Gottfried Benn

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The German author Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) was an important expressionist writer. Influenced by his work as a physician, he demonstrated brutal anti-sentimentalism in both his poetry and prose.

Gottfried Benn was born at Mansfeld, Prussia, the son of a Lutheran minister. The poet's earliest influences were the stern discipline of his father, whom he grew to hate, and the gentle romanticism of his Swiss mother, whom he adored. Eldest son in a large family, he entertained his brothers and sisters with fairy tales of his own creation. Although interested in a literary career, he studied medicine and graduated with honors from the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for Military Doctors.

His mother's death from cancer prompted Benn, then 26, to compose his first major poetic effort, Morgue (1912). This work emphasizes nature's indifference to human values and is characterized by melancholy cynicism. While serving as a medical officer during World War I, Benn composed semiautobiographical prose sketches which stressed the "dissolution of natural vitality." He then received an appointment to a hospital in Berlin and soon after married Edith Brosin, an actress. After beginning a private practice among the poor of Berlin, Benn published Flesh (1917), his second volume of poetry. In this work his disgust with "the stench of life" is evident.

Despite personal difficulties, among them his wife's death in 1921, Benn continued to pursue his literary and medical careers. Collections of his poetry were published in 1922, 1928, and 1935. For a brief period he was attracted to Nazism, since he felt that the political theories of this movement would foster a new social order based on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Considered reactionary, in 1932 Benn was removed from the faculty of the Prussian Academy by more liberal colleagues. But ironically, Hitler's regime was also hostile toward him. His prose works After Nihilism (1932) and The New State and the Intellectual (1933) supported the Third Reich but were banned because his poetry had been published by Jewish-owned firms. In 1935 Benn joined the army medical corps and served throughout World War II.

Benn was prevented from publishing by the Nazi government, but he privately printed a group of 22 poems in 1943. His second wife died in 1945, and he shortly thereafter married again. After the end of the war his work was banned by the Allies, but with the publication of Static Poems in 1948, he reemerged as a major poet. In 1949 he published several novellas, including The Ptolemean. Nihilistic thought continued to permeate Benn's work, but in Static Poems and Intoxicated Tide (1949) he grants that a precarious happiness may occur when man transcends biological and intellectual decomposition through art. Benn's autobiography, Doppelleben (Double Life), appeared in 1950. He died in West Berlin in 1956.

Further Reading

Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, eds., Modern German Poetry (1962), contains some fine translations of Benn's poetry and a brief biographical sketch. There are several full-length studies of him in German but none in English. The section in Walter H. Sokel, The Writer In Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (1959), is the outstanding analysis in English of Benn's art.

