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Although not a member of the Berlin DADA group, Schwitters employed Dadaist ideas in his work and in the early 1920s gave Dada performances with friends such as Theo Van Doesburg, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and Raoul Hausmann. His first collages may even have been inspired by the work of Hans Arp.
Schwitters' first Merz pictures date from early 1919, and in May of the same year, he contacted Tristan Tzara of Zurich Dada in the hope of finding opportunites to publicize these new and highly controversial works made of rubbish. Examples of his work subsequently appeared in the final Zurich Dada publication, Der Zeltweg, in November 1919, alongside the work of Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp, shortly before the group disintegrated for ever. At the same time Schwitters gained the support of Richard Huelsenbeck, the self-appointed leader of Berlin Dada, who promised to publish his work, but in 1920 the two men fell out, probably because Schwitters and his Hannover publisher had unscrupulously marketed the Merz poem 'Anna Blume' under the name of Dada.
Berlin Dada collapsed in April 1921 - but Merz carried on!
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