Michael Hamburger

Art and Nihilism:

The Poetry of Gottfried Benn
OTTFKIED
BENNSstatus in postwarGermany
is very nearly as high as
T. S. Eliots in post-warEngland
; like
Eliot, Bennis a critic as wellas a poetandhas
done muchto create the taste by which his
workis judged and appredated. But here the
comparison
ends; for whileEliots criticismis a
re-examinationof other poets workand a rediscovery of tradition, most of Bennsis a
direct or indirect commentaryon his own
practice.Asfor his criteria, theyare as different
as possible fromEliots Christian humanism,
being anti-Christian, anti-humanisticand--if
weaccept themat their face value--exclusively
~esthetic. Thoughhe has lately beendescribed
as "one of the grand old menof literary
Europe,"Bennretains all the characteristics of
an enfantterrible. Asa poet, he has beenobliged
to consolidate,if not to retreat from,a position
reachednearlythirty yearsago; but his critical
utterances remain provocative because they
formpart of a lifelong campaign
of aggressive
self-defence. This maybe one reason why
"literary Europe"has not yet endorsed the
Germanvaluation of Bennswork; another is
that his best poetry, by its very nature, is untranslatable.
Thefact that GottfriedBennis alive at all has
somethingto do with his high reputation; for
he is the sole survivor of a generationand a
school of poets whowere doomedto exile,
silence, or early death. Bennwas born in
I886; his first book of poemsappeared in
~9~2, a year that seemsmoreremote to most
4
49

Germansthan to most Englishmen. Of the

leading poets of Benns generation, Georg
Trail, Georg Heym,and Alfred Lichtenstein
have been dead for forty years. It wouldbe
foolish to pretendthat a living writers reputation is not affected by circumstancesof this
kind, largely irrelevant as they are to his work.
Muchof the interest that attaches to Benns
writingsandutterances is the interest aroused
by the sole survivor froma great shipwreck.
present status carmotbe tmderstood
Braswithout
a rather long glance backat the
movement
of whichhe is the last active representative. This movementis Expressionism;
and it dominatedmorethan two decadeswhich
were extraordinarily rich in promise and
excitement.IfI havespokenof doomand shipwreck, it is becauseso muchof this promise
remainedunfulfilled whenthe events of I933
brought Expressionismto a suddenend. It is
true that the movement
wasalready in decline;
and, in a certain sense, it hadbeendoomed
from
the start, because"begotten by despair upon
impossibility." But the banningand dispersal
of its members
hadthe effect of onceagaindisruptingthe continuity of German
literature and
of suppressing the new growth that would
certainly havefollowedthis organicdecline.
The years between I914 and ~933 were a
period of astonishing activity in German
literature; there wassuch a wealthof talent
and originality that it is no exaggerationto
speakof a literary renaissance.Thecomparison

