Selected Poems and Prose

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

GOTTFRIED BENN

Selected Poems and Prose

Edited and translated by

DAVID PAISEY

Contents

Title Page

Translator’s Preface

Biographical Introduction

POEMS

Schluss

Nice childhood

Circulation

Appendix

Man and woman walk through the cancer shed

Express

Night café

Songs

Then Icarus

Underground train

English café

Threats

Express-train

Robbers-Schiller

No comfort here

Night café IV

O night

Caryatid

Through the alder wood it was making its way

Journey

The doctor

Poplar

Cocaine

Synthesis

The instrument

Marie

Curettage

Rubble

Palau

Drunken flood

The later I

State Library

Mists

The Danish girl

The singer

Banana

Golgothas

Theogonies

Who are you

Gypsophila

Easter Island

Orphic cells

Qui sait

Behold the stars

What are you singing?

From distances, from kingdoms

Ever more silently

Primal days

Two extracts from the oratorio ‘The unceasing’. Music by Paul Hindemith.

I Song

II Choirs of men and boys

Hold the swords in defiance

On the bridge

Valse triste

Day, when summer ended

I give your lids the gift of slumber

The whole

Turin (I)

On the edge of the Baltic Sea

The loneliest time

He who’s alone

The companions

You bear

So tranquil

If at your journey’s limit

Then the sounds created a structure

He who dreams the dead recur

Monologue

Poems

Verses

A word

Departure

Lost I

A drawing after

Wave of the night

Fifth century

September

Ah, the distant land

Chopin

If you survey tradition

Static poems

The death of Orpheus

Certain evenings of life

Sweet little face

You lie in silence

Acheron

Berlin

Radar

Notturno

The dark one

Restaurant

What did Luther mean by the apple tree?

Artistic ethics

Journeys

Late

What does your retrospect lack?

Sentence-construction

Muffle yourself

We draw a great arc

The barriers

Despair III

March: letter to Meran

To –

Away with the amaryllis

Hemmed in

Laid on us

What’s bad

Bar

Only two things

Melancholy

In a night

Tristesse

Closure

Come

Words

Poem

Aprèslude

Herr Wehner

Can be no mourning

How do the beeches look

From Bremerhaven

Epilogue 1949

Finish

Schöne Jugend

Kreislauf

Blinddarm

Mann und Frau gehn durch die Krebsbaracke

D-Zug

Nachtcafé

Gesänge

Da fiel uns Ikarus vor die Füße

Untergrundbahn

Englisches Café

Drohungen

Schnellzug

Räuber-Schiller

Hier ist kein Trost

Nachtcafé IV

O Nacht

Karyatide

Durchs Erlenholz kam sie entlang gestrichen

Reise

Der Arzt

Pappel

Kokain

Synthese

Das Instrument

Marie

Curettage

Schutt

Palau

Trunkene Flut

Das späte Ich

Staatsbibliothek

Nebel

Die Dänin

Der Sänger

Banane

Schädelstätten

Theogonien

Wer bist du

Schleierkraut

Osterinsel

Orphische Zellen

Qui sait

Sieh die Sterne, die Fänge

Was singst du denn

Aus Fernen, aus Reichen

Immer schweigender

Primäre Tage

Zwei Auszüge aus dem Oratorium ‘Das Unaufhörliche’. Musik von Paul Hindemith.

I Lied

II Knabenchor

Dennoch die Schwerter halten

Am Brückenwehr

Valse triste

Tag, der den Sommer endet

Auf deine Lider senk ich Schlummer

Das Ganze

Turin

Am Saum des nordischen Meers

Einsamer nie

Wer allein ist

Die Gefährten

Du trägst

So still –

Wenn dir am Ende der Reise

Dann gliederten sich die Laute

Wer Wiederkehr in Träumen weiss

Monolog

Gedichte

Verse

Ein Wort

Abschied

Verlorenes Ich

Nachzeichnung

Welle der Nacht

V. Jahrhundert

September

Ach, das ferne Land

Chopin

Überblickt man die Jahre

Statische Gedichte

Orpheus’ Tod

Gewisse Lebensabende

Kleines süßes Gesicht

Du liegst und schweigst und träumst der Stunde nach

Acheron

Berlin

Radar

Notturno

Der Dunkle

Restaurant

Was meinte Luther mit dem Apfelbaum?

