and stereotypes stimulated Schwitters’ imagination, even though most of these texts could be described as anti-fairytales.
If the conventions of the genre demand a happy ending (just as the ballad genre favors tragic endings), the war and the subsequent ruinous inflation in Germany did not predispose the younger generation to believe in happy outcomes for human endeavor. While the wandering fairytale hero of humble origin ends up with a beautiful princess, wealth, and power ("half the kingdom"), artists like Brecht, Grosz, and Dix saw greed and corruption at work. At the same time, they had the vitality of youth and enjoyed being iconoclasts. Schwitters, in his stories, sometimes takes an almost didactic stand against expectations of happiness seen as success in life; inner peace and contentment are our best chances for finding happiness ("The Swineherd and the Great Illustrious Writer," "Happiness," "The Three Wishes"). Angels descending to earth in search of a happy person find either discontentment ("The Fairy Tale about Happiness") or death and the chicanery of power ("What is Happiness?").
Schwitters uses many of the stylistic features of fairytales such as repeated words and analogous situations, and sometimes he takes up themes from the Brothers Grimm (the rivaling "Two Brothers," the King Thrushbeard situation of "The Proud Young Woman," a "Lucky Hans" who ends up a rich man) or pays homage to Andersen (the animate objects in "Three Suitcases"). But there is one convention he breaks consistently and on purpose: the idea that fairytales and reality are separate worlds—it is exactly the clash that becomes his theme. The delightful "Transformations" describes what would happen in a modern city if people were really transformed into animals, here an elephant exorcised by officials from the Taxation Office ("Old-Age Pension" does the trick). Goodness goes unrewarded: in "An Old Fairy Tale," peaceful Frederick cannot get himself to sever the head of a wounded man and as a result, he is hanged himself, and "The Story of a Good Man" describes somebody who does not want to grudge a mosquito his blood and thereupon is bitten to death. In "He," the longest and maybe most original tale, a boy who cannot stop growing is to be punished for insubordination when he does not shrink, as ordered, and although he otherwise scrupulously follows orders, his growth leads to the destruction of the army and the devastation of much of the country, and he is finally made to seek suicide by drowning. A growth serum comes into play in "Once upon a Time There was a Tiny Mouse," where cat and mouse eat up the mistress of the house.
In these instances it is grotesque exaggeration in quasi-realistic surroundings (unusual growth) that gives the story its fairytale character, as it normally does in jocular tales, here represented by "He Who was Mentally Retarded" (a trickster who gets away with stealing because he also tricks his master’s colleagues in the fish business) and "Normal Insanity" [2], where an excessive pursuit of normality becomes madness. Some texts defy genre expectations by being all in negatives ("The King without People," "The Story about the Rabbit") or pure flights of fancy ("The Flat and the Round Painter," "The Flying Fish," and others).
The translator faced a hard task, for the puns and allusions of the German original often cannot be recreated in English, e.g., the name Schiller and the verb schillern in "The Man with the Glass Nose" (Zipes tries "Cyranian" and "Cyrano"). More worrying are the misunderstandings and mistranslations, too numerous to be listed within the space of this review. Just a couple of examples from "He": Einjährige does not mean "first-year recruits" (89, 100), but educated young men who had to do only one year of military service; "Der Dauermarsch des langen Mannes konnte vielleicht mehrere Kriege ersparen" does not mean "The tall man’s long march could perhaps spare Him many wars" (101) but "…could save (the country, in an economic sense) several wars." Complete nonsense is "the building in Hildesheim, which was called the Knochenhauer jailhouse, had been built between five-eighths and two-thirds of the man’s height" (95). The Knochenhauer Jailhouse being built around the ever-growing soldier is said to be of the same constructional type as a Hildesheim building, and had now reached 5/8 of 2/3 of 1/2 (an intentionally absurd measurement) of the man’s height.
The texts are preceded by a forty-page introduction and followed by fifteen pages of notes, which are mainly comments. These are often vacuous or make connections between life and text, society and text, that are mere guesses, not given more credibility by words like "obvious" or "evidently" being added. Schwitters repeatedly marked his distance from politics and criticized Prolet Kult, yet Zipes presses him into a primitive left/right pattern that does little justice to the realities of Germany between the wars. It was the Communists who readily undermined the governing Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic, and the Nazis owed much of their attraction to being (National) Socialists, their anticapitalist agitation going hand-in-hand with their antisemitism. In these post-modernist times, the heroic forward march of the avant-garde also looks oddly dated. Zipes concludes his introduction with a quotation from Adorno (another progressive ghost), translated by colleague Hullot Kentor, which this reviewer found incomprehensible.
Aesthetically, this is a very pleasant book. The text is generously spaced, each story is accompanied by a whole-page illustration in a naivist style, and "The Scarecrow" is given in its German original (207–219), an English adaptation (72–84), and as a running English text (223 ff.). A pity the book is flawed in other respects (including typos).
[1] Hellerup, Edition Bløndal; Zipes does not seem to be aware of this anthology.
[2] The German original is on page 230, quoted as Normaler Unsinn (recte: Irrsinn).
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[Review length: 1357 words • Review posted on December 8, 2009]