M HKA Ensembles

Book, 16.8 x 10.5 cm, language: German, publisher: Hamburg: Edition Nautilus Verlag Lutz Schulenburg, ISBN: 3-89401-193-9.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/631).

Literary synopsis *Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling, Ersters Kapitel: Ursachen und Beginn der grossen glorreichen Revolution in Revon* is Schwitters’s unfinished novel, in which an innocent bystander starts a revolution merely by being there. A group of people gather to condemn him as he stands, doing nothing, in public. As the man leaves, an absurd hysteria strikes the crowd causing many to be trampled to death. Later, a boy proclaims that Müller's movement has precipitated a great and glorious revolution in the town of Revon (Schwitters's imaginary name for Hanover). Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice "Schwitters’s essential aestheticism and formalism alienated him from the political wing of German Dada led by Huelsenbeck (editor of *Dada Almanach*), and he was ridiculed as ‘the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution’. Although his work of this period is full of hints and allusions to contemporary political and cultural conditions, unlike the work of George Grosz or John Heartfield it was not polemical or bitterly satirical. *Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling*, is Schwitters’s ironic response to what he saw as Huelsenbeck’s political posturing." - Richard Humphreys, 2009