art and nihilism, the poetry of gottfried benn

8/16/2019 Art and Nihilism, The Poetry of Gottfried Benn

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Michael Hamburger

TheArt and Nihilism:

Poetry of Gottfried Benn

GOTTFKIED ENN’S tatus in post-

warGermanys very nearly as high asT. S. Eliot’s in post-war ngland likeEliot, Benn s a critic as well as a poet and hasdone much o create the taste by which hiswork s judged and appredated. But here thecomparisonnds for while Eliot’s criticism s are-examination f other poets’ work nd a re-discovery of tradition, most of Benn’s s adirect or indirect commentary on his ownpractice. As or his criteria, they are as differentas possible from Eliot’s Christian humanism,being anti-Christian, anti-humanistic and--ifweaccept them t their face value--exclusively~esthetic. Though e has lately been describedas "one of the grand old men of literaryEurope,"Benn etains all the characteristics ofan enfant errible. Asa poet, he has been obligedto consolidate, f not to retreat from, a positionreached early hirty years ago but his criticalutterances remain provocative because theyform part of a lifelong campaign f aggressiveself-defence. This may be one reason why"literary Europe" has not yet endorsed theGerman aluation of Benn’s work; another isthat his best poetry, by its very nature, is un-translatable.

The act that Gottfried Benns alive at all hassomething o do with his high reputation; forhe is the sole survivor of a generation and aschool of poets who were doomed o exile,silence, or early death. Benn was born inI886; his first book of poems appeared in~9~2, a year that seems more emote to most

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Germans han to most Englishmen. Of the

leading poets of Benn’s generation, GeorgTrail, Georg Heym, nd Alfred Lichtensteinhave been dead for forty years. It would befoolish to pretend hat a living writer’s reputa-tion is not affected by circumstances f thiskind, largely irrelevant as they are to his work.Much f the interest that attaches to Benn’swritings and utterances is the interest arousedby the sole survivor from a great shipwreck.

Bra’s present status carmot be tmderstoodwithout a rather long glance back at themovementf which he is the last active repre-sentative. This movement s Expressionism;and it dominated more han two decades whichwere extraordinarily rich in promise andexcitement. IfI have spoken f doom nd ship-wreck, it is because so much f this promiseremained unfulfilled when he events of I933brought Expressionism o a sudden end. It istrue that the movement asalready in declineand, in a certain sense, it had been doomedromthe start, because "begotten by despair uponimpossibility." But the banning and dispersalof its members ad he effect of once again dis-rupting he continuity of German iterature andof suppressing the new growth that wouldcertainly have ollowed his organic decline.

The years between I914 and ~933 were aperiod of astonishing activity in Germanliterature; there was such a wealth of talentand originality that it is no exaggeration ospeak of a literary renaissance. Thecomparison

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with an earlier German enaissance, the Sturmund Drang f the I8th century, is especially apt;for this, too, was essentially a movement fyoung men, revolutionary in its impetus andits aims, but destined to deteriorate as its mem-bers matured. The more prolific of the Expres-

sionists thought nothing of publishing threevolumes f verse within a year; this, in itself,is neither a fault nor a virtue, but it is sympto-matic of the feverish energy that possessed thewhole generation; and it helps to explain whyso much f their output has been, conveniently,but often unjustly, forgotten. There was nolack of good craftsmanship; it is the stridentpitch of so much Expressionist poetry thatmakes t hard to bear; and its sheer quantitythat makes t hard to evaluate.

Literary Expressionism is usually taken tohave begun in 1911 with the publication of twopoems, Weltende by Jakob van Hoddis andDdmmerung y Alfred Lichtenstein. Weltendewas the first to appear and Lichtenstein ad-mitted having used it as a model, though herightly claimed to have improved on it. Bothpoems are rhymed and in regular stanza form.What was new about them was that theyconsisted of nothing more than an arbitraryconcatenation of images taken from contem-porary life. They presented a picture, but not a

