Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow)

Good design is not – as is often said about beauty – in the eye of the beholder. The maker has a lot to say about whether it does or does not conform to what the Swiss call ‘die gute Form’. The critic either validates or negates, but even that determination is not as important as whether the outcome fosters some meaningful result. 

A contrarian busts the standards. Ignoring norms is essential to making progress. Kurt Schwitters’s graphic design and typography during the 1920s and 1930s was indeed contrary, although consistent with the radical New Typography of that period. Schwitters broke with the traditional central-axis composition of his day, used daring sans serif typography and otherwise sprinkled type anarchically around his pages. A self-proclaimed Dadaist, he made his own rules, as seen in the layouts of his personal magazine, the enigmatically titled Merz. Yet this is even more vivid in the avant-garde children’s book Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow) that he co-produced with Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg and wrote with Kate Steinitz, and which was published in 1925 by Aposs Verlag in Hanover, Germany, where Schwitters was based. 

Die Scheuche is roughly composed and void of typographic trifles. Type is the main character in this fairy tale about a scarecrow made from the letter X, who wears ‘a hat and a tuxedo and a cane and an oh-so-be-yoo-ti-ful lace shawl’. Letters and typecase materials (marks, lines, decorations) replace conventional pictorial illumination. The text is entirely integrated with the unconventional illustration, forming a seamless pictorial narrative. The raw quality of the design produces a not entirely welcoming layout yet neither is it offputting. 

In the story, the Scarecrow’s day is interupted by ‘Monsieur le coq the rooster’ who – created from more printing parts – walks with a cane and goes ‘hick and hack and hic haec hoc’ (a typographic sound effect that recurs throughout the story, which describes the sound of hitting and also plays on the Latin words for ‘this’). A fight ensues; the rooster spits on the scarecrow and the letters f, u and i spew from the letter P, the rooster’s head. A farmer, represented by the letter B (for Bauer, or farmer), threatens the scarecrow. Chaos prevails.

‘The plot, in which a rooster, chicks and farmer fearlessly and incessantly attack the scarecrow, parallels the Dada/De Stijl notion of making way for the future by destroying or hacking up the past,’ wrote Leslie Atzmon in ‘Typography in a Brave New World’ (2004). 

Schwitters’s interest in altering typography was part of his preoccupation with words, sounds and letters. He was a student of Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism, each of which used texts, words or letters as creative elements. In 1924 and 1925 he worked with El Lissitzky for number 8/9 of Merz, and realized that the arrangement of variously sized words and letters on the page could encompass the meaning of a story. He further understood that text had rhythms that were enhanced by typography, which in the case of Die Scheuche was expertly typeset in a radical manner by Paul Vogt.