Hindemith’s character is marked by a sense of humour, a taste for practical jokes and a decent portion of self-irony, but above all an inexhaustibly childlike playfulness. In December 1913 he wrote to friends in Switzerland: “The greatest event of the last few months was the founding of our Conservatory club ‘Urian.’ We are 6 members (one crazier than the next) and aim primarily to have fun. […] We also make music as well, but music that only specially prepared ears can stand. Best of all, ears that are completely plugged up with cotton. We perpetrated a drama with music that we’ll perform after New Year’s. You too are cordially invited. But be sure to bring along some aspirin.” This circle of friends inspired Hindemith to write down a total of seven so-called “dramatic masterworks” during the years 1913-1920 – burlesque, at times surrealistic pieces whose subjects usually have an autobiographical background.

Numerous ocasional pieces from the genre of entertainment music and parodistic pieces were also provided for performance with musician friends, of which only the titles and ensembles are known today: some examples are “The Grave Is My Joy” and the “Music for 6 Instruments and a Page-Turner” for flute, piano, 2 violins, violoncello and double bass, the “Gouda-Emmental March” for piccolo, piano and string quintet and the “Lied with Large Orchestral Accompaniment in the Style of Rich. Stauss (Text from a Beekeeping Journal)” for soprano and string quartet. The still extant compositions “Minimax: Repertoire for Military Orchestra” (1923) and the “Overture to the Flying Dutchman, as Sight-Read by a Bad Spa Ensemble at the Fountain at 7 in the Morning” (1925), both for string quartet, give insight into Hindemith’s musical snese of humour.

Hundreds of – mostly small – pictures found in the composer’s estate clearly show Hindemith’s remarkable drawing talent. He drew them on all sorts of occasions on music manuscripts and calaedars, of serviettes and tablecloths, envelopes and notes. Most of them show imaginary beings in the forms of animals or people. The lion figures found in many of the drawings symbolise Gertrud Hindemith, who was born under the astrological sign of Leo.

Hindemith’s great passions included playing with model railways, to which sessions in his Berlin flat he invited personalities such as the pianist Artur Schnabel and the poet Gottfried Benn during the 1930s. The Swiss harpsichordist Silvia Kind, who then studied with Hindemith, remembers: “He possessed 300 metres of tracks, the most refined electrical railways with remote-control switches and signals. On Sundays he could sit down and work out a minutious schedule which would been a credit to any station manager. The hours in the normal operation were converted to minutes, the minutes to seconds. When the participants had arrived, the railway was constructed a half-day long through three rooms. It started in the afternoon; each participant received a schedule and a stopwatch and had to serve a train which kept precisely to the given stops and junctions and arrived at the correct second. Mrs. Hindemith said that in at 2 or 3  in the morning, the men would come to her pale and exhausted, asking for schnapps, especially when Artur Schnabel (another railway fanatic) was present.”

The Hindemiths corresponded to the leisure trends of those times with their enthusiasm for various types of sportive activity. During the 1931 summer holidays, a specially-hired sport instructor travelled with them to Bad Tölz who supervised them in ball-playing, shot-putting and gymnastics. During the following years, the Hindemiths wandered together with the publisher Willy Strecker on walking tours lasting several weeks through the Black Forest, Silesia or the Eifel. They later also gave expression to their love of nature through the loving cultivation of their garden.