CHAPTER ÄNN
“I cannot agree that I should pray. I cannot see any point as God has different concerns.”—Kurt Schwitters, Letter to Helma, 1940
Behind his family’s cottage, fourteen-year-old Kurt Schwitters created a garden with roses, strawberries, an artificial mountain, and a reconstructed pond. Bullies destroyed the private paradise. Poor Kurt had an hours-long attack he later called St. Vitus Dance—really an epileptic seizure.
More seizures—sometimes several daily—kept Kurt isolated. He graduated high school at twenty. Although he suffered attacks in adulthood, they were less frequent: he learned to stave off seizures with physical activity—walking and bicycling in town, hiking in the mountains, dancing at parties—plus an assortment of pharmaceuticals.
In 1920, Schwitters wrote of his teen years, “My interests changed because of the illness. I discovered my love for art. Initially, I composed rhyming couplets in the manner of music-hall comedians. During a full moon one autumn night I noticed the clear, cold moon. From then on I composed poetry in a lyrical, sentimental manner. Then music seemed to me to be the art. I learned to read music and played music all afternoon. In 1906 I saw my first moonlit landscape in Isernhagen and began to paint. One hundred watercolor landscapes by moonlight, painted from nature. Lit by stearin candles. I decided to become a painter.”
Martyrdom redeemed by creativity. Of Schwitters’ collage work, art historian Jonathan Fineberg asks, “Could his detachment with regard to his materials and his project of reorganizing fragmentary experience have been a symbolic reordering informed at least in part, by his epilepsy?”
The Nazis listed epilepsy as a condition to be eradicated. A critical task for Schwitters became to avoid seizing in public, since this could bring arrest, concentration camp and death. Before the Nazis though, Schwitters was already exploring themes of martyrdom. His 1919 story “The Onion” (Die Zwiebel) tells of a king ordering the narrator’s gruesome execution and evisceration. The king then eats our narrator’s eyeballs; this causes the king’s horrible death. The narrator’s body is reassembling, he’s resurrected! The princess begs him to bring back the king, too. Narrator instead blows up the king.
In 1940, Schwitters was imprisoned, along with thousands of other refugees, at Hutchinson Internment Camp on the Isle of Man: the English had decided any German might be a spy. The leading lights of German liberal culture, penned together, created a university for themselves, giving lectures and running discussion groups. Kurt helped launch a series of performance evenings, regularly reciting Ur Sonata and his other poems.
Outward sociability as a survival technique, concealing inward distress. In autumn 1940 letters from internment camp to Helma, Kurt wrote, “I go to our church, unable to believe in the love of humankind.”
Still, at the deepest level, he retained faith: “I retreat more and more from the rules of the Church, but I am still religious.” … “At night I hold conversations and you appear to answer. In spite of war and separation we belong to each other, forever and all eternity.”
