Born: Mansfeld, Germany; May 2, 1886
Died: Berlin, East Germany (now in Germany); August 7, 1956
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Morgue, und andere Gedichte, 1912
Söhne, 1913
Fleisch, 1917
Schutt, 1924
Betäubung, 1925
Spaltung, 1925
Gesammelte Gedichte, 1927
Ausgewählte Gedichte, 1911-1936, 1936
Gedichte, 1936
Zweiundzwanzig Gedichte, 1943
Statische Gedichte, 1948
Trunkene Flut, 1949
Fragmente, 1951
Destillationen, 1953
Aprèslude, 1955
Gesammelte Gedichte, 1956
Primal Vision, 1958
Primäre Tage, Gedichte und Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, 1958
Gedichte aus dem Nachlass, 1960
Gottfried Benn: Selected Poems, 1970
Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist, 1972
Sämtliche Gedichte, 1998
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Gottfried Benn (behn) was primarily a poet, but he did write some significant works in other genres, most notably a collection of novellas, Gehirne (1916; Brains, 1972); a novel, Roman des Phänotyp (1944; novel of the phenotype); the essay Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften (1949; Goethe and the natural sciences); his autobiography, Doppelleben (1950; Double Life, 2002); and a theoretical treatise, Probleme der Lyrik (1951; problems of lyric poetry). His writings also include other prose and dramatic works.
ACHIEVEMENTS
No other German poet exemplifies as fully as Gottfried Benn the emergence of the modern tradition within postwar German literature. His radical aesthetic as well as his political affiliations have made Benn a controversial figure. He was the “phenotype” of his age—that is, the exemplary representation of the intellectual and spiritual condition of his times. As such, Benn can be viewed as not only a remarkable poet but also an important figure of twentieth century German Geistesgeschichte.
Benn’s early work (until about 1920) was known only to a relatively small circle of readers. Indeed, it was only after World War II, in the last decade of his life, that Benn achieved fame. His achievements were acknowledged in 1951, when he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in literature. For years prior to this time, Benn had been blacklisted, as it were, as a result of his short-lived infatuation with Nazism. Because of the public commentary to which he had been subjected, Benn was reluctant to reenter public life. He did publish again, however, and in the years before his death a generation of poets in search of a tradition flocked around him like disciples around a master.
The years of Nazi control had yielded a vast wasteland in German literature. Indeed, the historical events of the twentieth century, in particular as they affected Germany, intensified the general philosophical disorientation of the immediate postwar period. Marxism was no real alternative for the West; existentialism prevailed instead, based in large measure on the writings of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. In this context, Benn’s theory of art as a metaphysical act had considerable authority. For postwar poets in search of a new way of writing, Benn provided a transition from the various offshoots of French Symbolism and German expressionism to contemporary modernism.
BIOGRAPHY
Gottfried Benn was born on May 2, 1886, the son of a Protestant minister. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Marburg and later studied medicine at the University of Berlin. He completed his medical degree in 1910 and was awarded first prize for his thesis on the etiology of epilepsy in puberty. Benn worked as a pathologist and serologist in Berlin, where he became friends with several expressionist poets, the most important of whom was Else Lasker-Schüler. Benn also set up medical practice in Berlin, and his first volume of poetry, Morgue und andere Gedichte (morgue, and other poems), clearly shows the influence of his scientific and medical training: The cold and unforgiving objectivity and precision of medical and surgical technique inform these poems, with their shocking portrayal of brutality and morbidity.
In 1914, Benn traveled briefly to the United States. Upon his return, he was drafted into themilitary medical corps, serving as an officer in Belgiumbefore returning to Berlin in 1917. These years, contrary to what one might expect, were extremely productive for Benn as awriter, and he later noted that during the following years, on thewhole relatively uneventful for him, he constantly drew for inspiration on his experiences in Belgium.
In 1933, Benn filled the position of which Heinrich Mann had been relieved, section president of the Prussian Academy. Later, Benn became director for the department of literature. In April of the same year, he gave a radio talk, “Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen” (“The New State and the Intellectuals”), clearly in response to a letter from Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, who wrote from the south of France. It is true that Benn initially embraced National Socialism in 1933. He greeted the political doctrines of the Nazis as a means for overcoming the stagnation and nihilism of Western civilization, but he soon regretted his participation and withdrew into silence.