Benn, Gottfried (Mansfield, 1886-1956, Berlin), the son of a Protestant clergyman, was expected to study theology, but switched to medicine, studied at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Academy, qualified in 1912, and, having been invalided out of the army after a short spell as medical officer, set up practice in Berlin. At this time he formed a close friendship with Else Lasker-Schüler and established contacts with Expressionist writers and editors (see Expressionismus), in whose organs his first poetry appeared. The Morgue cycle (1912), unprecedented in its depiction of disease and decay and a startling contribution to their cause, was followed by Söhne (1913), Fleisch (1917), and Schutt (1924). During the 1914-18 War Benn served in Belgium, where, partly through the influence of Sternheim, he wrote his only plays, Ithaka (1914), Etappe (1919), Der Vermessungsdirektor (1919), and Karandasch (1917), and the short ‘Rönne Novellen’ contained in Gehirne (1916). They reveal Benn's increasing alienation from reality and the deep division within his personality, which later caused him to speak of his ‘double life’; basing his views partly on his own psychosomatic disposition, he believed the total separation of a person's inner and outer life to be a culturally and anthropologically determined phenomenon. In 1917 he settled as a consultant in Berlin and produced another prose work, Diesterweg (1918). The 1920s are marked by a volume of poetry, Spaltung (1925), and by the publication of his collected works, Gesammelte Schriften (1923), Gesammelte Gedichte (1927), and Gesammelte Prosa (1928). In 1931 he wrote the oratorio Das Unaufhörliche (with music by Hindemith), and, among the essays of this phase, his expository Nach dem Nihilismus (1932). Gaining increasing recognition, he was elected to the Prussian Academy in 1932. During this crucial period Benn, deluding himself over the aims of National Socialism, gave it his support, which he withdrew in 1934 and, describing his intention to rejoin the military as ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’ (November), began working as an army doctor in April 1935. His insensitive criticism of those who had been forced into exile earned him a sharp response from Klaus Mann, to whom he later paid tribute in his autobiography. In 1938 he was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer and prohibited from publishing. Two years during the war were spent in Landsberg, but from 1945 he remained in (West) Berlin. Because of his compromising political past he was unable to publish until 1948-9, when all his major work appeared in quick succession, followed by a wave of public acclaim: Statische Gedichte (1948, ext. 1949) contained poetry written between 1937 and 1947, Trunkene Flut (1948, ext. 1952) a selection from the years up to 1935, Fragmente (1951), Destillationen (1953), and Aprèslude (1955) the late poetry. The ruins of Berlin form the background of Der Ptolemäer. Berliner Novelle 1947 (1949, rev. 1956, containing Weinhaus Wolf, written 1937-8). In 1950 appeared his autobiography Doppelleben (apart from his attempt to explain his past a valuable commentary on his work); in 1949 the essays of Ausdruckswelt, and in 1951 another volume entitled Essays as well as Probleme der Lyrik, his influential ars poetica. In the same year Benn was awarded the Büchner prize, the first of a number of honours. His remarkable essay Altern als Problem für Künstler (1954) is the most personal document of this last phase.

The near cynical irony of Benn's early poetry was a reaction against the morbid aspects of hospital life and bourgeois complacency, the creation of Werff Rönne in his Novellen the product of war. Unable to bear reality, Rönne, Benn's alter ego, attempts to resolve his existential conflict by regressing into the world of myth and its mystic images, into primeval states of Being and of Nature (to which the Ligurian, Mediterranean, complex is central), a world of vision, dream, and trance belonging to the unconscious, the ‘deep self’ of poetic production. Greatly influenced by Nietzsche and convinced of the meaninglessness of the historical and metaphysical world, he rejected forms of literature centred on this world, ignored accepted norms in his own Novellen and one-act plays, and ostentatiously conceived Der Roman des Phänotyp, written in 1944, as an anti-novel consisting of reflections with separate headings and no structural cohesion. In poetry he aimed above all at changing and contrasting perspectives and the elimination of familiar stylistic devices, including the apostrophe to Nature and the use of similes and adjectives of colour. In insisting that poetry should only evoke a momentary ‘anthropological situation’, that it should transcend space and time and be linear in conception (ins Momentane, Flächige gelegt), he expressed the aesthetic aspect of his existential philosophy, which rejected notions of development (he used for his centripetal style the term ‘Orangenstil’): ‘Entwicklungsfremdheit/ist die Tiefe des Weisen’ are the opening lines of ‘Statische Gedichte’, written in 1944. As early as 1927, his programmatic poem ‘Trunkene Flut’ marked the dimension of his ‘absolute art’, which absorbs modern trends since George and Mallarmé, and has affinities with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The extraordinary resonance of his best work derives from his fascination with words: ‘Nouns only have to open their wings to cover millenniums in their flight’. In the rhymed verse of ‘Ein Wort’ nouns of cosmic brilliance and ecstatic vitality are cyphers exemplifying the function of his creative writing (Wortkunst), which he has defined as ‘the attempt of art to experience itself as meaning’, the endeavour ‘to oppose the general nihilism of values with a new kind of transcendence: the transcendence of creative desire’ (die Transzendenz der schöpferischen Lust). Undeterred by his critics, including R. Schneider (Können Dichter die Welt ändern?, 1930), J. R. Becher, and A. Lernet-Holenia, he was among his generation of writers the most resolute defender of the autonomy of art, believing that the poet's contribution to humanity must be the inner regeneration of society (Verwandlung) and not political education or ideological commitment. In Der Ptolomäer his irony is directed against the materialism of West German society, including a narrator who is the owner of a beauty salon; but he, too, can bear his existence only by living a double life: ‘wir alle leben etwas anderes als wir sind’.

