Merzbau – Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters

Merzbau in Hannover

Merzbau
Kurt Schwitters himself described the Merzbau (Merz Building) as his life's work. The enormous significance which Schwitters attached to this work is evidenced by the fact that, from 1923 onwards, he devoted himself to it assiduously and, despite all untoward circumstances, began it three times: first in Hannover, then in Norway in 1937, and finally in exile in England in 1947. The Merzbau in Hannover was destroyed in an Allied air raid and the Norwegian version fell a victim to a fire. Only the English version remained, though Schwitters died before he could complete it. The Merzbau in Hannover was a fantastically constructed interior, as bewildering as it was abstract. The walls and ceiling were covered with a diversity of three - dimensional shapes and the room itself was crowded with materials and objects - or "spoils and relics", as Schwitters himself put it - which were contained in countless nooks and grottoes, some of them totally obstructed by later additions to the work, with the result that their contents then existed only in one's memory of the Merzbau in one of its former states. The Merzbau was - "on principle" - an uncompleted work and continued to grow, changing constantly. The starting point of the work was Schwitters' studio in his house at No. 5 Waldhausenstrasse. However the work grew and grew until finally, just before Schwitters' emigration to Norway, as many as eight rooms had been "merzed", including the skylight in the roof and the space underneath the groundfloor balcony. The actual center of the Merzbau was a tree-standing sculpture, commenced in 1920, which Schwitters called the Säule des erotischen Elends (Column of Erotic Misery). The artist once remarked that everything that was of any importance to him was contained in the Merzbau. This statement refers not only to Schwitters' ideas and overall artistic concept but also to concrete, everyday objects: souvenirs of friends and other things of sentimental value were stored in niches and later walled in. There were grottoes, for example, for Hans Arp and Theo van Doesburg, two caves for Hannah Höch, a cave for Lissitzky and one for Mies van der Rohe, as well as grottoes dedicated to abstract things and ideas, e.g. a Goethe Grotto, a Murderers' Cave, and even a "Love Grotto". Consequently, the Merzbau was also a kind of "constructed autobiography, a building of personal and historical reminiscences. It was not until the beginning of the thirties, however, that the Merzbau attained the Purist State shown on the surviving photographs taken at that time. Schwitters had by then turned the Merzbau into a constructivistic assemblage of white wood and plaster, reflecting the change in his own personal circumstances. It was under the pressure of the changing political situation in Germany that Schwitters' Merzbau became an alternative to restrictive reality. Schwitters came to terms with the political reality of the outside world by withdrawing within himself, by fleeing into the personal, domestic world of artistic fantasy. Schwitters described this development in a text entitled Ich und meine Ziele (Myself and My Aims), which he wrote in 1931: "Many grottoes have long since disappeared below the surface, like the Luther Corner, for example. The literary content is Dadaist, but that is understandable. After all, it dates back to 1923, and I was a Dadaist at that time. However, since the column has taken seven years to build, its form has developed with ever increasing severity, especially the ribs, exactly in keeping with my own intellectual development. The overall impression is one of a Cubist painting or Gothic architecture (not really!)."This association with Gothic cathedrals is by no means coincidental. Schwitters did not see the Merzbau as a Gesamtkunstwerk purely in a formal sense. On the contrary, it addressed the social and ideological aspects of the mediaeval cathedral as an entity which embraced all the arts, It was also from this social architecture of the cathedral that Walter Gropius drew his inspiration for the Bauhaus in Weimar. In his first Bauhaus manifesto, published in 1919, Gropius wrote. "Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith."" This harking back to the mediaeval tradition of the masonic lodge (Bauhüttel reflected the hope for a new beginning from the ruins of a society destroyed by war. This was also the basic idea behind Merz, for Schwitters constantly strove to create order out of chaos. Consequently, the Merzbau may be regarded as an individualized and secularized cathedral of the 20th century embracing all art forms and all creative possibilities. Schwitters himself put the idea in a nutshell: "Becoming absorbed in art is like going to church."

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