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50

Encounter

with an earlier Germanrenaissance, the Sturm

istic" because the poets real aim is to communicate his sense of the absurd and the incongruous.
und Drangof the I8th century, is especially apt;
for this, too, was essentially a movementof
The meaning and the irony are in the juxtayoung men, revolutionary in its impetus and
position of the various descriptive fragments
its aims, but destined to deteriorate as its mem- that make up the poem.
bers matured. The moreprolific of the ExpresIn some of his other poems, Lichtenstein
sionists thought nothing of publishing three
introduces a persona, KunoKohn,and qualifies
volumesof verse within a year; this, in itself,
his statements with" if, .... but," and" perhaps"
is neither a fault nor a virtue, but it is sympto- ("a fair-haired poet maybe going mad"). One
matic of the feverish energy that possessed the
thinks of the early Imagists--active in England
whole generation; and it helps to explain why and America at roughly the same time--and
particularly of T. S. Eliots early verse. Whatso muchof their output has been, conveniently,
ever it may owe to such commonancestors as
but often unjustly, forgotten. There was no
1Limbaud, Laforgue, and Corbi~re, Lichtenlack of goodcraftsmanship; it is the strident
steins irony, like Eliots, is a considerable
pitch of so much Expressionist poetry that
advance on that of any earlier poet; though
makesit hard to bear; and its sheer quantity
not free from the self-mockery, familiar since
that makesit hard to evaluate.
Heine and Musset, which is the intellects
Literary Expressionism is usually taken to
have begun in 1911 with the publication of two _ revenge on the heart, he uses irony to mocka
wholecivilisation, and this without recourse to
poems, Weltende by Jakob van Hoddis and
direct statement. This is one of the early
Ddmmerungby Alfred Lichtenstein. Weltende
varieties of Expressionism
; it is close to caricawas the first to appear and Lichtenstein admitted having used it as a model, though he
ture, but also asserts a newfreedomof association.
rightly claimed to have improved on it. Both
Lichtensteins ironic detachmentis far from
poemsare rhymedand in regular stanza form.
characteristic of the movementas a whole; but
What was new about them was that they
the titles of these two poems made history:
consisted of nothing more than an arbitrary
Lichtensteins Ddmmerung
because it reappeared
concatenation of images taken from contemin
the
title
of
an
important
anthology of I92o,
porary life. Theypresented a picture, but not a
Menscheitsddmmerung,
with the significant differrealistic one, for the perspective was distorted
ence that his ambiguous dusk had becomethe
and the objects depicted were not such as
"dawnof a new humanity," as the introductory
can normally be found together in the
manifesto makesall too clear ; HoddisWeltende
same place and at the same time; they were a
because it initiated that abuse of the cosmic
kind of collage. Hoddiscould not resist giving
which led to a gradual inflation in the verbal
the show away in the tifle--"End
of the
currency of Expressionism. Soon it ceased to
World"--an exaggeration all the more blatant
because so inappropriate to his ironic choice of
matter greatly whether a poet predicted the end
disasters. (E.g. "most people have a cold" and
of the world or a new humanity; both were
the stock-in-trade of every poetaster. This is the
"all the railway trains are falling off the
chief reason why the years between I914 and
bridges. ") In Lichtensteins poem,on the other
hand, the imagesare left to speakfor themselves; 1933--the Expressionist period proper--prohis tide is ambiguous, since the Germanword duced less work of lasting value than the years
immediately preceding the First World War.
"Ddmmerung"can mean both dawn and dusk;
The best of the youngpoets active before I914,
but it is clear from the poem that he means
dusk. If his dusk is a cosmic one, he neither
Georg Trakl, Georg Heym,and Ernst Stadler,
says nor implies that it is. He makesno attempt
did not belong to any movementor subscribe
to explain the presence in his poemof two men to any programme, though they were later
walking across a field, the "fat boy playing
included among the Expressionists.
Their
prophecies of renewal or destruction were their
with a pond" or the mandescribed as" sticking
own; and physically their worldwas still intact,
to a window."The description is "expression-

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Art and Nihilism: The Poetry of Gottfried Benn

evenif they found it spiritually uninhabitable.
It is worth noting that their most vivid evocations of war were written before the event:
GeorgHeymsvision of destruction, Der Krieg,
in 1911; Ernst Stadlers DerAufbruch,in which
he welcomeswar because it offers a hope of
change, in 1913. (Stadlers English contemporary, T. E. Hulme,had a similar attitude to war,
though based on different premises.)

OTTFRIED
BENNS first poems belong to
this early phase of Expressionism; and his
later developmentwas strongly influenced, not
to say determined, by a reaction against the
excesses of the later Expressionists, but especially against that desperate optimismwhich took
the form of political utopias. Gifted as he was,
even Franz Werfel has an embarrassing habit of
buttonholing his fellow men to assure them of
his love; but the worst offender was J.
Becher (born 1891), as frantic as he was
prolific in those years. (Thoughanother survivor, Becher has become a CommunistParty
manand has long ceased to write poemsin any
other capacity.) It must be mentioned in this
connection that Benn reacted only against the
dominantpolitical ideology, that of the Left;
in two essays of 1932 and 1933 he welcomed
the extremists of the Right and tried to reconcile Expressionismwith the new ideology. The
gesture was not appreciated; Expressionism
had already been condemned as "degenerate
art." In 1937 Gottfried Bennhimself was forbidden to publish and finally took refuge from
his persecutors in the National Socialist Party
by joining the Medical Corps of the Army(for
which he had originally been trained, before
going into private practice in Berlin as a
specialist in skin and venereal diseases). It was
then that Benn, always ready to makea virtue
of necessity, coined his famousdescription of
the Armyas "the aristocratic form of emigration." As the aphorism implies, Benn had
changed his mind about the Nazis. As for his
conception of aristocracy, this will become
clear whenI cometo deal with his beliefs in
general.
I have deliberately refrained from defining
Expressionism; for the work of those poets
either actively or posthumouslyassociated with