realistic one, for the perspective was distortedand the objects depicted were not such ascan normally be found together in thesame place and at the same time; they were akind of collage. Hoddis could not resist givingthe show away in the tifle--"End of theWorld"--an exaggeration all the more blatantbecause so inappropriate to his ironic choice ofdisasters. (E.g. "most people have a cold" and"all the railway trains are falling off thebridges. ") In Lichtenstein’s poem, on the otherhand, the images re left to speak for themselves;his tide is ambiguous, since the German word"Ddmmerung" an mean both dawn and dusk;but it is clear from the poem that he meansdusk. If his dusk is a cosmic one, he neithersays nor implies that it is. He makes no attemptto explain the presence in his poem f two menwalking across a field, the "fat boy playingwith a pond" or the man described as" stickingto a window." The description is "expression-

istic" because the poet’s real aim is to communi-cate his sense of the absurd and the incongruous.The meaning and the irony are in the juxta-position of the various descriptive fragmentsthat make up the poem.

In some of his other poems, Lichtenstein

introduces a persona, KunoKohn, and qualifieshis statements with" if, .... but," and" perhaps"("a fair-haired poet may be going mad"). Onethinks of the early Imagists--active in Englandand America at roughly the same time--andparticularly of T. S. Eliot’s early verse. What-ever it may owe to such common ncestors as1Limbaud, Laforgue, and Corbi~re, Lichten-stein’s irony, like Eliot’s, is a considerableadvance on that of any earlier poet; thoughnot free from the self-mockery, familiar sinceHeine and Musset, which is the intellect’s

_ revenge on the heart, he uses irony to mock awhole civilisation, and this without recourse todirect statement. This is one of the earlyvarieties of Expressionism it is close to carica-ture, but also asserts a new reedom of associa-tion.

Lichtenstein’s ironic detachment s far fromcharacteristic of the movement s a whole; butthe titles of these two poems made history:Lichtenstein’s Ddmmerung ecause it reappearedin the title of an important anthology of I92o,

Menscheitsddmmerung, ith the significant differ-ence that his ambiguous dusk had become he"dawn of a new humanity," as the introductorymanifesto makes ll too clear ; Hoddis’ Weltendebecause it initiated that abuse of the cosmicwhich led to a gradual inflation in the verbalcurrency of Expressionism. Soon it ceased tomatter greatly whether a poet predicted the endof the world or a new humanity; both werethe stock-in-trade of every poetaster. This is thechief reason why the years between I914 and1933--the Expressionist period proper--pro-duced less work of lasting value than the yearsimmediately preceding the First World War.The best of the young poets active before I914,Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, and Ernst Stadler,did not belong to any movement r subscribeto any programme, though they were laterincluded among the Expressionists. Theirprophecies of renewal or destruction were theirown and physically their world was still intact,



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even f they found it spiritually uninhabitable.It is worth noting that their most vivid evoca-tions of war were written before the event:Georg Heym’s ision of destruction, Der Krieg,in 1911 Ernst Stadler’s Der Aufbruch, n whichhe welcomes war because it offers a hope of

change, in 1913. (Stadler’s English contempor-ary, T. E. Hulme, had a similar attitude to war,though based on different premises.)

GOTTFRIED ENN S first poems belong tothis early phase of Expressionism and hislater development was strongly influenced, notto say determined, by a reaction against theexcesses of the later Expressionists, but especi-ally against that desperate optimism which tookthe form of political utopias. Gifted as he was,even Franz Werfel has an embarrassing habit ofbuttonholing his fellow men to assure them ofhis love; but the worst offender was J.Becher (born 1891), as frantic as he wasprolific in those years. (Though another sur-vivor, Becher has become a Communist Partyman and has long ceased to write poems n anyother capacity.) It must be mentioned in thisconnection that Benn reacted only against thedominant political ideology, that of the Left;in two essays of 1932 and 1933 he welcomedthe extremists of the Right and tried to recon-

cile Expressionism with the new ideology. Thegesture was not appreciated; Expressionismhad already been condemned as "degenerateart." In 1937 Gottfried Benn himself was for-bidden to publish and finally took refuge fromhis persecutors in the National Socialist Partyby joining the Medical Corps of the Army forwhich he had originally been trained, beforegoing into private practice in Berlin as aspecialist in skin and venereal diseases). It wasthen that Benn, always ready to make a virtueof necessity, coined his famous description of

the Army s "the aristocratic form of emigra-tion." As the aphorism implies, Benn hadchanged his mind about the Nazis. As for hisconception of aristocracy, this will becomeclear when come o deal with his beliefs ingeneral.

