Schwitters’s affinity for Dada is evident in several groups of works from the late 1910s, such as his watercolours and “stamp drawings”. His watercolour paintings have a light and playful feel, featuring free-floating motifs joined together by a series of lines and arrows. His “stamp drawings”, on the other hand, combine language, signs, and images and play with meaning and form. They are presumed to have been created in the offices of the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, where Schwitters was known to incorporate stamps from his desk job into his art.

The painter, graphic designer, journalist, and art historian Walter Dexel was a close friend of Schwitters and an active patron of the avant-garde. Schwitters sent Dexel and his wife Erna a number of collaged postcards, each of which is a small work of art in its own right: they combine the Dadaist approach of inventively assembling and arranging found everyday objects with personal messages and allusions. These postcards represent early attempts to integrate art into the everyday and serve as precursors of the later mail art movement.

Schwitters caused a public stir with his poem An Anna Blume (To Anna Blume, 1919), in which he parodies the traditional format of a romantic love poem. The work is composed of everyday language and passages of text taken from mass media and advertising contexts – albeit with no consistent, logical thread. Although slammed in the arts pages as “horrifying nonsense”, it was precisely this criticism that garnered Schwitters attention in the media. The artist also displayed the poem as a poster in public spaces. In 1919, women in Germany were allowed to vote in political elections for the first time – with his An Anna Blume posters, Schwitters was able to infiltrate the election campaigning and seize the spirit of social change.

Take a dentist’s drilling machine, a meat‑mincing machine, a groove‑scraper from the streetcar, omnibuses and automobiles, bicycles, tandems and their tires, including wartime substitute tires, and deform them.
Take lights and deform them in the most brutal manner.
Let locomotives run into one another; let curtains and portières dance like cobweb threads with window frames, and break whining glass. Make steam boilers explode to produce railway smoke.
Take petticoats and other similar things, shoes and false hair, also ice skates, and throw them into the right place where they belong — always at the right time.
Take, if you like, foot traps, self‑shooting devices, infernal machines, the tin fish and the funnel — naturally all in an artistically deformed state.
Use hoses; they are highly recommended.

Merzbühne, 1919, in: Sturm-Bühne. Jahrbuch des Theaters der Expressionisten, hg. von Herwarth Walden, Bd. 8, Berlin 1919, S. 3

Invest your cash in a Raddadist cure; you will never regret it – in fact, you will no longer be able to regret anything after the cure. Whether you are rich or poor is immaterial; the Raddadist machine even frees you from money itself. As a capitalist, go into the funnel, pass several rolls, and immerse yourself in acid. Then you come into closer contact with several corpses.
Vinegar drips – Cubism dada. Then you get to see the great Raddada. (Not the President of the globe, as many assume.) Raddada radiates wit and is studded with several hundred thousand needle‑points. After you have been tossed back and forth, my latest poems are read aloud to you until you collapse unconscious. Then you are kneaded and raddadized, and suddenly you stand outside again as a newly groomed anti‑philistine. Before the cure, you dread the needle’s eye; after the cure, you can no longer dread. You are a Raddadist and pray to the machine with full enthusiasm. – Amen.

Kurt Schwitters. Die Raddadistenmaschine, 1921; Der Ararat. Glossen, Skizzen und Notizen zur Neuen Kunst, hg. von Hans Goltz, Jg. 2, H. 1 (Januar), München 1921, S. 10f.

War is the greatest disgrace that humanity has experienced and can experience. It is the grand expression of the lack of self-control of human beings and of the personal or general idea of power. In its meaning, it is unthinkable that a truly democratic people could wage war. But do democratic peoples exist?

Krieg, 1923 maschinenschriftliches Typoskript, 1 Bl.

O, thou beloved of my twenty-seven sences, I love
thine!
Thou thee thee thine, I thine, thou mine. - We ?-
That belongs (by the way) not here.
Who art thou, uncounted woman?
Thou art - art thou? -
The people say thou werst. -
Let them say. They don't know how the church-
tower stands.
Thou wearest thy hat on thy feet and walkest
about on thy hands,
on thy hands walkest thou.
Hallo! Thy red dress, shredded into white folds.
Red I love, Eve Blossom, red I love thine!
Thou thee thee thine, I thine, thou mine. - We ?-
That belongs (by the way) in the cold fire.
Red Blossom, red Eve Blossom, what do the
people say?
Prize-question: 1.) Eve Blossom is nuts.
2.) Eve Blossom is red.
3.) What colour are the nuts?
Blue is the colour of thy yellow hair.
Red are the kernels of thy green nuts.
Thou simple maiden in everyday-dress, thou
sweet green beast, I love thine! -
Thou thee thee thine, I thine, thou mine. - We ?-
That belongs (by the way) in the fire-grate.
Eve Blossom! Eve, E-v-e, I drip thy name.
Thy name drips like soft candle-wax.
Doest thou know, Eve, doest thou already know
it?
One can also read thee from behind, and thou,
thou most glorious of all,
Thou art from the back as from the front:
"E-v-e".
Candle-wax drips caressing over my back.
Eve Blossom, thou drippy beast, I love thine!

An Anna Blume, 1919