In 1935, Benn left Berlin and headed for Hannover. It was Benn’s early poetry that gave rise to the debate on expressionism carried in the émigré paper Das Wort, printed in Moscow. In the ensuing years, Benn had a run-in with W. Willrich, a party loyalist who labeled Benn a “cultural Bolshevist” and tried to have Benn effectively “removed” from public life. Ironically, only the intervention of Heinrich Himmler himself stayed Willrich’s attempts. Benn remained in the army medical service from 1935 until the end of the war. After 1948, he enjoyed a new phase of poetic creativity, and his poetry eventually achieved recognition throughout Europe.
ANALYSIS
Both poetically and existentially, Gottfried Benn resided at the crossroads of two significant traditions. At the turn of the century, the natural sciences exercised a substantial “claim to truth” and provided influential paradigms of thought. For many of Benn’s generation, however, scientific study had entered a rapid phase of entropy—it was seen no longer to answer questions meaningfully from the humanist point of view. In fact, one could even say that the “scientific approach” was seen by many to “explain” the universe inadequately, precisely because it did not pose the right questions. In Germany, the most significant manifestation of this dissatisfaction with the scientific paradigm took place under the rubric of “expressionism,” which in many respects carried on the tradition of German Romanticism. The tension exemplified in the conflict between Benn’s scientific training and his early intoxication with expressionism came to play an important role in the development of his aesthetic theory and poetry.
A concept basic to Benn’s thought was his conviction that humankind necessarily “suffered consciousness.” He attributed this suffering to modern overintellectualization: “The brain is our fate, our consignment and our curse.” The modern consciousness fragments the totality of the world into its conceptual categories; reality is divided past meaningful comprehension; and the loss of humans’ capacity to perceive relationships points ineluctably in the direction of nihilistic resignation. During the years from 1921 to 1932, Benn studied the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Carl Jung, Ernst Troeltsch, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and through his study of prehistory, paleontology, and myth, he developed his own notions of art, reality, and the self.
In Benn’s conceptual framework, the inner space once occupied by the premodern sense of harmony and totality is now filled with a kind of nostalgic longing. By somehow penetrating and deactivating the rational consciousness, Benn hoped to return (momentarily) to archetypal, primal, and prelogical experience. Benn identified this act as “hyperemic metaphysics”—that is, an intensified state of perception (such as that induced by intoxication, dream visions, or hallucinations), which he then applied exponentially to derive his “hyperemic theory of the poetic,” or primal moments of poetic creativity.
It is necessary to see how Benn viewed the creative process to understand his poetry. According to Benn, the creative process required first “an inarticulate, creative nucleus, a psychic substance”; second, words familiar to the poet that “stand at his disposal” and are “suited to him personally”; and third, a “thread of Ariadne, which leads him with absolute certainty out of this bipolar tension”—that is, the tension between the psychic substance and the “word.” This amalgam constitutes the basic creative situation for Benn.
“BEAUTIFUL YOUTH”
One of his first poems, “Schöne Jugend” (“Beautiful Youth”), perhaps best illustrates Benn’s early cynicism. The poem describes the dissection of the body of a young (and possibly at one time “beautiful”) girl, whose decomposed mouth and esophagus are perfunctorily noted, as is the nest of young rats discovered beneath the diaphragm, “one little sister” of which lay dead while the others lived off the liver and kidneys—“drank the cold blood and had/ spent here a beautiful youth.” A quick death awaits the rats: “They were thrown all together in the water. Ah, how their little snouts did squeal!” It becomes obvious that the “beautiful youth” to which the title refers is not that of the young girl, as the reader is intended to assume, but rather of the rats.
“ONE WORD”
A good example of Benn’s preoccupation with the capacity of language to “fascinate,” and in so doing to give momentary vision to meaning within meaninglessness (form from chaos), is his poem “Ein Wort” (“One Word”). This poem is about the fact that words and sentences can be transmuted into chiffres, from which rise life and meaning. The effect can be such as to halt the sun and silence the spheres, as everything focuses for the moment on the primal catalyst, the single word. The word, however, is transitory, brilliant but short-lived, and already in the second and last strophe of this brief poem it is gone, leaving behind it the self and the world once again apart and distinct, alone in the dark, empty space surrounding them. Perhaps this paraphrase of Benn’s poem gives an idea of how Benn viewed the magic of the poetic word, its unique ability to stand (and consequently place the reader/listener) outside the “normal” conceptual categories of time and space. It communicates truth as a bolt of lightning momentarily illuminating the sky.
