Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his
Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same
time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the
genre upside down and inside out. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy
Tales is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories
in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared
in English. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's
leading authorities on fairy tales, this book gathers thirty-two stories
written between 1925 and Schwitters's death in 1948--including a
complete English-language recreation of The Scarecrow, a children's
book illustrated with avant-garde typography that Schwitters created
with Kate Steinitz and De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg. Lucky Hans
and Other Merz Fairy Tales also includes brilliant new illustrations
that evoke the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
Schwitters wrote these darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales at
a time when traditional German fairy tales were being co-opted by the
Nazis. Filled with sharp critiques of German life during the Weimar and
early Nazi eras, Schwitters's tales are rich with absurdist events and
insist that not everyone--and perhaps not anyone--lives happily ever
after. In "Lucky Hans," the starving protagonist tries to catch a rabbit
only to have it shed its fur like a coat and run off naked into the
forest. In other tales, a sarcastic gypsy stands in for a fairy
godmother and an army recruit is arrested for growing to monstrous size.
Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is a delightfully strange and
surprising book.
