Schwitters built an artwork inside his house in Hanover. Starting around 1923, the Merzbau grew outward from a column of collaged objects in his studio until there was barely room to live. He worked on it for sixteen years. Allied bombing destroyed it in 1943. He built a second Merzbau in Lysaker, Norway. The Nazis invaded; he abandoned it. It burned down in 1951. He started a third at Cylinders Farm in the English Lake District. He died in January 1948, leaving it unfinished.

He was born in Hanover in 1887, an only child whose father ran a ladies' clothing shop. He suffered from epilepsy throughout his life. He fled to Norway in 1937, then to Scotland in 1940, where he was classified as an enemy alien and interned in camps including Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. While interned, he allegedly made small sculptures from leftover oatmeal.

His art, which he called Merz (a fragment of the word Kommerz), used collage, found objects, poetry, sound art, typography, and installation. He worked across Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, often simultaneously. He was largely neglected by the time he died.