I have deliberately refrained from definingExpressionism; for the work of those poetseither actively or posthumously ssociated with

The Poetry of Gottfried Benn ~

the movement s so various that there is nopoint in reducing their practice to a singleformula. Lichtenstein’s ironic collage has alreadybeen described. Georg Heym and GeorgTrald were visionary poets whose strength wastheir lack of irony; whereas Heym wrote in

strictly regular stanzas modelled on those ofStefan George, Trald wrote mostly in a form offree verse that owes much to H/51derlin’sclassical cadences. Both used little imagery hatwas specifically modern, for their poetry issymbolic rather than descriptive. Ernst Stadlerwrote in long irregular lines adapted from WaltWhitman, rarely in stanza form, but rhymed;much of his imagery is derived from modernurban life, for he remained closer to certainof his predecessors in the Naturalist movement.In these early years it was an older poet, AugustStramm (1879-I915), who produced thewildest experiments in diction, syntax, andmetric. When necessary, he coined new wordsto convey states of mind never before ex-pressed; these, unlike the neologisms ofGottfried Benn, were not cerebral but emotive,purely expressive sounds, onomatopc~ic orptm-like. I shall quote his short poem ckwermut,though one of his more conventional pieces,because his work tells us so much about theperiod of Benn’s formative years:

Schreiten treben Striding trivingLeben ehnt Living ongsSchauern tehen Shuddering tandingBlicke uchen Glances ook forSterben lichst Dying growsDas Kommen The comingSchreit ScreamsTief DeeplyStummen WeWir Dumb

This poem contains no visual images, no

adjectives, and only a single adverb. (The wordcorresponding to "dumb" s used neologisti-cally as a verb.) It describes nothing but an in-ward state; but whereas Lichtenstein--and, in avery different way, Trald---expresses an inwardstate by projecting it into an outward scene,here there is no reference to any recognisableobject, person or place. Stramm suppressesoutward reality, so that his poem conveys only



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movement,n inward gesture it is an abstractpattern that corresponds o his inward tate.

In his first poems, Gotffried Benn used arealistic technique or an expressionistic pur-pose-to convey disgust. In some of his laterworks---especially hose of his middle period--

he came s close as any poet to pure abstraction;outward eality, in those poems, rovides onlyfragments which the poet assembles into apattern. One must beware, of course, of apply-ing the terms of graphic art to poetry; and Ihave avoided drawing parallels between ndi-vidual poets and graphic artists. But during heExpressionist period, literature and the visualarts were uncommonly, erhaps unhealthily,dose to each other. Kokoschka rote Expres-sionist plays, Ernst Barlach both novels andplays. Very oosely, the distinction betweenabstraction and projection (or distortion) canbe applied to both arts. Such artists as Klee--not to mention Picasso--used both abstractionand projection for different purposes; and theunstable relationship between outward andinward reality is what distinguishes everymodern movement n art and poetry. Benn’shatred of the outside world was such that heattempted the complete disruption of thisrelationship. He has therefore done his best toavoid all the recognised symbols, especially

those associated with religion, as these wouldhaveserved o relate his work o the universaltruths which e denies.

BENN’Sremises go back o two definitions¯ by Nietzsche which e is fond of quoting:"The world as an msthetic phenomenon" nd"Art as the last metaphysical ctivity withinEuropean Nihilism." Gotffried Berm acceptsthis European Nihilism as one accepts theweather. In a recent interview he said : "Whenannouncing your visit, you promised not toask me whether I’m a Nihilist. Indeed, thequestion is just as meaningless s to ask mewhether ’m a skater or a stamp collector. Forthe important hing is what one makes f one’sNihilism." Though it is not always dearexacdy what Benn means by Nihilism, moreoften than not he uses the term to denote thenegation of all absolute values; but, in lateryears especially, he speaks also of the "tran-

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scending of Nihilism," and this is done bysetting up new values to take their place--much s Nietzsche poke of the " revaluation ofall values." Benn elieves that Nihilism s theinevitable frame of mind of all those Europeansof the present age who have the courage to

think; he never ires of expressing is contemptfor those who "pretend" that the old valuesare more enable han their substitutes, such ashis own blend of scientific determinism nd~esthetidsm. The reasons he gives for thisdeterminism are partly biological, partlypsychological--though e does not care for theword--and artly historical or political; he isconvinced hat "the white peoples are at thestage of egress, no matter whether he theoriesabout their decline are considered valid todayor not .... The race has become mmobile, tremains fixed around its kernel, and thiskernel is intellect, that is to say Nihilism."Here, as elsewhere, he simply equates Nihilismwith a highly developed onsciousness.

