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Born Hanover, 1887; attended the Akademie der Künste, Dresden, 1909-1914; began military service, 1914; studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule, Hanover; influened by Kandinsky and the Dadaists began to experiment with abstract pictures in 1918 using collages, one piece had the letters MERZ and he subsequently described his assemblages as Merz; first exhibition, 1918; began his first Merzbau, a huge construction nearly filling a house (destroyed 1943); participated in the Weimar Dada Congress, 1922; edited Merz magazine, 1923-1932; first performance of Ur-Sonata, non-semantic sound collage, 1924; worked as a commercial designer and typographer for several companies, 1920s; a founder of 'circle of new commercial designers', 1927; member of Abstraction-Création, 1932; emigrated to Norway, 1937; made his second Merzbau (destroyed 1951); escaped Norway to Britain, 1940; began a third Merzbau at Ambleside, Cumbria (unfinished and moved to Newcastle University, 1965); died, 1948.
Publications include: Die Blume Anna. Die neue Anna Blume. Eine Gedichtsammlung aus den Jahren 1918-1922 (Berlin, [1923]); Merz FOLIO poems translated by Jerome Rothenburg and Pierre Joris (Morning Star Publications, Edinburgh, 1991); Die Scheuche. Märchen. typographisch gestaltet with Käte Steinitz (1975) facsimile reprint of Hannover, Aposs-Verlag, 1925.