Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales

[Dave Monroe]

Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales
Kurt Schwitters
Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes
Illustrated by Irvine Peacock
Cloth | 2009 | $22.95 / £13.50
248 pp. | 5 1/2 x 8 | 31 halftones. 26 line illus.


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.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8868.html

Chapter 1

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8868.pdf

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8868.html