5~

the movementis so various that there is no

point in reducing their practice to a single
formula. Lichtensteins ironic collage has already
been described.
Georg Heym and Georg
Trald were visionary poets whose strength was
their lack of irony; whereas Heymwrote in
strictly regular stanzas modelled on those of
Stefan George, Trald wrote mostly in a form of
free verse that owes much to H/51derlins
classical cadences. Both used little imagerythat
was specifically modern, for their poetry is
symbolic rather than descriptive. Ernst Stadler
wrote in long irregular lines adapted from Walt
Whitman,rarely in stanza form, but rhymed;
much of his imagery is derived from modern
urban life, for he remained closer to certain
of his predecessors in the Naturalist movement.
In these early years it wasan older poet, August
Stramm (1879-I915),
who produced the
wildest experiments in diction, syntax, and
metric. Whennecessary, he coined new words
to convey states of mind never before expressed; these, unlike the neologisms of
Gottfried Benn, were not cerebral but emotive,
purely expressive sounds, onomatopc~ic or
ptm-like. I shall quote his short poemSckwermut,
though one of his more conventional pieces,
because his work tells us so muchabout the
period of Benns formative years:
SchreitenStreben
Lebensehnt
SchauernStehen
Blickesuchen
Sterbenwlichst
Das Kommen
Schreit!
Tief
Stummen
Wir

Stridingstriving
Living longs
Shudderingstanding
Glanceslook for
Dying grows
The coming
Screams
!
Deeply
We
Dumb

This poem contains no visual images, no

adjectives, and only a single adverb. (The word
corresponding to "dumb"is used neologistically as a verb.) It describes nothing but an inwardstate; but whereasLichtenstein--and, in a
very different way, Trald---expresses an inward
state by projecting it into an outward scene,
here there is no reference to any recognisable
object, person or place. Stramm suppresses
outward reality, so that his poemconveysonly

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~2

Encounter

movement,
an inwardgesture; it is an abstract
pattern that correspondsto his inwardstate.
In his first poems,Gotffried Bennused a
realistic techniquefor an expressionisticpurpose-to conveydisgust. In someof his later
works---especiallythose of his middleperiod-he cameas close as anypoet to pure abstraction;
outwardreality, in those poems,providesonly
fragments which the poet assembles into a
pattern. Onemustbeware,of course, of applying the terms of graphic art to poetry; and I
have avoideddrawingparallels betweenindividual poets andgraphicartists. Butduringthe
Expressionistperiod, literature and the visual
arts were uncommonly,
perhaps unhealthily,
dose to each other. Kokoschkawrote Expressionist plays, Ernst Barlach both novels and
plays. Veryloosely, the distinction between
abstraction and projection (or distortion) can
be applied to both arts. Suchartists as Klee-not to mentionPicasso--usedboth abstraction
and projection for different purposes;and the
unstable relationship between outward and
inward reality is what distinguishes every
modernmovementin art and poetry. Benns
hatred of the outside world wassuch that he
attempted the complete disruption of this
relationship. Hehas therefore donehis best to
avoid all the recognised symbols, especially
those associated with religion, as these would
haveservedto relate his workto the universal
truths whichhe denies.