Benn oes one stage further than Nietzsche:"What istinguishes the situation of the man of~94o--the man concerned with intellectualquestions and deductions--from Nietzsche’ssituation s, above ll, that he has broken ffre-lations with the public and with that pedagogic-cum-political sphere which Nietzsche’s works,

especially those of the eighties, passionatelycultivated." In a section of his Ausdruckswelt(I949) headed "Pessimism," Benn elaborateson this theme of intellectual isolation: "Menare not lonely, but thinking s lonely. It is truethat men re closely surrounded with mournfulthings, but many ake part in this mourningand it is popular with everyone. But thinkingis ego-bound nd solitary." This, of course,dependson howone hinks ; but for Benn hereis no question of any other kind of thought.All his theories, whether esthetic, metaphysical,or political, derive from his sense of the dis-harmony etween nward and outward reality."That which ives is something ther than thatwhich hinks," is how e formulates his basicdichotomy.

From he start, Berm’s hinking wasanalyticalrather than synthetic; while his contemporaryTrail wrote of the "image of man," he wroteof the body of man on the dissecting table.



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unaware hat numbers are symbols; and thefact that these animals ppear ona painting doesnot lead him o question heir formal unction.Heprefers to treat them s facts. This peculiarand deliberate short-sightedness uggests hatBenn s right in calling himselfa pheno-type,"

that is, a representative f the mentality f theage. One can see the same division at work nthe modemult of statistics for statistics’ sake--facts in a vacuum f unreality. And Benn’santi-humanism--which esults from a similarrefusal to see the whole eflected in the part--is precisely that of the modern otalitarianstates, to whom uman eings are either usefulcommodities or" phenomena" hat lend them-selves to interesting experiments. n the evenmore realistic" poems hat followed Morgue,Benn sees human beings as so much meatwhich, while alive, is also invested with asubstance which he calls not "mind," but"brain." Since hinking s "lonely," here is nobond between one human being and another;only one’s own go is real, other people’s, atbest, are an abstraction.

Even he doctrine of Art for Art’s sake--revived by Benn under he guise of Artistik--corresponds to the general process of frag-mentation it is work n a vacuum f unreality."Works of art," according to Benn, "are

phenomena, istorically ineffective, withoutpractical consequences. hat s their greatness"and"Artistik s the attempt of Art to experienceitself as a meaning ithin the general decay ofall meaning, nd o form a new tyle out of thisexperience; t is the attempt of Art to opposethe general nihilism of values with a new kindof transcendence, he transcendence f creativepleasure. Seen in this way, the conceptembraces ll the problems f Expressionism, fabstract art, of anti-humanism, theism, anti-historicism, of cyclicism, of the ’hollow man’rain short, all the problems of the world ofexpression" x95x)-

ThoughBean believes in "absolute prose"and "the absolute poem, the poem withoutfaith, the poem without hope, the poemaddressed to no one, the poem madeof wordswhich you assemble n a fascinating way," hecan lapse into the sentimentality f saying hat"poets are the tears of the nation" (1928).

J~tzcot~ttte~"

Thesewords, significantly, occur in a tributeto a dead friend. A great many of Benn’spoems are addressed to someone, but thissomeones himself; I cannot see that his habitof talking to himself n the second erson makeshis poems ny more absolute than they would

be if he addressed he Muse r a girl friend.As t happens, ne of Bean’s ecent collections,Fragmente ~95~), contains a poem ddressedto someone other than himself; this poem,Blaue Stunde, reads suspiciously like a lovepoem, nd it is one of the best pieces in thecollection.