Benn's correspondence includes letters to an old friend, Briefe an F. W. Oelze (2 vols.), ed. J. Schröder and H. Steinhagen, 1977-80; Briefwechsel mit Paul Hindemith, ed. A. C. Fehn, 1978; Gottfried Benn und Max Rychner. Briefwechsel 1930-1956, ed. G. Schuster, 1986; Briefe an Tilly Wedekind 1930-1955, ed. M. V. Schlüter, 1992. Gesammelte Werke (4 vols.), ed. D. Wellershoff, appeared 1958-61, new edn. 1977; Gesammelte Werke in der Fassung der Erstdrucke (4 vols.), ed. B. Hillebrand, 1982-4; and Sämtliche Werke, Stuttgarter Ausgabe (5 vols.), ed. G. Schuster, 1986 ff.

Bibliography

See Primal Vision, (1961) his selected writings; studies by J. M. Ritchie (1973) and R. Alter (1976).

Gottfried Benn (2 May 1886 Putlitz, Brandenburg – 7 July 1956 West Berlin) was a German essayist, novelist, and expressionist poet. A doctor of medicine, he welcomed for a very brief moment and later criticized sharply the National Socialist revolution.

Sketch of Gottfried Benn

Contents 1 Biography and work 2 Reception 3 Books 3.1 Collections 4 References 5 Literature 6 External links

Biography and work

He was born in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson of pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg.^[1] He was educated in Sellin in the Neumark and Frankfurt an der Oder. To please his father, he studied theology at the University of Marburg and military medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin.^[2]

With a beat of a kettledrum, Benn started as an expressionist poet before World War I when he published a booklet of poems, titled Morgue and other Poems, 1912, dealing with physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer, and death — for example No III — „Cycle:

Der einsame Backzahn einer Dirne, / die unbekannt verstorben war, / trug eine Goldplombe. / Die übrigen waren wie auf stille Verabredung / ausgegangen. / Den schlug der Leichendiener sich heraus, / versetzte ihn und ging für tanzen. / Denn, sagte er, / nur Erde solle zur Erde werden.

— Gottfried Benn^[3]

The lonesome molar of a love-maid, / who had died unknown, / wore a gold filling. / As if by silent agreement the leftovers / had gone out. / The mortician knocked out the filling, / pawned it and went dancing for. / Because, he said, / only earth should return to earth.

— Natias Neutert^[4][5]

Poems like this "were received by critics and public with shock, dismay, even revulsion."^[6] 1913 the next volume followed, called Sons. New Poems.^[7]

Benn's poetry offers an introverted nihilism: an existentialist philosophy which sees artistic expression as the only purposeful action. In his early poems Benn used his medical experience and terminology to portray a morbid conception of humanity as another species of disease-ridden animal.^[8] He enlisted in 1914, spent a brief period on the Belgian front, and then served as a military doctor in Brussels. Benn attended the trial and execution of Nurse Edith Cavell. He worked as a physician in an army brothel. After the war, he returned to Berlin and practiced as a dermatology and venereal disease specialist.^[9]

Hostile to the Weimar Republic, and rejecting Marxism and Americanism, Benn, like many Germans, was upset with ongoing economic and political instability, and sympathized for a short period with the Nazis as a revolutionary force. He hoped that National Socialism would exalt his aesthetics, that Expressionism would become the official art of Germany, as Futurism had in Italy. Benn was elected to the poetry section of the Prussian Academy in 1932 and appointed head of that section in February 1933. In May he defended the new regime in a radio broadcast, saying "the German workers are better off than ever before,"^[10] and later signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the "vow of most faithful allegiance" to Adolf Hitler.^[10]

The cultural policy of the new State didn't turn out the way he hoped, and in June Hans Friederich Blunck replaced Benn as head of the Academy's poetry section. Appalled by the Night of the Long Knives, Benn abandoned his support for the Nazi movement. He lived with perfectly together-pinched lips, internally and outwardly, and the bad conditions of the system "gave me the latter punch", as he quoted in a letter — a "dreadful tragedy!"^[11] He decided to perform "the aristocratic form of emigration" and joined the Wehrmacht in 1935, where he found many officers sympathetic to his disapproval of the régime. In May 1936 the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps attacked his expressionist and experimental poetry as degenerate, Jewish, and homosexual. In the summer of 1937, Wolfgang Willrich, a member of the SS, lampooned Benn in his book Säuberung des Kunsttempels; Heinrich Himmler, however, stepped in to reprimand Willrich and defended Benn on the grounds of his good record since 1933 (his earlier artistic output being irrelevant). In 1938 the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the National Socialist authors' association) banned Benn from further writing.

