CHAPTER ÜPSIILON
Nazi SA raided the office of Paul Renner, director of Munich’s Master School for German Printers, on March 25th, 1933, seizing Renner’s copy of Kurt Schwitters’ literary journal, Merz 24—typeset and printed there the year before by typographer Jan Tschichold and his students. Under Hitler, only heavily-ligatured Germanic blackletter fonts like Fraktur were permitted. New typography, an internationalist, form-follows-function approach promoted by Jan Tschichold—author of Die Neue Typographie—Paul Renner, and Kurt Schwitters, was condemned by Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels as “Kulturbolschewismus”: communism’s advance-guard.
The SA was far too late to prevent distribution of Merz 24’s thousand copies. The issue’s content was Schwitters’ thirty-page Ur Sonata (Primeval Sonata). Schwitters had developed this sound-poem through iteration and reiteration, between 1921 and 1932, during dozens of controversial performances at avant-garde theater evenings, private parties and fancy salons throughout Europe. He’d published excerpts previously, for instance, in Eugene Jolas’ Paris quarterly transition, and Arthur Lehning’s Dutch i 10 arts review.
After the March 1933 raid, Paul Renner was fired from his college directorship, and the font he’d created, Futura (this font you’re now reading), was banned. Jan Tschichold was imprisoned for a month, then escaped to Switzerland and England, where he was hired by the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, to design the standard Penguin paperback. Kurt Schwitters was dismissed from his bread-and-butter position as chief graphic designer to the city council of his hometown, Hannover, and the Nazis began to include his typographically adventurous publications in book-burnings. They’d already been exhibiting Schwitters’ collages in the “Complete Insanity” area of their touring “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) shows. Then, in 1935, Neues Volk magazine wrote of his art, “Simply indescribable trash… That the Merzbild could even be purchased from public city funds testifies more to the business sense than to the artistic talent of their creator.”
Schwitters did not stop touring. Harriet Janis, co-founder of the Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan, recounts Walter Spengemann’s tale that, “He began enlivening his poetry lectures with a most dangerous kind of audience participation. Opening that strange, omnipresent, cabalistic portmanteau of his, he would remove a photograph of Hitler and place it at the platform’s edge. Before launching into the long Ursonate…he would invite his audience to spit at Hitler’s likeness whenever they felt so inclined. This, he implied, would be an acceptable substitute for applause.”