In the course of the recent interview alreadycited, Benn sserts that "style is superior totruth"--an assertion already implied in hisearlier and more rastic statement hat "God sa bad stylistic principle"; but elsewhere hestates that "God s form." This is one of themany latant self-contradictions that can betraced back to Bean’s egocentric habits ofthought, for the first statement s a criticismof other people’s work, he second defence ofhis own. Once we have become ware of thispeculiar dialectic, his arguments end to cancelone another out. On p. 53 of Ausdrucleswelt(x949), he argues hat the State has no right tocomplain f the damage one by artists as longas it wageswars hat kill off three million menn

the space of three years; on page xo7he writes:"In my opinion, the West is not being des-troyed by the totalitarian systems r the crimesof the SS, nor by its material impoverishmentor its Gottwalds and Molotovs, but by thedog-like grovelling of its intellectuals beforepolitical concepts." As above, in the firstinstance Bean s thinking of intellectuals likehimself under a r~gime hostile to them, n thesecond f intellectuals unlike himself n ratherdifferent circumstances. The real question--whether r not writers are responsible or whatthey write--has been clumsily evaded n bothcases; the importance attached to their"grovelling" in the second instance wouldsuggest hat they are responsible f their viewsare different from Belm’S.

B~Nta, of course, has had his share of mis-fortune; rather more han his share, per-haps, to judge by his attitude. "As an example



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of this generation," he writes in the preface toAusclruckswett. "I mention my own family:three of my brothers fell on the batdefield, afourth was se.riously wounded wice, the restwere totally bombed out, lost everything. Myfirst cousin, the writer Joachim Ben_n, fell inthe battle of the Somme, is only son in the lastwar; of this branch of the family nothingremains. I myself was continually on activeservice as a doctor in the following years : I914to I918, x939 to ~944- My wife died in ~945in immediate connection with the events of thewar." It is strange that Benn should choose toprovide this information in the preface to awork in which he elaborates his anti-humanismand surveys the Nazi rtgime without troublingabout any of its victims except a certain type of

artist remarkably like himself. Judged by hisown tandards, his family’s ate is of no accountif one sympathises, one must reject Bemx’sstandards. Though he mentions his family as amere "example" of his generation, no exampleis called for at all; and Benn s sufficiently aufait with statistics to have found a differentexample if he had cared to look for one. Imention this only because the question ofsympathy arises frequently over Benn’s proseworks, strange mixture of fact and fantasy,speculation and self-confession that they are;

and it is peculiarly irritating to be asked forsympathy on one page, only to have it violendyrejected on the next, when he pervading moodof cynical or stoical toughness akes over froma passing mawkish ne.

In this same indictment of National Social-ism (written in ~94I, published in ~949), Bennconfines himself o criticising its lack of" style"and its lack of sympathy for the independentartist; never once does he suggest that this lackof style may be connected with fear and hatredof the truth and with a dual morality notaltogether different from his own. This, ofcourse, would be to criticise some of his ownpremises ; and Benn simply will not admit thepossibility that he himself could ever have beenin the wrong. Writing of Berlin in x947, hedescribes the rttined city, its starving popula-tion, and the luxuries imported by the occupa-tion forces ; and goes on : "... The populationlooks on greedily through the windows:

Poetry of Gottfried Benn 55

culture is advancing again, little murder, moresong and rhythm. Inwardly, too, the defeatedare well provided for: a transatlantic bishoparrives and murmurs my brothers ;--a human-ist appears and chants: the Occident ;--a tenorwheedles O lovely Art--the reconstruction of

Europe s in progress."Gottfried Benn’s attitude has not changed

since the twenties when he wrote:

die Massengliickesindschon r?inennah,bald st die Liickefiir die Trance a

mass leasures, mass oyare close o tears,already a gap dearsfor trance to break

throughApart from the modern vocabulary, this is the"aristocratic" attitude struck by so many ofthe x9th century ~esthetes in defiance of a

bourgeois ociety still smugly ecure ; this was agood reason for being provocative. To adoptthe same attitude to Berlin in ~947 is neitheroriginal nor interesting; it is merely one ofmany occasions where a shoddy philosophycauses Benn to lapse into bad taste--and itshows up the puerility of his claim that "styleis superior to truth." Benn is Baudelaire’sdandy up-to-date ; he also"ne sortjamais de soi-mbne." But the dandy was only one ofBaudelaire’s personae; Baudelaire was also the"homme es foules" who could lose himself inothers and complete himself. Benn’s chieflimitation is that nearly all his thinking isdetermined by a reaction against one thing oranother--against iterary or ideological fashions,against the vulgar or against his own mpulsesbut reaction is only a different sort of depend-ence. To be always sneering at the vulgar is asort of vulgarity.