Künstlermoral

Reisen

Spät

Du übersiehst dich nicht mehr

Satzbau

Verhülle dich

Wir ziehn einen großen Bogen

Die Gitter

Verzweiflung III

März. Brief nach Meran

An –

Nimm fort die Amarylle

Eingeengt

Auferlegt

Was schlimm ist

Bar

Nur zwei Dinge

Melancholie

In einer Nacht

Tristesse

»Abschluss«

Kommt

Worte

Gedicht

Aprèslude

Herr Wehner

Kann keine Trauer sein

Wie sehn die Buchen im September aus

Von Bremens Schwesterstadt

Epilog 1949

PROSE

Brains (Gehirne)

The birthday (Der Geburtstag)

Diesterweg (Diesterweg)

The garden of Arles (Der Garten von Arles)

an extract from The modern self (Das moderne Ich)

extracts from Lyric self (Lyrisches Ich)

How Miss Cavell was shot (Wie Miss Cavell erschossen wurde)

Primal vision (Urgesicht)

an extract from On the problems of being a poet (Zur Problematik des Dichterischen)

an extract from After nihilism (Nach dem Nihilismus)

extracts from Speech to the Prussian Academy of Arts, 5 April 1932 (Akademierede)

Eugenics I (Züchtung I)

Extracts from Expressionism (Der Expressionismus)

extracts from Mind and soul of future generations (Geist und Seele künftiger Geschlechter)

an extract from The people and the writer (Das Volk und der Dichter)

Doric world (Dorische Welt)

an extract from Writing needs inner latitude (Die Dichtung braucht inneren Spielraum)

an extract from Pallas (Pallas)

extracts from On the theme of history (Zum Thema Geschichte)

three extracts from The phenotype’s novel (Roman des Phänotyp)

an extract from Marginalia (Marginalien)

extracts from Double life (Doppelleben)

extracts from Problems of lyric poetry (Probleme der Lyrik)

extract from Speech in Darmstadt, 21 October 1951 (Rede in Darmstadt)

extracts from Speech in Knokke (Rede in Knokke)

an extract from Should poetry improve life? (Soll die Dichtung das Leben bessern?)

Index of Poem Titles and First Lines (English)

Index of Poem Titles and First Lines (German)

About the Author

Copyright

Translator’s Preface

This is a personal selection from the much larger work of Gottfried Benn, presented in two roughly chronological sequences, of verse and prose respectively, so that developments over time can become apparent. In bulk he produced several times more prose than verse, but I have selected much less of the former for translation. The dates supplied here are of first recorded appearances of texts, either in manuscript or print, as established in the four-volume collected edition published by Limes Verlag (Wiesbaden) in 1958–61, edited by Dieter Wellershoff; later authorial amendments have been incorporated. Note that the date supplied at the head of each text is not part of the original: where no dated manuscript survives, composition may have preceded the year of first publication. I have left the texts largely without commentary, to allow readers to form their own opinions. A brief biographical note follows, which may help to put particular works into context, notably those of the Nazi period. There is a huge critical literature on Benn in German, but I see no point in listing any parts of it for readers who know no German. Benn’s original texts can all be found in the latest collected edition by Klett-Cotta Publishers in Stuttgart. I did not think it necessary to print a bibliography of their first and subsequent appearances during his lifetime.

