The literary productions of German Dada have long languished under a cloud. They have never been regarded as a respectable object for scholarly investigation, and in any event it has been virtually impossible to study them in depth because the works have for the most part either been out of print for a generation or more, or are published in minute editions under obscure imprints.

Moreover, while immense scholarly effort continues to be lavished on the uttermost minutiae of Goethe's life and works, precious little serious attention has been devoted to this crucial modern movement and to the considerable technical problems facing the critic of the composite poetic forms adopted by the avant-garde, which frequently cross the traditional boundaries between visual, aural and written. As a result, the quality of criticism of the available material is, by and large, pretty deplorable. Nor is the standard of such published primary texts as have been produced excessively high. Hugo Ball's poetry, for example, is collected in an extremely selective volume lacking any proper critical apparatus, and the Gesammelte Gedichte I of Hans Arp has met with a similar fate. Until now, Schwitters has fared even worse; odd items of his work have appeared piecemeal together with a trickle of secondary material, but there has been little of any substance.

Few publishers have had the courage to market German Dadaists, who owe a particular debt to the enterprise of such houses as the Limes Verlag, and also in Schwitters's case to DuMont, who have so far produced two studies of his life and works, and are now embarking on the publication of his literary work, beginning with the lyric poetry. Volumes two and three promise prose and dramatic works; Volume four will contain manifestos and critical prose.

Outside Germany, Schwitters is best known for his visual works, in particular his Merz collages and constructs; of his other creative activities, virtually nothing is known beyond a narrow specialist circle save for the notorious and much-anthologized and translated "An Anna Blume".

Schwitters's poetic career proper began with a series of poems, published in Der Sturm, imitative of that journal's first eminent protégé, August Stramm. They are superficially similar but where Stramm compresses every element of his poems (lines, words, length) in his endeavour to concentrate significance in a manner parallel to Futurist linguistic doctrine, Schwitters is content to play with the medium and its technical possibilities, exploiting words as objects in his exploration of a private fantasy-world.

Schwitters progressed from this phase to Merz (a term lifted from "Commerz-und Privatbank" which cocks a deliberate snook at the materialism and spiritual emptiness of contemporary society), his own personal form of Dada in which he takes the linguistic and physical leftovers of industrial society, and seeks to translate them into an art of collage poems and pictures. "An Anna Blume" is the most celebrated of the Merz poems, and its eponymous heroine became a kind of mascot for Schwitters. The poem itself is a clever parody of bourgeois Romanticism and a huge deflation of the cosmic aesthetic exclusivity of Der Sturm (which obligingly published the poem on two separate occasions).

From Merz, Schwitters continued farther along the experimental path, progressing beyond sound poetry to become one of the (little acknowledged) innovators of concrete poetry. He spent his latter years in England, producing some embarrassingly bad verse in English. Poor or not, one of his English poems aptly summarizes his childlike—and not infrequently childish—peregrinations within his own private universe:

I build my time
In gathering flowers
And throwing out the weeds.
This time will lead me forward
To death
And God
And Paradise.

The edition [Das literarische Werk, Volume 1: Lyrik] is rather mystifyingly carved up by Friedhelm Lach into five sections, which not only render the study of chronological development difficult (let alone the task of, say, tracing the order of contributions to Der Sturm), but also raise tricky and unnecessary problems of classification. (Should the "pornographisches i-gedicht" have been in the concrete poetry section, and should "What a b what a b what a beauty" have numbered among the English rather than the concrete poems? And since when has the "Ursonate" been a concrete poem?) There is in addition to the main text a welcome selection of illustrations—mainly of Merz pictures—to remind the reader that there are further gradations beyond the concrete, in which printed material is absorbed into a contrastive visual design without totally forfeiting its significance as language.

This volume proclaims itself as the first instalment of a "critical complete edition", and should therefore be judged as such; unfortunately, it falls far short of the minimum requirement, even granted that the Germans are not exactly precipitate in furnishing their men of letters with definitive texts to their oeuvres. The inconsistencies, inaccuracies and plain blunders are legion. The poem "Obervogelsang" appears to have been quoted from a letter to Raoul Hausmann. Lach's footnote refers to two other published versions, which differ slightly from each other, but which—far more importantly—are substantially at variance with the Hausmann version, lines 6-8 of which run:

Bekke Dii kee
P'p'bampédii gaal
Ii Uü Oo Aa

These lines are rendered in PIN (a journal produced by Schwitters and Hausmann) as

Beckedikee
Lampedigaal
P'p'beckedikee

No explanation is offered, and the reader who does not check back with PIN will be blissfully ignorant of the fact that these are virtually two different poems. Nor does Lach consider it worth pointing out that the title of the poem as shown in the facsimile of the manuscript, which he reproduces in his own Der Merzkünstler Kurt Schwitters, is in fact the more normal form "Obervogelgesang"—a red herring for a researcher investigating the suppression of prefixes and the mutations of standard substantive patterns.

