Gottfried Benn

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

Biography and Work

He was born the in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg. 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]]. 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

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

Poems like this „were received by critics and public with shock, dismay, even revulsion.“ 1913 the next volume followed, called Sons. New Poems.

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. 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.

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," and later signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the "vow of most faithful allegiance" to Adolf Hitler.

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!“ 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). 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)

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 (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 (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
• Template:PND
• Gottfried Benn at NNDB.
• Gottfried Benn Society, German language site.