scending of Nihilism," and this is done by

setting up newvalues to take their place-muchas Nietzschespokeof the " revaluation of
all values." Bennbelieves that Nihilismis the
inevitable frameof mindof all those Europeans
of the present age whohave the courage to
think; he nevertires of expressinghis contempt
for those who"pretend" that the old values
are moretenablethan their substitutes, suchas
his ownblend of scientific determinismand
~esthetidsm. The reasons he gives for this
determinism are partly biological, partly
psychological--though
he does not care for the
word--andpartly historical or political; he is
convincedthat "the white peoples are at the
stage of egress, no matter whetherthe theories
about their decline are consideredvalid today
or not .... The race has becomeimmobile,it
remains fixed around its kernel, and this
kernel is intellect, that is to say Nihilism."
Here, as elsewhere,he simplyequatesNihilism
with a highly developedconsciousness.
Benngoes one stage further than Nietzsche:
"Whatdistinguishes the situation of the manof
~94o--the manconcerned with intellectual
questions and deductions--from Nietzsches
situationis, aboveall, that he has brokenoffrelations with the public andwith that pedagogiccum-political sphere whichNietzschesworks,
especially those of the eighties, passionately
cultivated." In a section of his Ausdruckswelt
(I949) headed "Pessimism,"Bennelaborates
on this themeof intellectual isolation: "Men
ENNS
premisesgo backto two definitions
are not lonely, but thinkingis lonely. It is true
by Nietzschewhichhe is fond of quoting: that menare closely surroundedwith mournful
"The world as an msthetic phenomenon"and
things, but manytake part in this mourning
"Art as the last metaphysicalactivity within and it is popular with everyone.But thinking
EuropeanNihilism." Gotffried Bermaccepts
is ego-boundand solitary." This, of course,
this EuropeanNihilism as one accepts the
dependson howonethinks ; but for Bennthere
weather. In a recent interviewhe said : "When is no question of any other kind of thought.
announcingyour visit, you promisednot to
All his theories, whether~esthetic,metaphysical,
ask me whether Im a Nihilist. Indeed, the
or political, derive fromhis senseof the disquestion is just as meaninglessas to ask me harmonybetweeninward and outwardreality.
whetherIm a skater or a stampcollector. For "That whichlives is somethingother than that
the importantthing is whatone makesof ones whichthinks," is howhe formulatesthis basic
Nihilism." Though it is not always dear
dichotomy.
exacdy what Benn meansby Nihilism, more
Fromthe start, Bermsthinkingwasanalytical
often than not he uses the term to denote the
rather than synthetic; while his contemporary
negationof all absolute values; but, in later
Trail wrote of the "imageof man," he wrote
years especially, he speaksalso of the "tranof the bodyof manon the dissecting table.

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Art and Nihilism: The Poetry of Gottfried Benn

The bitterness of his early poem,Lovely Childhood, * is that of disillusionment; it contains no
symbolism, though perhaps an implicit comparison with a poetic subject, the death of
Ophelia:
The mouthof a girl whohad long lain amongthe
reeds looked gnawedaway.
Asthe breast wascut open,the gullet showedfull of
holes.
Finally in a cavity belowthe diaphragm
a nest of youngrats wasdiscovered.
Onelittle sister lay dead.
Theothers thrived on liver and kidneys,
drankthe cold bloodand
enjoyeda lovely childhoodhere.
Andsweetand swift cametheir death also :
Theywereall throwninto the water together.
Oh,howthe little muzzlessqueaked!
There is a certain twisted sentimentality about
Negros Bride, af another of these early poems;
as in most attempts at realism in lyrical poetry,
the descriptive details are deceptive, for they
serve to convey and arouse an emotion not at
all intrinsic to the"phenomenon"
described :
Thenthere lay beddedon cushionsof dark blood
the very fair neck of a white woman.
Thesun wasfurious with her hair
andslobberedher the length of her thighs
and knelt moundher somewhat
darker breasts,
undisfiguredyet by vice and birth.
Anigger next to her: his eyes and forehead
mangledby a horses hoof. Hebored
twotoes of his filthy left foot
into the inside of her smallwhiteear.
She, however,lay andslept like a bride :
on the vergeof her happiness,her first love,
and just as thoughon her wayto manyascensions
of her youthful warmblood.
Until in her,
deepin her whitethroat, they sankthe blade
and a rich purple apronof deadblood
wasthrownaroundher hips.
This was the given reality--because Benn
bad chosen to be a doctor; but of course there
was no more need for him to write about
corpses than for T. S. Eliot to write about
"Schiine Jugend"from Morgue(1912). Translated by Babette Deutsch and A. Yarmolinsky:
ContemporaryGermanPoetry. John Lane. 1923.
af "Negerbraut."Translatedby EdgarLohnerand
Cid Corman.WakeNo. I2, NewYork, 1953.

