SOURCE: "Weimar Politics and the Theme of Love in Kurt Schwitters' Das Baumerbild" in Dada/Surrealism, No. 13, 1984, pp. 17-36.

In the following essay, Nill interprets Schwitters's assemblage Das Bäumerbild in the context of post-World War I German politics, finding in the work symbols of love and war.

While the Hanover Dadaist Kurt Schwitters vociferously rejected using art as political propaganda, he did not reject the use of political propaganda in art, as countless political phrases which function as "material" in his literary works attest.¹ For example, in his prose poem "Aufruf (ein Epos)" (1921), Schwitters spliced together newspaper fragments, often overfly political, and lines from his sensational love poem "An Anna Blume" (1919):

O du, Geliebte meiner siebenundzwanzig Sinne, ich liebe dir!
 Du deiner dich dir, ich dir du mir.—Wir?
 (Die letzte Kraftanspannung der Bolschewisten.)
 Sechs Zugbeamte wurden verletzt, darunter drei
 erheblich, und immer wieder erscholl der Ruf...