Gottfried Benn (2 May 1886 – 7 July 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
Biography and work
Family and beginnings
Gottfried Benn was born in a
Lutheranism 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.
[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. ] 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.
[cf p. x.] After being laid off as a military doctor in 1912, Benn turned to
pathology, where he dissected over 200 bodies between October 1912 and November 1913 in Berlin. Many of his literary works reflect on his time as a pathologist.
In the summer of 1912, Benn started a romantic relationship with the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler.
Gottfried Benn began his literary career as a poet when he published a booklet titled Morgue and Other Poems in 1912, containing Expressionism poems dealing with physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer, and death — for example No III — Cycle:
Poems like this "were received by critics and public with shock, dismay, even revulsion."[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*.] In 1913 a second volume of poems came out, titled Sons. New Poems.[Gottfried Benn: Söhne. Neue Gedichte. Berlin (n.d. 1913.]
Benn's poetry projects an introverted nihilism, that is, an existentialist outlook that views artistic expression as the only purposeful action. In his early poems Benn used his medical experience, often using medical terminology, to portray humanity morbidly as just another species of disease-ridden animal.[Cf. Twentieth-Century Culture: A Biographical Companion edited by Alan Bullock and R. B. Woodings Harpercollins, 1984, p.61. ]
World War I and Weimar Republic
After the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in 1914, and spent a brief period on the Belgian front, then served as a military doctor in
Brussels. Benn attended the
court-martial and execution of Nurse and British spy
Edith Cavell. He also worked as a physician in a hospital for prostitutes. After the war, he returned to Berlin and practiced as a
dermatology and
venereal disease specialist.
[cf E.B. Ashton (Ed.): Gottfried Benn Primal Vision. New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, p. xi–xii.]
During the 1920s, he continued having a close relationship with Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler who addressed love poems to him. This bond to her is the subject of the film Mein Herz-niemandem (1997) by Helma Sanders-Brahms.
During the Third Reich
Hostile to the
Weimar Republic, and rejecting
Marxism and
Americanization, Benn was upset with ongoing economic and political instability, and sympathized for a short period with the
Nazis, whom he incorrectly saw as a Conservative Revolutionary force. He hoped that
Nazism would exalt his aesthetics and that expressionism would become the official art of Germany, as
Futurism had become 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."
[ 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 , p. 367-8] He later signed the
Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, that is, 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 turned away from the Nazis. He lived quietly, refraining from public criticism of the Nazi Party, but wrote that the bad conditions of the system "gave me the latter punch" and stated in a letter that the developments presented a "dreadful tragedy".[Cf. Gottfried-Benn-Gesellschaft e.V. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: http://www.gottfriedbenn.de/lebenslauf.php ] 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 art, 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.
After the war
During World War II, Benn was posted to
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 was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. In 1953 he released the poem
Nur zwei Dinge, which appeared in the Benn's collection of poems
Destillationen. He died of cancer in
West Berlin in 1956, and was buried in Waldfriedhof Dahlem, Berlin.
Reception
Benn had a great influence on German poetry immediately before World War I (as an expressionist), as well as after World War II (as the 'Static' poet).
[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).]
Books
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Morgue und andere Gedichte Morgue (Berlin, 1912)
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Fleisch (1917)
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Die Gesammelten Schriften The (Berlin, 1922)
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Schutt (1924)
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Betäubung (1925)
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Spaltung (1925)
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Nach dem Nihilismus (Berlin, 1932)
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Der Neue Staat und die Intellektuellen (1933)
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Kunst und Macht (1935)
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Ausgewählte Gedichte Selected (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.
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Statische Gedichte Static (Zürich, 1948)
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Ptolemäer (Limes, 1949); Ptolemy's Disciple (edited, translated and with a preface by Simona Draghici), Plutarch Press, 2005, (pbk).
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Doppelleben (1950); autobiography translated as Double Life (edited, translated, and with a preface by Simona Draghici, Plutarch Press, 2002, ).
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Stimme hinter dem Vorhang; translated as The Voice Behind the Screen (translated with an introduction by Simona Draghici (Plutarch Press, 1996, ).
Collections
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Sämtliche Werke ("Stuttgarter Ausgabe"), ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Holger Hof, 7 volumes in 8 parts, (Stuttgart 1986–2003, ).
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Prose, Essays, Poems by Gottfried Benn, edited by Volkmar Sander; introduction by Reinhard Paul Becker (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1987, & (pbk.)
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Selected Poems (Clarendon German series) by Gottfried Benn (Oxford U.P., 1970, )
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Gottfried Benn in Transition by Gottfried Benn, edited by Simona Draghici (Plutarch Press, 2003, )
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Poems, 1937–1947 (Plutarch Press, 1991, )
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Impromptus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, )
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Gottfried Benn – Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze: Briefwechsel 1932–1956, edited by Harald Steinhagen, Stephan Kraft and Holger Hof, 4 volumes, (Klett-Cotta/Wallstein, )
Notes
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German Dreams and German Dreamers: Gottfried Benn's German Universe by Henry Grosshans (Wyndham Hall Press, 1987, (pbk.).
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Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist by J. M. Ritchie (London: Wolff, 1972, .
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Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn's Postmodernist Poetics by Susan Ray (Oxford; New York: P. Lang, 2003, & (pbk.).
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Gottfried Benn's Static Poetry: Aesthetic and Intellectual-Historical Interpretations by Mark William Roche (University of North Carolina Press, 1991, .
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Primal Vision: Selected Poetry and Prose of Gottfried Benn edited by E. B. Ashton (NY: Bodley Head, 1961; Boyars, 1971; Marion Boyars, 1984,
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Twentieth-Century Culture: A Biographical Companion edited by Alan Bullock and R. B. Woodings (Harpercollins, 1984,
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Gottfried Benn and his Critics: Major Interpretations 1912–1992 by Augustinus P. Dierick. Columbia, 1992.
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German Literature Under National Socialism by J. M. Ritchie (London: C. Helm; Barnes & Noble, 1983, .
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The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919–1945 by Alastair Hamilton, foreword by Stephen Spender (London: Blond, 1971, .
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Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 by Philip Rees (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990, ).
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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., .
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Encyclopedia of the Third Reich by Louis Leo Snyder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976, ; London: Blandford, 1989, ; New York: Paragon House, 1989, 1st pbk. ed., ; New York: Marlowe, 1998,
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Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets, Richard Millington, (Peter Lang AG, 2012)
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“Das Ich ist ein Phantom.” The Crisis of Cartesianism and its Transcendence in Myth in Gottfried Benn's Early Dramas." by Augustinus P. Dierick. In: Analogon Rationis. Festschrift für Gerwin Mahrarens zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Marianne Henn and Christoph Lorey. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1994, 357–389.
External links