53

bank balances. It is not a question of what we

know, but of how we place the things we
know; whether, nihilistically,
we see the
phenomenonas isolated or as part of a larger
reality which includes our ownconsciousness.
Akeadya few years later, in his very personal
prose pieces written during the First World
War, Bennreacted against this given reality
in a mannerthat was correspondingly extreme :
outward reality suddenly ceased to exist.
Bennshero, the doctor l~Snne, indulges in day
dreams, ~esthetic and erotic fantasies wholly
divorced from his ownsituation. His ambition
now is "to look for forms and bequeath himself." In an autobiographical sketch of 1934,
Benn admits that the character of R6nne is
based on his own; we should have guessed as
much,as Bennhas rarely written about anyone
but himself. This is howhe describes lk~Snne
in retrospect: "The year 1914/15 in Brussels
was enormous, it was then that K~Snne was
created, the doctor, the flagellant of individual
objects, the bare vacuumof facts, 1L~Snnewho
could not bear any reality, nor take any in, who
knew only the rhythmic opening and shutting
of the ego and the personality." In the same
sketch Benn wrote of himself that "he was
never free fromthis trance that there is no such
thing as reality."
Benns developmentafter 1914is a perpetual
struggle between his ego and the external
world. Total reality had been disposed of; all
that remained was the isolated fact and the
autonomousfantasy, the two principal components of his later poetry and prose.
passage describes howK/Snne
T I~firstfollowing
succumbs
to the fasdnation of facts :
Now,there wasa picture on the wall: a cowin a
meadow.A cowin a meadow,he thought, a round,
browncow,the sky and a field. Ah,whatineffable
bliss that picture gavehim.Thereit stands on four
legs, one, two, three, four legs, this is not to be
denied; it standson four legs in a meadow
of grass,
lookingat three sheep, one, two, three sheep--the
number!HowI love numbers, theyre so hard,
theyre so inviolable fromeveryside, they bristle
with unassailability, theyre quite unambiguous,
it
wouldbe ludicrous to fred fault with themin any
way ....

R~Snne, though a scientist,

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seems to be

J~tzcot~ttte~"
unawarethat numbersare symbols; and the
fact that these animalsappearona paintingdoes
not lead himto questiontheir formalfunction.
Heprefers to treat themas facts. This peculiar
and deliberate short-sightednesssuggeststhat
Bennis right in calling himselfa"pheno-type,"
that is, a representativeof the mentalityof the
age. Onecan see the samedivision at workin
the modem
cult of statistics for statistics sake-facts in a vacuumof unreality. AndBenns
anti-humanism--which
results from a similar
refusal to see the wholereflected in the part-is precisely that of the moderntotalitarian
states, to whom
humanbeings are either useful
commoditiesor" phenomena"that lend themselves to interesting experiments.In the even
more"realistic" poemsthat followedMorgue,
Benn sees humanbeings as so much meat
which, while alive, is also invested with a
substance which he calls not "mind," but
"brain." Sincethinkingis "lonely,"there is no
bond between one humanbeing and another;
only ones ownego is real, other peoples, at
best, are an abstraction.
Eventhe doctrine of Art for Arts sake-revived by Bennunderthe guise of Artistik-corresponds to the general process of fragmentation: it is workin a vacuum
of unreality.
"Works of art," according to Benn, "are
phenomena,historically ineffective, without
practicalconsequences.
Thatis their greatness";
and"Artistikis the attemptof Art to experience
itself as a meaningwithin the general decayof
all meaning,andto forma newstyle out of this
experience;it is the attemptof Art to oppose
the general nihilism of values with a newkind
of transcendence,the transcendenceof creative
pleasure. Seen in this way, the concept
embracesall the problemsof Expressionism,of
abstract art, of anti-humanism,
atheism, antihistoricism, of cyclicism, of the hollowman
rain short, all the problemsof the world of
expression"(x95x)ThoughBean believes in "absolute prose"
and "the absolute poem, the poemwithout
faith, the poem without hope, the poem
addressed to no one, the poemmadeof words
whichyou assemblein a fascinating way," he
can lapse into the sentimentalityof sayingthat
"poets are the tears of the nation" (1928).