People say poetry cannot be translated – Benn said so himself – and my efforts may be futile, but I think there may be some merit in trying to convey something of the quality of a great poet to Anglophone readers who cannot read him in the original. Nevertheless the inclusion of the German originals of all the poems selected may encourage some interaction with the poet’s own words. In my renderings of the poetry, which Benn intended to be read on the page rather than spoken, I have tried to reflect the scope of his characteristic diction, as well as his original metric structures, rhyme-schemes (with the occasional expedient of assonance), and often even the punctuation. I have allowed myself more latitude in translating the free verse. The prose is more easily rendered into English, and I have aimed at literal versions which respect the rhetorical structures – sentence length and so on – of the German originals, some of which were intended to be spoken. The early experimental narratives are pioneering examples of Expressionist prose, but the other works are mostly quite straightforward. I have translated two from the Nazi period in full, one because it is a superb piece of rhetoric, the other because its toxicity is extreme. I have omitted a substantial study entitled Goethe and the Natural Sciences (1931) because it takes for granted educated German readers’ familiarity with the life and works of Goethe and would require much annotation. The eyewitness account of the trial and execution of Edith Cavell in 1915 (1928) is included for its English interest. Most of the remaining prose here consists of excerpts from longer texts, chosen sometimes for their beauty, sometimes for their information content and interest, notably those which refer to poetry, especially Expressionist poetry. There are many fine poems I have not translated, but, apart from remaining narratives and the Goethe essay, I think I have included the best (and worst) of the prose.

I should like to dedicate these translations to the memory of Leslie (‘Moses’) Reed (1920–84), in September 1947 my meticulous first teacher of German in Whitchurch Secondary School, Cardiff. I am grateful to Professor Leonard Forster (1913–97) who encouraged me to work on diction in Benn’s poems up to 1927 at University College London and in Berlin, where I met Benn briefly in July 1955. My thanks also to Michael Schmidt (another Benn enthusiast) and Helen Tookey of Carcanet, Alun and Julie Emlyn-Jones, and to Massimo Danielis, who created the aquatint engraving Benn: Ein Wort in 2012 for the cover of this book.

Biographical Introduction

In a letter Gottfried Benn wrote to his long-standing correspondent in Bremen Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze on 11 September 1950, he said: ‘My private life is really completely opaque, a continuum of gaps and losses, no-one could make a story of me, perceive and portray any coherence. A strange parallel to my so-called oeuvre, which consists only of break-ups and break-downs, and has no line which can be read’. Nevertheless a brief biography follows, with particular attention to a period in the 1930s which caused Benn, and causes his readers, severe problems.

Gottfried Benn was born on 2 May 1886 in Mansfeld (a village in Westpriegnitz, North Germany), as the second child of a Lutheran pastor and his French-Swiss wife. He spent most of his childhood in Sellin (now Zielin, West Poland, another village in what was then the German Neumark), where he was allowed to join the son of the local manor as he received instruction from a private tutor; the two went together to secondary school (Gymnasium) in Frankfurt on the Oder. In adulthood he liked to point out how many important German writers had grown up in Lutheran parsonages, but his father was very authoritarian, and Gottfried clashed with him bitterly for refusing his mother medical relief during her painful death from cancer in 1912.

He went to Marburg University to study philology and theology, as his father wished, but after two years, in accordance with his own wishes, changed to the study of military medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Akademie in Berlin, for which there was a state subsidy. His intended career as a regimental doctor in peacetime was cut short by kidney damage suffered during manoeuvres. He undertook further training as an auxiliary doctor in Berlin hospitals, including the Westend Hospital in Charlottenburg, and in particular on a dissection course in Moabit. He later confessed¹ that he had been removed from psychiatric work because he found it impossible to take any interest in individual patients’ case histories, to the extent that doing so led to severe physical symptoms in himself. His first small collection of poems, Morgue and Other Poems, was published as a pamphlet in Berlin in 1912 and created a sensation: Benn became known as a leading figure in the new movement called literary Expressionism.

After his further professional experience and a trip to America as a ship’s doctor, he found himself in the army again at the beginning of the First World War. He took part in the battle for Antwerp, then spent much of the war in Brussels, where he was given the job of doctor in a hospital for prostitutes; this was a very productive period in literary terms. In 1917 he was discharged as a result of some kind of nervous breakdown, and returned to Berlin. Here he opened the private practice for skin and venereal diseases which was his often meagre source of income for the rest of his working life in that city, with the exception of the period from 1935 to 1945, when he was again employed by the army, this time as a medical administrator. Throughout his life, poetry was of primary importance to him, though he wrote in other genres too; medicine merely paid the bills.

