PREFACE

The general sense of insecurity was expressed in growing levels of violence and bigotry. Vicious skirmishes between political opponents were common. The calls for a strong leader to take command grew louder. Thus the culture of the Weimar period, which had stood for democracy, for internationalism and for a new order, started to founder even before 1933. A massive backwash of resentment was building up in Germany, against the government, against foreign influences and against a perceived breakdown of traditional values. When the surge of reaction hit the arts, it swept aside the whole edifice—Constructivism and topless revues, Thomas Mann and Tarzan of the Apes, Bert Brecht and Josephine Baker alike. —Gwendolen Webster, Kurt Merz Schwitters

SCHWITTERS CRACKS UP HITLER

A century ago—between World War I and World War II—the artist Kurt Schwitters spent ten years developing an unusual nonsense poem. He gave dozens of recitals, in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Holland, and Switzerland, then later in Norway and England. His poem grew and changed with every performance. He invented a method for transcribing the piece, and self-published a thousand copies.

In that era of resurgent nationalism, Schwitters was a pacifist and Utopian supranationalist: he opposed the idea of nation-states. In 1924 he wrote, “Anyone who is supranational cannot understand the hatred that nations have for each other.”

Schwitters could get along in several languages; he understood that people are divided by language. Our mother tongue is a mechanism for internalizing our nation’s prejudices, clichés, metaphors, knee-jerk associations, and lies. We are polluted from our earliest years with baked-in historical agendas. Someone who does not speak my language may be my enemy.

In writing about his sound-poetry Schwitters announced his personal mission to free words and letters from the imposition of meaning. Behind this proclamation one discerns a deeper understanding: he is referring to the evils linguistic differences encourage. Rather abstractly, Schwitters explains:

Abstract poetry evaluates values against values. You could also say “words against words.” This makes no sense, but it creates the sense of a world, and that is what matters. (The common soldier must show respect and deference to every officer.)

Transference of the artist’s worldview. (Callus and corn ointment in a society at peace, war merchandise.) Total experience greens brain, but the shaping is what matters…. And you? (Sign up for war bonds!) Decide for yourself what is poem, what is frame.

The dada movement, back in 1916, had proclaimed that government lies led to World War I. Literary historian Jed Rasula explains, “[Hugo] Ball, like so many other artists, flinched at the platitudes used to whip up martial fever, he felt that language itself was being poisoned.” Kurt Schwitters’ response, after the war, had been to take scraps of these poisoned languages and reassemble them into collage, concocting fresh language with no denotation—no corrupt social meaning.

Schwitters said, “The Ursonate is the most purely abstract of my poems.” All instrumental music is abstract: music without lyrics makes no referential statement. When language is similarly freed from making referential statements—as with Ur Sonata—our unconscious can freely apprehend.

Abstract words seem funny; we laugh. Then, as the poem begins to sound beautiful, we feel joy. Credit Kurt Schwitters with awakening the joyous, preverbal awareness we experienced as little kids.

Consider the schoolbook series from the sixties, Phonics Is Fun. Is it fun learning to read? Through phonics lessons, beginning readers figure out that phonemes are meaningless letter-combinations lodged inside of words: “-at” is in cat and hat. The picture of a cat wearing a hat is funny. But Kurt Schwitters is funnier than phonics, immersing us in a phonemic bath that never dries up into meaning. His Ur Sonata theme tatta tatta frees “-at” of any mission to denote cat or hat. In Ur Sonata, phonemes escape social language; they attain the autonomy of musical notes—as in composer Oliver Nelson’s song-title, “The Blues and the Abstract Truth.” The abstract truth we experience bathing in Schwitters’ sound poetry is transcendental. For an hour, we’re transported to translingual Utopia.

In January 1937, Kurt Schwitters—that tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired man—fled for his life from Germany. The deadly serious Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had singled out Schwitters as an exemplary degenerate artist, since in his collage-making Schwitters famously specialized in elevating garbage to the status of art-material. In June 1937, Hitler was photographed for a newspaper, standing in front of Kurt Schwitters’ signature artwork, the Merzbild collage, confiscated from a museum and now hung, askew, in the “Complete Insanity” room of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. In the photo, Hitler is laughing.

Score one for Schwitters, self-titled “bourgeois and idiot”: he cracked up Hitler.

LIVING UR SONATA

I first heard Ur Sonata when I was a boy in the sixties—recited by my father. In the eighties, when I was performing it regularly, my audiences seemed to experience Ur Sonata as a novel discovery, not the landmark classic I knew it to be. Today—forty years on—an Internet search turns up dozens of Ur Sonata performances on Youtube, along with hundreds of articles and blogposts, yet few people I chat with in my bookstore are familiar with this century-old artwork.

Kurt Schwitters knew Ur Sonata could be a baffling poem, but he hoped it would outlive his era. His 1927 essay Meine Sonate in Urlauten aims to help make the poem accessible. The essay is descriptive (“The sonata consists of four movements….”), explanatory (“The gathering of the themes and inspirations was dadaistic and arbitrary….”), analytical (“Many interpretations are possible…imagination is required to read correctly….”), defensive (“Work improves the reader’s receptivity much more than questions or thoughtless criticism….”), instructional (“Every performer can put together his or her own Cadenza based on the themes….”), and reflexive (“My explanations are a document concerning the inexplicability of a work of art, or, as Raoul Hausmann, puts it: ‘First comes art, then piano playing.’”).

In Living Ur Sonata—written a century after Schwitters—I too aim to help make the poem accessible. My tactic is to mix personal storytelling with historical narrative. Ur Sonata is a poem that’s accompanied me for sixty years, offering joy and solace. I hope Living Ur Sonata assists you, dear reader, in gaining as much benefit as I have from Kurt Schwitters’ delightfully baffling, profound composition.

Here are two reasons to celebrate Kurt Schwitters today especially: he puts us in touch with our common humanity, and he inspires us to defy our own era’s resurgent nationalism. A hundred years after he composed it, let’s conjure Kurt Schwitters to transcend authority and seize the hour, by singing Ur Sonata.