During World War II, Benn was posted to garrisons in eastern Germany where he wrote poems and essays. After the war, his work was banned by the Allies because of his initial support for Hitler. In 1951 he won the Georg Büchner Prize. He died in West Berlin in 1956, and was buried in Waldfriedhof Dahlem, Berlin.

Benn's tomb in Berlin

Reception

Benn had an enormous literary influence on German poetry and verse-making immediately before World War I (as an Expressionist) and even after World War II (as the 'Static' poet).^[12] He was referred to in Günter Grass's book, My Century, meeting with his ideological opposite, Bertolt Brecht, shortly before both of them died in the summer of 1956. It is unclear if this meeting ever occurred in reality, or if it is purely symbolic. He was also mentioned in John Berryman's "Dream Song #53".

Books

• Morgue und andere Gedichte [Morgue and other Poems] (Berlin, 1912)
• Fleisch (1917)
• Die Gesammelten Schriften [The collected works] (Berlin, 1922)
• Schutt (1924)
• Betäubung (1925)
• Spaltung (1925)
• Nach dem Nihilismus (Berlin, 1932)
• Der Neue Staat und die Intellektuellen (1933)
• Kunst und Macht (1935)
• Ausgewählte Gedichte [Selected Poems] (May, 1936) Note: 1st edition contained two poems that were removed for the 2nd edition in November 1936: 'Mann und Frau gehen durch die Krebsbaracke' and 'D-Zug'. The vast majority of the 1st editions were collected and destroyed.
• Statische Gedichte [Static poems] (Zürich, 1948)
• Ptolemäer (Limes, 1949); Ptolemy's Disciple (edited, translated and with a preface by Simona Draghici), Plutarch Press, 2005, ISBN 0-943045-20-7 (pbk).
• Doppelleben (1950); autobiography translated as Double Life (edited, translated, and with a preface by Simona Draghici, Plutarch Press, 2002, ISBN 0-943045-19-3).
• Stimme hinter dem Vorhang; translated as The Voice Behind the Screen (translated with an introduction by Simona Draghici (Plutarch Press, 1996, ISBN 0-943045-10-X).

Collections

• Sämtliche Werke ("Stuttgarter Ausgabe"), ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Holger Hof, 7 volumes in 8 parts, (Stuttgart 1986-2003, ISBN 3-608-95313-2).
• Prose, Essays, Poems by Gottfried Benn, edited by Volkmar Sander; introduction by Reinhard Paul Becker (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1987, ISBN 0-8264-0310-7 & ISBN 0-8264-0311-5 (pbk.)
• Selected Poems (Clarendon German series) by Gottfried Benn (Oxford U.P., 1970, ISBN 0-19-832451-0)
• Gottfried Benn in Transition by Gottfried Benn, edited by Simona Draghici (Plutarch Press, 2003, ISBN 0-943045-21-5)
• Poems, 1937-1947 (Plutarch Press, 1991, ISBN 0-943045-06-1)