Although intellectually and socially he was very much a loner, he married three times,² and, particularly in the unmarried intervals, had a number of sometimes overlapping and far more than casual sexual relationships, possibly the first being with the very fine poet Else Lasker-Schüler.³ His first marriage was cruelly cut short by his wife’s early death, and, as he did not like young children, he did not feel able to bring up his daughter Nele himself, so she lived with friends in Denmark, and was adopted there in 1946. In 1929 a young actress with whom he was having an affair committed suicide, knowing he did not consider her his equal intellectually. There are tender references in a few poems to his second and third wives, but despite their importance to his daily life, neither played a part in his creative work. Only one of his male friendships can be said to have been close for a time, that with Erich Reiss,⁴ a Berlin publisher who had produced some of his early works; around 1930 the two met regularly in the evening to drink in Benn’s favourite pub. Benn’s long correspondence with F.W. Oelze, already mentioned, maintained a polite distance at the personal level, after Benn’s extreme wariness at first and a hiccup in 1936, but it did provide him with a degree of support (though hardly at the intellectual level Oelze unsuccessfully aimed for), and, more importantly, assistance with preserving his manuscripts through the war of 1939–45 and its immediate aftermath.

Benn’s early poems of extreme suffering amongst the lowest levels of society seem driven by a wild but unexpressed compassion, and some of the early prose suggests a highly vulnerable sensitivity which was to be hidden under various assertive defence strategies. However, he soon turned his attention to his thereafter constant theme of the fractured human self in a tragic world of post-Nietzschean nihilism, where human existence and experience is potentially meaningful and transcendent only in so far as it produces art. States of intoxication, rushes of blood to the brain and other organs, commingling of cultural and anthropological memories, all these could help provide the conditions necessary for the production of poetry and in part its subject. Benn’s poems are monologues, acts of defiance erected against the void: but ‘the poem is the mind’s unpaid work … one-sided, without effect and without a partner’.⁵ The poems trace a great arc across his life and are undiscursive: they can stand for themselves.

His prose, by contrast, with the exception of some early experimental pieces with a narrative-autobiographical kernel, is full of assertions and arguments, though it too tends to the conclusion the poems simply incorporate. Much of it is rhetorically refined and mellifluous, but it should not be read in isolation from its social and political circumstances. He was elitist, and a racist foretelling the end of the white race.⁶ It is perhaps easy to see the attraction of parts of National Socialist ideology for him, but difficult to understand the stupidity of such an apparently rigorous thinker leaving his isolationist comfort zone to welcome the Third Reich in print, as he did in prose collections of 1933 and 1934; politics had hitherto been for him a sphere outside the permanent haven of art, and certainly never its possible concurrent. Perhaps there is a millenarian in every lyric poet, but for a time Benn saw the political upheaval as an anthropological mutation capable of countering European nihilism; perhaps also he was blinded by the possibility of acceptance in the nationalist community, as opposed to the indifference to the individual of modern society.⁷ He had also been flattered in 1932 by the public recognition implicit in his election to membership of the Literary Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts. But the uncharacteristically convoluted prose of his 1932 inaugural speech to that body reveals how nervously he was trying to impress; as spoken it must have been near-incomprehensible. Despite misgivings, he remained among the rump of members who had not resigned, emigrated or been dismissed at the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933, as had several whose places were filled by more of its literary supporters, and from 15 February to 8 June 1933 was its acting chairman. He was criticised for remaining in Germany by various writers who had emigrated, notably his friend Heinrich Mann, and defended his position in print.