Thesewords,significantly, occur in a tribute

to a dead friend. A great manyof Benns
poemsare addressed to someone, but this
someone
is himself; I cannotsee that his habit
of talking to himselfin the secondpersonmakes
his poemsany more absolute than they would
be if he addressedthe Museor a girl friend.
Asit happens,oneof Beansrecent collections,
Fragmente(~95~), contains a poemaddressed
to someoneother than himself; this poem,
Blaue Stunde, reads suspiciously like a love
poem,and it is one of the best pieces in the
collection.
In the courseof the recent interviewalready
cited, Bennasserts that "style is superior to
truth"--an assertion already implied in his
earlier andmoredrastic statementthat "Godis
a bad stylistic principle"; but elsewherehe
states that "Godis form." This is one of the
manyblatant self-contradictions that can be
traced back to Beans egocentric habits of
thought, for the first statementis a criticism
of other peopleswork,the seconda defenceof
his own. Oncewe have becomeaware of this
peculiar dialectic, his arguments
tend to cancel
one another out. On p. 53 of Ausdrucleswelt
(x949), he arguesthat the State has no right to
complainof the damagedoneby artists as long
as it wageswarsthat kill off threemillionmenin
the spaceof three years; on pagexo7he writes:
"In myopinion, the West is not being destroyedby the totalitarian systemsor the crimes
of the SS, nor by its material impoverishment
or its Gottwalds and Molotovs, but by the
dog-like grovellingof its intellectuals before
political concepts." As above, in the first
instance Beanis thinkingof intellectuals like
himself undera r~gimehostile to them,in the
secondof intellectuals unlike himselfin rather
different circumstances. Thereal question-whetheror not writers are responsiblefor what
they write--has been clumsily evadedin both
cases; the importance attached to their
"grovelling" in the second instance would
suggestthat they are responsibleif their views
are different fromBelmS.
of course, has had his share of misB~Nta,
fortune; rather morethan his share, perhaps, to judge by his attitude. "Asan example

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Art and Nihilism:

The Poetry

of this generation," he writes in the preface to

Ausclruckswett. "I mention my own family:
three of mybrothers fell on the batdefield, a
fourth was se.riously woundedtwice, the rest
were totally bombedout, lost everything. My
first cousin, the writer JoachimBen_n, fell in
the battle of the Somme,
his only son in the last
war; of this branch of the family nothing
remains. I myself was continually on active
service as a doctor in the followingyears : I914
to I918, x939 to ~944- Mywife died in ~945
in immediateconnection with the events of the
war." It is strange that Bennshould choose to
provide this information in the preface to a
work in which he elaborates his anti-humanism
and surveys the Nazi rtgime without troubling
about any of its victims except a certain type of
artist remarkably like himself. Judged by his
ownstandards, his familysfate is of no account;
if one sympathises, one must reject Bemxs
standards. Thoughhe mentions his family as a
mere "example" of his generation, no example
is called for at all; and Bennis sufficiently au
fait with statistics to have found a different
example if he had cared to look for one. I
mention this only because the question of
sympathyarises frequently over Benns prose
works, strange mixture of fact and fantasy,
speculation and self-confession that they are;
and it is peculiarly irritating to be asked for
sympathyon one page, only to have it violendy
rejected on the next, whenthe pervading mood
of cynical or stoical toughnesstakes over from
a passing mawkishone.
In this same indictment of National Socialism (written in ~94I, published in ~949), Benn
confineshimselfto criticising its lack of" style"
and its lack of sympathyfor the independent
artist; never oncedoes he suggest that this lack
of style maybe connected with fear and hatred
of the truth and with a dual morality not
altogether different from his own. This, of
course, would be to criticise someof his own
premises ; and Bennsimply will not admit the
possibility that he himself could ever have been
in the wrong. Writing of Berlin in x947, he
describes the rttined city, its starving population, and the luxuries imported by the occupation forces ; and goes on : "... The population
looks on greedily through the windows:

of Gottfried

Benn

55

culture is advancingagain, little murder, more

song and rhythm. Inwardly, too, the defeated
are well provided for: a transatlantic bishop
arrives and murmurs: mybrothers ;--a humanist appears and chants: the Occident ;--a tenor
wheedles: O lovely Art--the reconstruction of
Europeis in progress."
Gottfried Benns attitude has not changed
since the twenties when he wrote:
die Massengliicke masspleasures,massjoy
sindschontr?inennah,are closeto tears,
baldist dieLiicke
already a gap dears
for trance to break
fiir die Trance
da
through
Apart from the modernvocabulary, this is the
"aristocratic" attitude struck by so manyof
the x9th century ~esthetes in defiance of a
bourgeoissociety still smuglysecure ; this wasa
good reason for being provocative. To adopt
the same attitude to Berlin in ~947 is neither
original nor interesting; it is merely one of
many occasions where a shoddy philosophy
causes Benn to lapse into bad taste--and it
showsup the puerility of his claim that "style
is superior to truth." Benn is Baudelaires
dandyup-to-date ; he also"ne sortjamais de soimbne." But the dandy was only one of
Baudelaires personae; Baudelaire was also the
"hommedes foules" whocould lose himself in
others and complete himself. Benns chief
limitation is that nearly all his thinking is
determined by a reaction against one thing or
another--againstliterary or ideological fashions,
against the vulgar or against his ownimpulses;
but reaction is only a different sort of dependence. To be always sneering at the vulgar is a
sort of vulgarity.
With few exceptions, then--the essay on
Goetheandthe NaturalSciences is an outstanding
one--Benns critical
writings are not an
exploration of other minds, but commentson
his ownpractice and justifications of his own
attitude. The acute self-awareness that goes
with self-division has enabled him to write
brilliandy about the creative process as
experienced by himself (in Problemeder Lyrik,
~95x). His belief in "absolute poetry"--that is,
in poetry as an end to be pursued for its own
sake, without any didactic intention~has had
the very positive ffe.c.t. 9f opposing the

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56

Encounter

tendency, still very widespreadin Germany,

to think that poetryis only a matterof expressing sublime sentiments in regular stanzas.
Benns "absolute poetry" and "absolute
prose," of course, will never be written; for
wordshave a habit of conveyingmeaning,and
Bennmakesno allowance for this function.
Artistik, in fact, is a fallacy, becausewhena
workof art is madepublic it has the practical
consequence of being a meansof communication, as wellas its essentialfunctionof merely
existing as" Significant Form"(and evenform
is significant, evenwhenweprefer not to say
of what). IfBenndid not wish to communicate
anything, he wouldkeep his workto himself;
andhe wouldnot bother to explain the creative
processto others or to defendhis owntheories
with such stubborn persistence. Recently he
has even found it necessary to assure his
readers that he is humanby writing an account
of his "dual life" iDoppelleben); here the
difficulty of reconciling his two selves--the
conscientious doctor and the amoralartist-has proved insuperable and involved him in
argumentstoo silly and too casuistic to bear
repetition. Benn himself summedup the
dilemmawhenhe said of his generation: "We
lived somethingdifferent from whatwe were,
we wrote something different from what we
thought, wethought somethingdifferent from
what we expected, and what remains is something different fromwhatweintended"(x949).
So muchfor Bennstheories. In trying to sum
themup, I mayhave simplified themunduly,
encouraged by Benns own weakness for
epigrams.Preposterousas someof his statements mayseem, they proceed from premises
implicit in the workand conductof manywho
wouldhesitate to adopt Benns attitude; it
needs perversity, desperation, and a certain
moralcourage--aswell as a characteristically
Germanaddiction to extremes--to push them
to their absurd conclusions. Benn,at least,
does not pretend that he is on the side of the
angels. At the sametime, it is easy to identify
cynicismwith honesty and hence with truthfulness; this is nota logicalprogression,
for one
can be cynical withoutbeing honest, and honest
without havingany capacity for truthfulness.
Notso muchbecausehe prefers style to truth--