With few exceptions, then--the essay onGoetheand he Natural Sciences is an outstandingone--Benn’s critical writings are not anexploration of other minds, but comments onhis own practice and justifications of his ownattitude. The acute self-awareness that goeswith self-division has enabled him to writebrilliandy about the creative process asexperienced by himself (in Probleme der Lyrik,~95x). His belief in "absolute poetry"--that is,in poetry as an end to be pursued for its ownsake, without any didactic intention~has hadthe very positive ¢ffe.c.t. 9f opposing the



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tendency, still very widespread n Germany,to think that poetry s only a matter of express-ing sublime sentiments in regular stanzas.Benn’s "absolute poetry" and "absoluteprose," of course, will never be written; forwords have a habit of conveying meaning, ndBenn makes no allowance for this function.Artistik, in fact, is a fallacy, because whenworkof art is made ublic it has the practicalconsequence of being a means of communi-cation, as well as its essential function f merelyexisting as" Significant Form" and even formis significant, even when weprefer not to sayof what). IfBenn did not wish to communicateanything, he would keep his work o himself;and he would ot bother to explain the creativeprocess o others or to defend his own heories

with such stubborn persistence. Recently hehas even found it necessary to assure hisreaders that he is human y writing an accountof his "dual life" iDoppelleben); here thedifficulty of reconciling his two selves--theconscientious doctor and the amoral artist--has proved insuperable and involved him inarguments oo silly and too casuistic to bearrepetition. Benn himself summed p thedilemmawhenhe said of his generation: "Welived something different from what we were,we wrote something different from what wethought, we hought something different fromwhat we expected, and what remains is some-thing different from what we ntended" x949).

So much or Benn’s heories. In trying to sumthem up, I may have simplified them unduly,encouraged by Benn’s own weakness forepigrams. Preposterous as some of his state-ments may eem, they proceed from premisesimplicit in the work and conduct of many whowould hesitate to adopt Benn’s attitude; itneeds perversity, desperation, and a certain

moral courage--as well as a characteristicallyGerman ddiction to extremes--to push themto their absurd conclusions. Benn, at least,does not pretend that he is on the side of theangels. At the same ime, it is easy to identifycynicism with honesty and hence with truth-fulness this is not a logical progression, or onecan be cynical without being honest, and honestwithout having any capacity for truthfulness.Notso much ecause e prefers style to truth--

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a preference not borne out by his practice andbased on a false antithesis in any case--asbecause of his unhappy relationship withoutward eality, Berm xcels at the aphoristichalf-truth. Stimulating s they often are, Benn’sutterances tend to point back o his own itua-tion; and heir final effect is to make ne feelrather glad that poets are only the unacknow-ledged egislators of humanity.

B~.~rt~’s eliefs, unfortunately, annot e dis-regarded n considering is creative work.Though his achievement, too, is somethingdifferent from what he intended, the greaterpart of his poetry moves within the dialecticof Nihilism. In view of the great value heattaches to Art, one might expect his poetry

to be of the consistently highquality of---say--Mallarm~’s, Val~ry’s, or Stefan George’s; butin fact even Benn’s ~esthetic standards areextraordinarily nreliable. All his collections ofpoetry--but especially the more ecent ones--contain pieces that are not only grosslyinferior to his best work, but simply unformed--cerebral jottings in loose free verse ormechanical hyme hat all tOO learly communi-cate something: t3enn’s preoccupation withhimself and with ideas that are not realisedpoetically. The feebleness of such poems s

Satzbau and Ideelles Weiterleben? from hisrecent collection Fragmente ~95x) has as muchto do with truth as with style; here is a shortextract from he latter :

Dabei lng iiglich so viel bei dir durchIntrovertiert, extrovertiertNahrungssorgen, hewidrigkeit, Steuermoral--mit allem musstest du dich befassen,ein geriittelt Mass on Leben n mancherlei Gestalt...

Yet daily so much passed through youIntroverted, extroverted

money roubles, marriage vexations, tax moral-ity--with all these you had to concern yourself,a full measure of life in many shape...