What today seems his worst moral failing of this or any period is his acceptance of Nazi policy towards Jews. His essay ‘Doric World’⁸ considered, as a model for the ‘total state’ of Nazi Germany, the severe, militaristic, slave-based and to us morally transgressive state of ancient Sparta, because it had bred what he considered the beginnings of high art. And ‘Eugenics I’⁹ of the previous year had supported state-run eugenics, and by implication the beginnings of the Holocaust, since it contains the chilling proposition that modern man ‘becomes great through the concept of the enemy, only the man who sees enemies can grow’: from the start, the Nazi state had insistently proclaimed Jews its prime enemy. Benn’s absorption and repetition of Nazi theory in prose examples from 1932 to 1934 extends even to the micro-level of vocabulary, which no English translation can reveal:¹⁰ and the climax of ‘Eugenics I’ uses the extreme rhetoric later characteristic of Goebbels in his prophetic rants: ‘brains must be bred, great brains to defend Germany, brains with canine teeth, teeth of thunderbolts’.¹¹ Benn did not act like an anti-Semite, as we have seen in his friendships with Else Lasker-Schüler and Erich Reiss, and wrote to one of his concurrent mistresses on 4 December 1935: ‘My favourite milieu has always been the Jewish, and next to it the aristocratic one’. But he had nevertheless decided to adopt the Nazi position, or at least not to criticise it, and wrote to the same correspondent two weeks later: ‘Yes, the Jews, that inexhaustible subject! One should really have nothing to do with any of them, taking an absolutely strict line. But then along comes someone like E[rich] R[eiss] with a gift of chairs and two books published by Piper, and that is nice’.¹²

Whatever his personal feelings, he did not publicly oppose Nazi policy towards the Jews, nor, even after the war, did he disown or apologise for his earlier arguments in favour of other aspects of the Third Reich, arguments which had been long in gestation. His fault was not a Lord Jim leap, a momentary error bitterly regretted and expiated over many years.¹³ In 1949, Benn heard that the Jewish émigré novelist Alfred Döblin,¹⁴ with whom he had been friendly before 1933, and who returned to Germany in November 1945 as a French Cultural Officer in Baden-Baden, despite his admiration for some of Benn’s works, had called him ‘a scoundrel’;¹⁵morally this seems to me entirely just. xvii

Benn never joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and after the war was to have no difficulties during the de-Nazification process of the occupying powers. The more he was exposed to the organisations and ideas of Hitler’s Germany immediately after his welcome of 1933/34, however, the more they revealed strong currents of opposition to his avant-garde past and far from orthodox present, and he felt himself under threat. Keeping his head down did not seem by itself a sufficient strategy for self-preservation, and in 1935 he decided to rejoin the army, calling this step ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’.¹⁶ He left Berlin for an administrative post in Hanover at the end of March 1935, and continued in this post in Berlin again from 1937, and from 1943 to 1945 in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Gorzów in Poland).

He had reckoned without the non-intellectual side of the Nazi regime, however, and, in response to the publication in March 1936 of his Selected Poems, was subjected to a virulent anonymous attack in the 7 May issue of Das Schwarze Korps, the weekly newspaper of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, which took exception mainly to the shocking explicitness of some early works, and said he qualified as ‘a successor of those who have been thrown out of the house because of their unnatural piggery’.¹⁷ To counter this implied threat of dismissal from the army, and possibly worse, Benn succeeded in raising support from his commanding officer in Hanover, Major-General von Zepelin, and from Hanns Johst,¹⁸ President of both the Literary Section of the Academy of Arts and of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Chamber of Literature, founded by Goebbels in 1933), of which Benn had been a member since December 1933. However, on 15 May 1936 he was forbidden to publish anything while still a serving soldier, and on 28 April 1938 was to be excluded from the Chamber of Literature.

Benn continued writing while under this ban, which did not prevent further National Socialist attacks on Expressionism and its literary products, including Benn. He had a particularly virulent opponent in Wolfgang Willrich,¹⁹ but in September 1937 Heinrich Himmler wrote to Willrich that the institutions for which he was responsible had been forbidden to take any part in actions against Benn, thanks to his unobjectionable behaviour since 1933.²⁰ Benn was incautious enough to have 22 recent poems privately printed in August 1943, and sent them to seven people only.²¹ One of these poems (‘Monologue’, written in 1941) contained some withering criticism of National Socialism and its policies of enslavement, which could have cost him his life had it become public. Including a Shakespearian lament for the loss of measure, and denunciation of individual Nazi leaders, mainly for their vulgarity, it mourns the tragedy of inaction he had chosen.