“LOST SELF”
The radical dissolution of meaning with the evaporation of the word’s spellbinding aura aligns with Benn’s view of the disintegration of reality in general. Nowhere are the consequences of this loss of reality for the individual given more poignant expression than in Benn’s poem “Verlorenes Ich” (“Lost Self”). Benn applies the terminology of modern science as an explanation of the radical alienation of the modern self. The strictly scientific explanation of the universe does not adequately explain the vicissitudes of human existence. Benn does not envision a return to a previous form of existence since that is an impossibility, nor does he seek refuge in a Christian answer, positing God as the source of an otherwise incomprehensible universe. Neither, however, is his stance one of resignation or of art for art’s sake, even though he is often reproached for both. Instead, his predicament always centers on the struggle for human meaning and significance. The solution to this existential dilemma, he finds, is manifested in the intellectual and spiritual acts that human beings can perform, among these the creative act of giving form. “The artist,” wrote Benn, “is the only one who copes with things, who decides their destiny.”
“DEPARTURE”
It is true that Benn felt that all good poetry is “addressed to no one,” and that he expressly refuted the possibility of poetry having any public function. To castigate Benn for an unconscionable aestheticism, though, would not be accurate or just. He does not cast aside the question of ethical responsibility; if he did, one would not expect to find such an obsession with what constitutes the essence of humanity, above all with the existential-poetic confrontation with Being. To explore this problem further, it is illuminating to consider a highly autobiographical poem by Benn, “Abschied” (“Departure”), contained originally in a cycle of poems Benn referred to as “Biographische Gedichte” (“Biographical Poems”) and first published in Zweiundzwanzig Gedichte (twenty-two poems). Formally, the poem is a classic example of artistic control: four strophes of eight lines each in iambic pentameter, with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes in an ababcdcd scheme. Structurally, the poem constitutes a tightly organized unit: Its formal principles interact with its themes—namely, the schizophrenic existence of the persona and the acknowledged taking leave from the old Self.
The topos of parting (Abschied) is itself an interesting one within German poetry; one may recall the significant example of Goethe’s “Willkommen und Abschied” (“Welcome and Farewell”). Benn’s poem, however, does not deal with the separation of two individuals—two lovers, for example. Instead, it describes a separation of the persona, a division of the Self into a former “You” and a present “I.” The You represents the part of the individual that belongs to a world of the past, while the I attempts to grasp and develop within the poem the process of alienation to which it has been subjected. The first strophe outlines the relationship of the former to the present Self by employing a series of metaphors, while the second strophe probes the cause of the schism and relates the sole recourse as perceived by the persona. The link between past and present—memory—becomes the topic of the third strophe, and finally the poem moves toward a further degree of estrangement, concluding with a note of sadness and melancholy typical of Benn.
The subject of each independent clause in the first strophe is the pronoun “you,” and initially it is the active subject, while the “I” remains the passive object. The relationship is established via a metaphor: “You fill me as does blood the fresh wound,/ and run down its dark path.” The image of the wound operates on the physical plane to suggest impairment, disease, decay. Later, in the third strophe, this physical affliction is seen to be present on a psychological plane as well. The adjective describing the wound, “fresh,” can be read two ways. On one hand, it accentuates the grotesque nature of the wound by showing it in its first moments when blood flows most freely. On the other hand, “fresh” can suggest “recent.” The reader is thus made privy to the suffering of the persona as it takes place. The metaphor of the wound encompasses the first two lines of the poem. The dark trace of the blood is more than merely graphic realism; it evokes an aura of mysterious origin. Blood is the life-sustaining fluid, and its escape from the wound enacts the kind of exposure that the “deep self” of the persona endures. Its dark hue contrasts with the “day of minutiae,” the “heavenly light” of the third strophe, and “a high light” in the third line of the last strophe. Its opaqueness suggests obscurity and impregnability. The persona’s flight into silence at the end of the second strophe (“you must take your silence, travel downward/ to night and sorrow and the roses late”) gives image to the inexpressibility of the “deep self.”