The reason why hese--and many imilar lines--are feeble is that they say something whichBennwouldnot think worth saying if he tookhimself ess seriously and did not feel himselfto be an isolated ego. Benn’s xcessive elf-pity--unredeemed by pity for others--proceeds



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Art and Nihilism: Thefrom this sense of isolation; it is even moredetrimental to his verse than to his prose. Whatis lacking in such pieces is the true creativeflash; and this creative flash cannot be hadwithout contact, contact with the Muse, withthe anima mundi or whatever we wish to call thereality that fuses with the poet’s consciousness.Bennhimself went to the crux of the matter inthis passage from his preface to Ausdruckswelt,one of the few in which he modifies his earlierviews: "Nihilism as the negation of history,actuality, affirmation of life, is a great quality,but as the negation of reality itself it meansdiminution of the ego."

Ex nihilo nihil; Benn’s state of mind is onewhich could well be utterly uncreative. (I say"state of mind" because to call Nihilism a

philosophy or a creed would be a contradictionin terms.) It is difficult to conceive howanyonecan affirm reality without affirming life, unlessby life he means only some particular manifesta-tion of life, an accepted mode f existence or ahostile environment. The poems of Benn’sbest period, the early twenties, include manythat are almost excellent, but only a few areproof against the intrusion of irrelevant ideasand inessential "phenomena." These ideas maybe expressed in words specially minted byBenn; but this does not prevent them from

being slogans, superior and clever ones, butabstract and therefore unpoetic. I am hinking ofsuch new compound ords as Bewusstseinstr?fger(consciousness-bearer), Satzbordell (sentencebrothel) and Tierschutzmdzene (Maecenases ofthe tLSPCA) or of technical terms such asSelbsterreger (auto-exciter). The intrusionthese words reduces much of Benn’s mostoriginal work to the level of intellectualjournalism; they stand for something thathas not been experienced, but thought out.

They are cerebral without being drunken (thephrase trunken cerebral occurs in one of thesepoems). Like all slogans, they are either lies orhalf-truths; and they spring from a conscious-ness divided against itself.

It is this basic self-division that assumes heguise of a conflict between inward and out-ward reality, between subject and object.When he conflict becomes oo acute, the mindcries out for it~ own dissolution or for the

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destruction of the world. In the poems of thisperiod, Benn more frequendy dwells on thesecond possibility; but the two, of course, arecomplementary. The strange fact is that whereBeun’s extreme mental stress finds its exactcounterpart in visions of cosmic destruction,his poems become wholly formed and essen-tially positive. The barrier breaks down. Sincecomplete Nihilism is not humanly possible,these very visions become an affirmation oflife, if only of a "biological" force which isindestructible. I shall quote one of Benn’s mostsuccessful poems of this period, from thecollection Spaltung (1925). Like all Berm’s estpoems, t is not really translatable; rough andwholly inadequate as it is, the accompanyingversion must be read only as an aid to the

appreciation of Benn’s own poem:PALA U

"Rot st der Abend uf der Insel yon Palauunddie Schatten inken--"singe, auch us den Kelchen er FrauIdsstes sich rinken,TotenvSgelchreinund die Totenuhrenpochen, ald wird s seinNacht und Lemuren.

Heisse Rifle. Aus Eukalypten ehtTropik und Palmung,was ich noch iilt und teht,will auch Zermalmunghis in das Gliederlos,his in die Leere,tief in den Schb’pfungsschossdiimmernder eere.

rot ist der Abend uf der Insel von Palauund m Schattenschimmerhebt sich steigend aus Diimmer ndTau:" Niemals nd Imrner";alle Tode der WeltsindFiihren nd Furten,

undvon Fremdem mstelltauchdeine Geburten--

einmaImit Opferfettauf dem iniengeriistetriigt sich dein Flammenbettwie Wein ur Kiiste,Megalithen uhaufunddie Grliber nd Hallen,Hammer es Thor im Laufzu den Asen erfallen--



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58wie die GStter ergehnund ie grossen iisaren,yon der Wange es Zeusemporgefahren--singe, wandert ie Weltschon n fremdestem chwunge,schmeckt ns das Charonsgeldliingst unter der Zunge--

Paarung. Dein Meet elebtSepien, Korallen,was uch noch i~’It und chwebt,will auch erfallen,rot ist der Abenduf der nsel yon Palau,Eukalyptenschimmerhebt in Runen us Diimmer nd Tau:Niemalsund Immer.

