We were contacted recently by Sam Ford, a UWE art student, who through a chance meeting with Karl Übergriff, son of founder members of an underground art group in Hannover during the Second World War. The name of the group is an abbreviation of ‘Entartete Kunst’ – Degenerate Art, the name given by Hitler to modern and expressionist art, especially by Jews, during the 1930s and 1940s. Sam gave a spellbinding account of the group’s story in the crypt of St John the Baptist Church, Nelson St, as related by Karl, who came to Britain in the 1950s, having lost his parents. His parents had been part of a Hannover group led by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, who created the Merzbau, a building which was a work of art in itself, an abstract and ever-changing collage of grottoes and found objects. During the war they spent much time there, but one night Karl’s father Hans went to check that all was clear when the sirens wailed, and the building was flattened by a bomb, with Hans inside it, in a sarcophagus in the shape of a large seed. Ultimately Karl came to the UK, to seek out Kurt Schwitters who had also come here, and brought with him the sarcophagus or tomb, which he still maintains, living outside Bristol, as he does not like the city. A reconstruction of the Merzbau can be seen today in the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.