The night setting maintains the motif of darkness found in the “dark path” on the second line. The hour corresponds to dusk and evinces the twilight of the former self, the You. The atmosphere of darkness surrounding the You continues to dominate, although it retreats for the moment with the appearance of roses in the following line. While this imagery is initially perplexing (because it does not seem to cooperate with the earlier metaphor of the wound), under the assumption that the You represents a former state of naïve harmony and quietude, the rose will be seen to bloom now only with difficulty, indicating the suffering connected with the memory of the persona’s previous unified existence.
In the second strophe, the self-reflection intensifies, resulting in a kind of linguistic breakdown: The abstract nouns lack contact with reality and no longer illustrate the tendency toward analogous thought, as in the first five lines; no finite verb appears from lines 6 to 8, leaving the explication static and ineffective. Significantly, it is the second strophe which introduces the idea of alienation. Its cause is seen as the absence of a homogeneous reality, as a craze of pluralities (Benn speaks of “realities”). Resistance against this disembodying centrifugal force is sustained within the act of composing the poem itself, in the creative act that circles around the “deep self” in an attempt to describe it with more accuracy than simple, or even scientific, language can yield. “The form is the poem,” Benn wrote elsewhere, stating the crux of his aesthetic.
In spite of the alienation from the “deep self,” it is only this region that can satisfy the needs of the persona. This part of the Self, however, is (linguistically) impregnable, and silence represents the only alternative. The poem ends as “a last day” (Benn’s own advancing age), which “plays its game, and feels its light and without/ memory goes down—everything is said.” Such a poetic stance is rooted in the modernist poetic tradition. Benn acknowledges that no word or sign can now reveal that for which he searches; they are but symbols of the essential thing.
Had the persona no memory of itself, then no tension or conflict would result. The plague of consciousness is such, however, that it disrupts the fluidity of expression. This is represented throughout the poem by frequent dashes, colons, and question marks. Sentences and thoughts are left incomplete, fragmented; punctuation replaces words and becomes itself a frustrated sign or symbol of the inexpressible. The “deep self” evades all intellectualization.
In his epoch-making address, Probleme der Lyrik, Benn postulated that
not one of even the great poets of our time has left behind more than six or eight complete poems. The rest may be interesting from the point of view of biography and the author’s development, but only a few are content in themselves, illuminating from within themselves, full of lasting fascination—and so, for these six poems, [there are] thirty to fifty years of asceticism, suffering, and struggle.
Even according to Benn’s own stringent definitions, he deserves to be acknowledged as a great poet.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
LONG FICTION: Roman des Phänotyp, 1944; Die Stimme hinter dem Vorhang, 1952 (The Voice Behind the Screen, 1996).
SHORT FICTION: Gehirne, 1916 (Brains, 1972); Provoziertes Leben: Eine Auswahl aus den Prosaschriften, 1955.
NONFICTION: Fazit der Perspektiven, 1930; Nach dem Nihilismus, 1932; Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen, 1933; Kunst und Macht, 1943; Goethe und die Naturwis-senschaften, 1949; Doppelleben, 1950 (Double Life, 2002); Essays, 1951; Probleme der Lyrik, 1951.
MISCELLANEOUS: Die gesammelten Schriften, 1922; Gesammelte Prosa, 1928; Ausdruckswelt: Essays and Aphorismen, 1949; Frühe Prosa und Reden, 1950; Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, 1958-1960 (4 volumes).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alter, Reinhard. Gottfried Benn: The Artist and Politics (1910-1934). Bern, Switzerland: Herbert Lang, 1976. A biography including the history of German politics and literature in Benn’s time.
Dierick, Augustinus Petrus. Gottfried Benn and His Critics: Major Interpretations, 1912-1992. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992. Critical interpretation and history by an expert in German expressionist literature. Includes an exhaustive bibliography.
Donahue, Neil H., ed. A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005. Chapter on expressionist poetry discusses Benn.
Powell, Larson. The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. Examines the works of Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Alfred Döblin, with attention to the role of nature. Contains a chapter on Benn.
Ray, Susan. Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn’s Postmodernist Poetics. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Ray analyzes Benn’s poetry, placing him with the postmodern poets.
Roche, Mark William. Gottfried Benn’s Static. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Intellectual and historical interpretation of Benn’s poetry with bibliography and index.
Travers, Martin. The Poetry of Gottfried Benn: Text and Selfhood. Studies in Modern German Literature 106. New York: P. Lang, 2007. Examines the question of self in Benn’s poetry.
Richard Spuler