CHAPTER ÄFF
“I slept in a small glassed-in porch off the dining room. There was a huge chest near my couch; the first night I was astonished to hear distinct stirrings inside it. At breakfast I felt impelled to mention the phenomenon. The twelve-year-old Schwitters boy had filled it with guinea pigs.”—Paul Bowles, Without Stopping
Kurt Schwitters had a special relationship with animals. Inside his Hannover house, this meant lots of pet guinea pigs.
On January 2nd, 1937, Kurt left for Norway—secretly. He’d learned the SS was planning to interview him about the political activities of his friends; Helma’s mother was pro-Nazi and if she’d known Kurt was fleeing, she might warn the SS. Ernst was already in Lysaker, outside Oslo. Helma remained in Hannover to safeguard the house full of Kurt’s art and to look after her father, her Nazi mother, Kurt’s mother Henriette, and the guinea pigs.
For three years, living with Ernst outside Oslo, Kurt kept up professional life, painting, making collages, writing letters, traveling, and assembling another Merzbau. But he spent part of every summer on the remote island of Hjertøya, where, based in a storage shed—the Merzhytta—he created in solitude. While he worked, Kurt habitually sang Ur Sonata.
In 1940, the Nazi invasion of Norway pushed northward; Kurt and Ernst engaged in a dangerous flight, during which Kurt used pet mice to manage stress, helping stave off an epileptic seizure (he did have a seizure later, after they’d crossed the North Sea to Scotland). Biographer Gwendolen Webster relates,
An English soldier remembered how he was struck by the sight of a figure standing perfectly still during an air-raid alarm. While everyone else scrambled for shelter, the man merely took some white mice from a jacket pocket and let them loose. When the soldier found an opportunity to question him, the man replied: “Yes, I run after them and try to catch them. You see, I can’t bear the torments and harassment of alarms anymore. I can’t stand it! So, I thought to myself that it would be better if I catch the mice. Then I don’t hear the alarm, then I don’t register the war, then I don’t take any notice of aeroplanes, then I am not afraid and just concentrate on getting the little animals back again.” When I asked him for his name, he replied, “I am Kurt Schwitters from Hannover.”
Sixty years later, on June 11th, 1997, during a pilgrimage to Schwitters’ long-abandoned Merzhytta on Hjertøya, Wolfgang Müller—Valerie Caris Blitz’s Die Tödliche Doris performance partner—was startled when, “All of a sudden, I heard a starling uttering strange sounds […] Somehow these sounds had a familiar ring. Suddenly I realized that the bird was reciting parts of the ursonate which some unknown ancestor had picked up from Schwitters long ago and transmitted over generations. Starlings are known to be masters of imitation […]. They learn the song from their parents (or parts of the song). Here, parts of the original ursonate had been transmitted without notice by the world of art.”