The second version of "Frohe Tage. London Symphony" is reproduced in the body of the text. A footnote informs us that the first version, dated 1942 (the manuscript of which is lodged in the Kurt Schwitters archive in Oslo) was printed in Stefan Themerson's book Kurt Schwitters in England and again in Lach's own monograph. This first version is then reproduced—but in a form which strays considerably from both. One line, indeed, has three distinct renderings (presumably according to one's skill in reading Schwitters's hand-writing and one's knowledge of English): "Prize Beer", "Price Beer", or "Pike Beer". Again, there is no comment on these variants.

But the most serious blemish of all is the treatment meted out to "An Anna Blume", which is central to an understanding of his Merz period, and indeed to his work as a whole. There are two texts which appear to have established themselves: that which Der Sturm published twice (in 1919 and 1926), and a slightly different version employed by anthologizers and which Schwitters himself cites in Anna Blume und ich. But there has never been any real certainty about the text of the poem, and Lach does little more than add to the confusion. Instead of accepting one of the "standard" versions, he reproduces Schwitters's "final" version—Lach's editorial policy generally is, to say the least, idiosyncratic—taken from a letter written to Christof Spengemann in 1947 (despite which the poem is labelled "c. 1919"). The editor states that the poem appears "with a different typographical arrangement and with variants in Der Sturm".

There follows a Iongish—but not exhaustive—list of locations where the poem has been reproduced, with no information about which version appears where—and then a list of variants which refer back to Der Sturm is offered. This list notes two punctuation changes, whereas there are no less than twenty-seven. Lach states that a line 6 variant is "Die Menschen" for "Die Leute". Apart from the fact that he seems to be referring to the wrong line, the words "Die Menschen" do not appear in the Der Sturm version.

Lach also passes over in silence a change of spelling and an omitted word and accepts as definitive what is clearly an oversight by Schwitters ("Rot ist die Farbe Deines grünen Vogels"—where every other text has "Girren" for "Farbe"). In one of the French versions cited in the footnotes, the crucial word "rouge" is omitted. The offending line should read: "Le roulement de ta boule rouge est vert." And there is also a silly misprint of "les" for "le" ("Les sais-tu, Eve . . . ?"). The Urtext is quoted in the footnotes (with no useful suggestion about chronology; one suspects that it was written in retrospect), in a version which seems to indicate that Lach has copied his own faulty version from Der Merzkünstler Kurt Schwitters, except that he has reinserted a line omitted then; particularly unfortunate is the retention of "seines" for "deines" in "die Farbe seines gelben Haares" where the Der Sturm text is quite unambiguously in favour of apostrophization.

At one point, Lach makes a passing reference to "the instability of Dadaist texts", and there is no denying that much Dada written material poses considerable technical problems to the would-be editor. But by and large these are no more severe than those which face the editor of a Büchner or a Trakl, let alone of any medieval text. The only German Dadaist whose poetry represents an extreme challenge to editorial skill is Hans Arp. This is because of his organic concept of the work of art; that is, the individual work can undergo several metamorphoses, be divided into separate poems or absorbed into others, rendered from German into French and vice versa, and so on.

None the less, the Dadaist text demands the highest possible level of editorial expertise and accuracy; every comma counts in a situation where language is playing new roles beyond that of carrier of verbal meaning, so that, for example, Lach's lame excuse for normalizing poems written exclusively in lower case (namely, that Schwitters subsequently moved out of this phase) is a travesty of scholarship in a situation where the impact of the physical appearance of the text is at least as significant as its "meaning".

If the Dadaists are to be seriously investigated and properly evaluated (both exercises are long overdue) then genuine critical editions of a high order of reliability and comprehensiveness are essential. Regrettably, this Schwitters volume does not meet these requirements. It is the ultimate Dada joke in the worst possible taste that this attempt to approach Schwitters has succeeded only in making him seem even more obscure, whimsical and inaccessible than before.