After the war, and then long-drawn-out difficulties in finding publishers for his new works, his reputation in West Germany rose quite quickly, based largely on the rhyming, strictly metrical poems he was still writing, which found admirers and imitators among some poets of the younger generation. He also had considerable success with new works in prose, though he never returned to the experiments of his early years. Alexander Lernet-Holenia, one of the friends to whom Benn sent a copy of his privately printed poems of 1943, had told Benn in 1942 that he was the greatest lyric poet for 100 years, but needed to invent a new third style after his ‘cancer shed’ early poems and his eight-line stanzas of the 1920s:²² I believe he never did so. In both prose and verse he revisited familiar themes and arguments. When I visited him on 20 July 1955, he was very kind to a painfully inexperienced student, and obligingly wove into his conversation many of the formulations I knew well from his publications. In his post-war letters he tells how his wife had asked him to stop writing poems about roses and melancholy, and I believe most of the works of that final period bear the mark of depression. The often repetitious prose seems to me a falling-off, and the verse to shrink in scope to a concentration on art as the sole product capable of transcendence, to poems about writing poems. He thought no writer could hope to produce more than a handful of perfectly achieved lyric poems in a lifetime, but for me there are more than enough in his work to rank him among the greatest German poets of the twentieth century, however seriously flawed he was as a man. He died on 7 July 1956.

1 In Epilog (1922).

2 He married: firstly in 1914 Edith Osterloh, who died in 1921 (their daughter Nele was born in 1915); secondly in 1938 Herta von Wedemeyer, who committed suicide during the chaotic final weeks of the Second World War when, alone, she despaired of leaving the Soviet zone of occupation for the American one; and thirdly in 1946 the dentist Dr Ilse Kaul, who outlived him.

3 Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), a Jew who would emigrate to Jerusalem to avoid Nazi persecution. Benn delivered a moving eulogy to her in Berlin in 1952, long after her death.

4 Erich Reiss (1887–1951) was a Jew, and his business, begun in 1908, was liquidated by the Nazis in 1936. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from which he was released in 1938 thanks to appeals from influential supporters (not including Benn, who at that time would have had no influence with the authorities), and emigrated to the USA via Sweden. His warm and chatty letters to Benn from 1946 to 1951 have been published.

5 In Summa summarum (1926).

6 In Benn’s view, the threat came mainly from the East.

7 Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) is the classic formulation of this sociological opposition, still very current in Benn and his contemporaries. Nazi community was, of course, exclusive.

8 ‘Dorische Welt’ (1934).

9 ‘Züchtung I.’ (1933). Eugenics, systematised by Francis Galton (1822–1911), remained a much-studied subject until some time after the Second World War, when its Nazi associations discredited it. University College London maintained a lecture room named Eugenics Theatre for well over a decade after 1945.

10 For instance, the words Führerbegriff, Volkheit, volkhaft and arthaft, not hitherto part of Benn’s diction, can be found in ‘After Nihilism’, ‘Eugenics I’, ‘Expressionism’ and ‘Doric World’, but not in the poems.

11 Compare Goebbels: ‘Only a brazen species will be able to assert itself in the storms of our time. It must have guts of iron and a heart of steel’ (quoted in the notes to Victor Klemperer, Tagebücher 1944, ed. Walter Nowojski and Hadwig Klemperer, 4th ed. (Berlin, 2006), p. 85. Victor Klemperer’s LTI [Lingua Tertii Imperii], first published in 1946, has documented Nazi linguistic practices.

12 Benn’s letters to Elinor Buller of 4 and 17 December 1935.

13 Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900) was known to Benn in translation.

14 Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), now best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).

15 ‘Ein Schuft’; see Benn’s letter to F.W. Oelze, 23 March 1949. In his memoir Doppelleben (1949), Benn wrote that he could not see why Döblin had described him thus.