SOURCE; "One Man's Merz," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3808, February 28, 1975, p. 231.

Like many of that generation of the European avant-garde associated with Dada and Surrealism, Kurt Schwitters worked in several artistic media and sought to break down the barriers between the different art forms, and also between what convention deemed to be "art" and "non-art". Although something of a loner, in that he did not join any large group of artists, but preferred to work in relative isolation, cultivating "Merz", his own brand of Dada, Schwitters's work broadly follows a pattern typical of his breed of artistic revolutionary: he painted, sculpted, produced collages, typographical designs, sound and concrete poems—and also prose. This last may come as something of a surprise.

Among the other Dadaists continuous prose is a rare phenomenon, but Schwitters made extensive excursions into the field, and with a fair degree of success. This second volume of Das Uterarische Werk, which covers the period 1918-30, does contain items which scarcely fall within the accepted terms of reference of a "prose work", but there are also many tales which seek to convey Schwitters's highly personal world view through the medium of narrative fiction.

It is unfortunate that these short stories should be so little known—the visual extravaganzas create a more immediate impact and cross language barriers with consummate ease, thereby generating a very one-sided view of Schwitters the creative artist—particularly since they reveal him much more clearly than in the visual work as far more than a childlike (and at times, childish) creator of idle fantasies. In his prose tales he comes across as a thoughtful, capable writer with the ability to combine the Dadaist pun with his own Merz techniques, sustaining them through a developing action in order to make a much more complex and powerful "point" than can be achieved by a collage or a few lines of verse.

Some of his verbal vandalism is trifling and tedious, and the narrative situations can be repetitive and trivial, but at the same time he cannot be dismissed as a mere dabbler in words, toying with the Novelle and fairytale conventions to his own arbitrary and private ends, as his two most important prose works, both short stories, demonstrate. "Die Zwiebel" and "Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling" first appeared in the pages of the Expressionist periodical Der Sturm. In both, Schwitters makes lavish use of a wide range of styles, from Stramm-like compressed Expressionistic language to the simplicity of the children's fairytale, and of his Merz technique of incorporating into the artistic construct various discarded items from the world about him: in his visual work, he would include in his collages used bus tickets, pieces of newspaper, wrappings, scraps of wood, along with other less savoury items, and in his prose he employs fragments of advertisements, notices, clichés and proverbial utterances. These are embedded in the text in an apparently random fashion in order to disrupt and deflate the suspension of disbelief and the narrative flow. In the visual works, the result is often confused and lacking in specific direction but in the prose works these linguistic objets trouvés are subordinated to the main thread of the action in a way which concentrates, rather than dissipates, the impact of the text.

"Die Zwiebel" takes a rather nasty delight in describing in a first-person narrative an execution—the narrator being the victim—which reaches its climax at the moment when the prisoner has been killed and his body is being carved up for a variety of purposes. Then, suddenly, the action goes into reverse, like a film running backwards through the gate:

They began to put me together again. First my eyes were popped gently back into their sockets. (Be not afraid, Faith, Love, Hope are the stars.) Then my entrails were fetched. Fortunately, nothing had been cooked yet nor cut up for sausages. (Vaincu, mais non dompté.) Still, people are happy when the harvest is good.

In the end, the status quo ante is more or less restored, except that the narrator has lost some blood and the odd shred of flesh, and the king, who is one of the witnesses, dies. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, the socialist revolution is proclaimed.

"Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling" is also concerned with revolution, but in this case the central figure, who represents the creative artist or anyone who refuses to become caught up in the aimless bustle of contemporary life, causes first unease, then sensation, and finally uproar by actually standing still and not wishing to move. This affront against public decency stings those who gather round into an increasingly frenzied response, until the man suddenly walks away:

Then the most shocking thing of all happened. Slowly, and with the composure of a perfect machine, the man started to walk off, greeting all those about him in a friendly manner, not with the policeman, but in the opposite direction. The women scream, the men are astonished beyond bounds, the children run yelling.

At the end, a hunchback youth runs through the streets proclaiming the outbreak of the glorious revolution.

Like all the Dadaists, Schwitters was repelled by the arrogant self-assertiveness of contemporary man and sought to pillory the narrow materialist aspirations of the society of his day. In these prose works, he employs satire both to point the finger of scorn and also to suggest the direction in which an alternative world might lie. Fantastical and self-indulgent Schwitters's work may be; the tone is none the less fundamentally serious in intent and sincere in its moral objective.

The preceding volume of Schwitters's verse was chastised for falling short of the highest standards of editorial accuracy (TLS, October 5, 1973), and this second volume is regrettably not without blemish. The very first item, "Die Zwiebel", six pages in length, contains in its footnotes sixteen omissions with regard to variants, and two misprints. This cannot help but cast further doubt on the quality of the editing.