(These selected writings of Gottfried Benn or "primal visi...)
These selected writings of Gottfried Benn or "primal visions" of the 1920s anticipated in certain ways the positions of such writers today as Beckett and Genet, the French "antinovelists" and the American "Beats."
The German author Gottfried Benn was an important expressionist writer. Influenced by his work as a physician, he demonstrated brutal antisentimentalism in both his poetry and prose.
Background
Gottfried Benn was born on May 2, 1886, at Mansfeld, Prussia (now part of Putlitz, Germany), 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. The eldest son in a large family, he entertained his brothers and sisters with fairy tales of his own creation.
Education
Although interested in a literary career, Benn studied theology at the University of Marburg and medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for Military Doctors, graduating with honors.
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.
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.
Benn was elected to the poetry section of the Prussian Academy in 1932, but being considered reactionary for his attraction to Nazism, he was removed from the faculty of the Prussian Academy by more liberal colleagues the next year. 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. 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 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.
For a brief period, Benn 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. Benn's irrationalism, expressed in some of his works, led him to see in National Socialism a genuine renaissance of the German nation but he soon became disillusioned with the results, turning into a critic who was himself attacked by Nazi purists.
Views
By profession a physician, Benn was fascinated by the philosophical aspects of many branches of science, and over the years he wrote a number of extraordinary essays in which the poet’s intuitive vision was accorded the utmost imaginative freedom.
Benn rebelled passionately against the demons of a mechanized world, against the rationalism which was paralysing modern civilization and the political doctrines which derived from it, preaching an aesthetic nihilism and the cult of primitive atavism.
Quotations:
"In the beginning there was the Word and not the talk, and in the end there won't be the propaganda but again the Word."
"My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me."
"Whoever wants to understand much must play much."
"He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!"
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Nietzsche, Spengler
Writers
Goethe
Connections
Benn married Edith Brosin, an actress. She died in 1921. His second wife died in 1945, and he shortly thereafter married again.
late wife:
Edith Brosin
References
The Hour That Breaks: Gottfried Benn
The Hour That Breaks is the first biography of Gottfried Benn to appear in English. The author of this study charts in impressive detail the complex paths of Benn’s life, through the demands of his medical practice and military involvement in two world wars, his brief political advocacy of Hitler and Nazism in 1933, to his final «comeback» in post Second World War Germany.