References

1. ^ cf Primal Vision: Selected Poetry and Prose of Gottfried Benn edited by E. B. Ashton (NY: Bodley Head, 1961; Boyars, 1971; Marion Boyars, 1984, p. ix. ISBN 0-7145-2500-6
2. ^ cf p. x.
3. ^ Gottfried Benn: Morgue und andere Gedichte. 21. Flugblatt des Verlages A. R. Meyer, Berlin 1912./ Gottfried Benn: Sämtliche Werke ('Stuttgarter Ausgabe'), ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Holger Hof, 7 volumes in 8 parts, Stuttgart 2003 p. 12. ISBN 3-608-95313-2).
4. ^ Translated and recited by German poet and translator Natias Neutert. Cf. Foolnotes, Booklet, Smith Gallery Performance, Soho New York 1980.
5. ^ Cf. Under the headline Latently existing words in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Anja Juhre-Wright talks with Natias Neutert about the difficulties of translating Benn. See external links
6. ^ Reinhard Paul Becker: Introduction. In: Volkmar Sander (Ed.): Gottfried Benn. Prose, Essays, Poems. (Foreword by E.B. Ashton). The German L Vol. 73, Continuum, New York, p. XX*.
7. ^ Gottfried Benn: Söhne. Neue Gedichte. Berlin (n.d. [1913].
8. ^ Cf. Twentieth-Century Culture: A Biographical Companion edited by Alan Bullock and R. B. Woodings Harpercollins, 1984, p.61. ISBN 0-06-015248-6
9. ^ cf E.B. Ashton (Ed.): Gottfried Benn Primal Vision. New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, p. xi-xii.
10. ^ ^{a b} 88 "writers", from Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949, Volume 12 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, University of California Press 1998, ISBN 0-520-07278-2, p. 367-8
11. ^ Cf. Gottfried-Benn-Gesellschaft e.V. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: http://www.gottfriedbenn.de/lebenslauf.php
12. ^ Derived from his most effective and well known work, from Gottfried Benn's Statische Gedichte. Arche Verlag, Zürich 1948/Limes Verlag Wiesbaden 1949 (with three more poems).

Literature

• German Dreams and German Dreamers: Gottfried Benn's German Universe by Henry Grosshans (Wyndham Hall Press, 1987, ISBN 1-55605-001-1 (pbk.).
• Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist by J. M. Ritchie^{[disambiguation needed ]} (London: Wolff, 1972, ISBN 0-85496-046-5.
• Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn's Postmodernist Poetics by Susan Ray (Oxford; New York: P. Lang, 2003, ISBN 3-03910-006-8 & ISBN 0-8204-6275-6 (pbk.).
• Gottfried Benn's Static Poetry: Aesthetic and Intellectual-Historical Interpretations by Mark William Roche (University of North Carolina Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8078-8112-0.
• Primal Vision: Selected Poetry and Prose of Gottfried Benn edited by E. B. Ashton (NY: Bodley Head, 1961; Boyars, 1971; Marion Boyars, 1984, ISBN 0-7145-2500-6
• Twentieth-Century Culture: A Biographical Companion edited by Alan Bullock and R. B. Woodings (Harpercollins, 1984, ISBN 0-06-015248-6
• Gottfried Benn and his Critics: Major Interpretations 1912-1992 by Augustinus P. Dierick. [Columbia SC: Camden House Inc.], 1992.
• German Literature Under National Socialism by J. M. Ritchie^{[disambiguation needed ]} (London: C. Helm; Barnes & Noble, 1983, ISBN 0-389-20418-8.
• The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919-1945 by Alastair Hamilton, foreword by Stephen Spender (London: Blond, 1971, ISBN 0-218-51426-3.
• Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 by Philip Rees (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990, ISBN 0-13-089301-3).
• Reason and Energy: Studies in German Literature by Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge & Paul, 1957; New York: Grove Press, 1957; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, revised ed., ISBN 0-297-00267-8.
• Encyclopedia of the Third Reich by Louis Leo Snyder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976, ISBN 0-07-059525-9; London: Blandford, 1989, ISBN 0-7137-2167-7; New York: Paragon House, 1989, 1st pbk. ed., ISBN 1-55778-144-3; New York: Marlowe, 1998, ISBN 1-56924-917-2

External links

• Translation of Astern/Asters
• Gottfried Benn in the German National Library catalogue (German)
• Gottfried Benn at NNDB
• Gottfried Benn Society, German language site
• [1] Latently existing words

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Persondata
Name	Benn, Gottfried
Alternative names
Short description	German novelist, poet
Date of birth	May 2, 1886
Place of birth	Mansfeld (Prignitz)
Date of death	July 7, 1956
Place of death	West Berlin

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