"Evening s red on the island of Palauand the shadows ink--"sing, from woman’s halices tooit is good o drink,deathly he little owls cryand the death-watch icks outvery soon t will beLemures nd night.

Hot hese reefs. From ucalypti there flowsa tropical palm concoction,all that still holds nd taysalso longs or destructiondowno the limbless stage,dovcn o the vacuum,back o the primal age,dark ocean’s womb.

Evening s red on the island of Palauin the gleam of these shadowsthere issues rising from wilight and dew"Never and Always"all the deaths of the earthare fords and erries,~vhat o you owes ts birth

surrounded with strangeness--

oncewith acrificialfat on the pine-wood looryour bed of flames would ravellike wine o the shore,megaliths heaped aroundand he graves and he halls,hammer f Thor that’s boundfor the Aesir, crumbled, alls--"

~ncounteras the gods urcease,the great Cresars ecline,from he cheek of Zeusonce aised up to reign--sing, already the worldto the strangest rhythm s swung,Charon’s oin, if not curled,long tasted under he tongue--

Coupling. epias your seasand coral animate,all that still holds and waysalso longs o disintegrate,evening s red on the island of Palan,eucalyptus glazeraises in runes from wilight and dew:Never and Always.

It is certainly true to say of this poem hat ittranscends Nihilism, as any sustained creativeact is bound o do; but I believe that Benn smistaken in postulating a creative act thataffirms no values other than ~esthedc ones.This poem would not be successful ifBenn hadnot believed in it while he wrote it--with hissenses, certainly, but with his intellect as well.

Benn’s best poems succeed in spite of hisintentions--because he cannot keep reality outof them. He can be indifferent to the meaningof his poetry and to its impact on others; hecan disclaim responsibility for it on the grounds

that he has no other purpose than to express orto please himself; but he cannot prevent thefragmentary fact and the autonomous imagefrom turning into symbols. He can banish him-self to an island, but he cannot make hat islandvanish from the universe.

In other words, Nihilism is incompatiblewith Art, though it is compatible with manyof those unformed or half-formed productsthat pass for works of art. As Benn’s recentwork shows, poetry cannot go further than--oreven as far as--pure abstraction in painting;the next stage would be the empty canvas andthe blank page, the best possible expressions ofNihilism, and the most honest. The stage afterthat calls for a different sort of courage: thecourage to turn back and, as far as possible, tobegin again with the rudiments. Whether helikes it or not, Benn has entered this stage, astage more difficult than any other. The danger,once more, is reaction, the temptation to fall



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Art and Nihilism:

into a false primitivism r a stale neo-classi-cism. No ~esthedc programme s of any use atthis stage; what s needed s a greater readinessto see, hear, and feel, instead of an arrogantpreoccupation with one’s own hltellect. This,of course, is more easily said than done--

everything s against t; but the alternative isBenn’s progressive erebralisation" carried tothe point where art ends and thought becomesan affliction. If Benn’s iological determinism

The Poetry of Gottfried Benn 59

is right, artists have no more hoice han thedoomed ivilisation to which hey belong; if,as I am sure, it is wrong, Benn’s xplorationswill not have been in vain. No one will wishto follow him all the way; but he has writtenthe "six or eight consummate oems" which

he believes to be all a contemporary yricalpoet can achieve; and, more often than not,even his failures have he fascination of un-inhabitable egions.

Patric Dickinson

Ullswater

Beside he lake the loversHad itched their green tent,And weet they were to seeAs the bright day woundThe hills with shadow.Nowt was ime to go.

O hardly could he bearTo draw her imageFrom ts palace n the lake,And o he held her closeAnd issed her lips in tranceThough hey were both awake.

Then with glad grace they movedAs n a danceTo loose a rope and turn

To ift a peg and urnTo ove’s repeated igure:At last the pole was down

Andall was stowed awayInto the panniersOf their motorbike, ut stillThey could not go. NearbyTwo hildren on a rockCockcrowedo wake he hills,

That stirred and n a flashHad he flesh off their bonesAnd he bones ground o dust;Then hrew them back the voicesOf their own hildren, yearsUnborn. t was ime to go.

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ ORG

art and nihilism, the poetry of gottfried benn

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