a preferencenot borneout by his practice and

based on a false antithesis in any case--as
because of his unhappyrelationship with
outwardreality, Bermexcels at the aphoristic
half-truth. Stimulatingas they often are, Benns
utterances tend to point backto his ownsituation; andtheir final effect is to makeonefeel
rather glad that poets are only the unacknowledgedlegislators of humanity.
beliefs, unfortunately,
cannotbe disB~.~rt~s
regardedin consideringhis creative work.
Thoughhis achievement, too, is something
different from what he intended, the greater
part of his poetry moveswithin the dialectic
of Nihilism. In view of the great value he
attaches to Art, one mightexpect his poetry
to be of the consistentlyhighquality of---say-Mallarm~s,Val~rys,or Stefan Georges;but
in fact even Benns ~esthetic standards are
extraordinarilyunreliable.All his collectionsof
poetry--but especially the morerecent ones-contain pieces that are not only grossly
inferior to his best work,but simplyunformed
--cerebral jottings in loose free verse or
mechanicalrhymethat all tOOclearly communicate something: t3enns preoccupation with
himself and with ideas that are not realised
poetically. The feebleness of such poemsas
Satzbau and Ideelles Weiterleben? from his
recent collection Fragmente
(~95x)has as much
to do with truth as with style; here is a short
extractfromthe latter :
Dabeiglngtiiglich so viel bei dir durch
Introvertiert,extrovertiert
Nahrungssorgen,Ehewidrigkeit, Steuermoral-mit allemmusstestdu dich befassen,
ein geriittelt MassyonLebenin mancherleiGestalt...
Yet daily so muchpassed through you
Introverted, extroverted
moneytroubles, marriage vexations, tax morality-with all these you had to concern yourself,
a full measureof life in manya shape...

Thereason whythese--and manysimilar lines

--are feeble is that they say somethingwhich
Bennwouldnot think worth saying if he took
himselfless seriously and did not feel himself
to be an isolated ego. Bennsexcessiveself-pity
--unredeemedby pity for others--proceeds

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Art and Nihilism: ThePoetry of Gottfried Benn

from this sense of isolation; it is even more
detrimental to his verse than to his prose. What
is lacking in such pieces is the true creative
flash; and this creative flash cannot be had
without contact, contact with the Muse, with
the animamundior whateverwe wish to call the
reality that fuses with the poets consciousness.
Bennhimself went to the crux of the matter in
this passage from his preface to Ausdruckswelt,
one of the few in whichhe modifies his earlier
views: "Nihilism as the negation of history,
actuality, affirmationof life, is a great quality,
but as the negation of reality itself it meansa
diminution of the ego."
Ex nihilo nihil; Benns state of mind is one
which could well be utterly uncreative. (I say
"state of mind" because to call Nihilism a
philosophy or a creed wouldbe a contradiction
in terms.) It is difficult to conceivehowanyone
can affirm reality without affirming life, unless
by life he meansonly someparticular manifestation of life, an accepted modeof existence or a
hostile environment. The poems of Benns
best period, the early twenties, include many
that are almost excellent, but only a few are
proof against the intrusion of irrelevant ideas
and inessential "phenomena."These ideas may
be expressed in words specially minted by
Benn; but this does not prevent them from
beingslogans,superior and clever ones, but
abstract and therefore unpoetic. I amthinking of
such newcompoundwords as Bewusstseinstr?fger
(consciousness-bearer), Satzbordell (sentence
brothel) and Tierschutzmdzene (Maecenases of
the tLSPCA)or of technical terms such as
Selbsterreger (auto-exciter). The intrusion
these words reduces much of Benns most
original work to the level of intellectual
journalism; they stand for something that
has not been experienced, but thought out.
They are cerebral without being drunken (the
phrase trunken cerebral occurs in one of these
poems).Like all slogans, they are either lies or
half-truths; and they spring from a consciousness dividedagainst itself.
It is this basic self-division that assumesthe
guise of a conflict between inward and outward reality, between subject and object.
Whenthe conflict becomestoo acute, the mind
cries out for it~ own dissolution or for the

57

destruction of the world. In the poemsof this

period, Benn more frequendy dwells on the
secondpossibility; but the two, of course, are
complementary.The strange fact is that where
Beuns extreme mental stress finds its exact
counterpart in visions of cosmic destruction,
his poems become wholly formed and essentially positive. The barrier breaks down.Since
complete Nihilism is not humanly possible,
these very visions becomean affirmation of
life, if only of a "biological" force which is
indestructible. I shall quote one of Bennsmost
successful poems of this period, from the
collection Spaltung (1925). Like all Bermsbest
poems,it is not really translatable; rough and
wholly inadequate as it is, the accompanying
version must be read only as an aid to the
appreciation of Benns own poem:
PALA U
"Rotist der Abendaufder Insel yonPalau
unddie Schattensinken--"
singe, auchausdenKelchenderFrau
Idsstes sichtrinken,
TotenvSgel
schrein
unddie Totenuhren
pochen,baldwirdes sein
NachtundLemuren.
HeisseRifle. AusEukalyptengeht
Tropik undPalmung,
wassichnochhiilt undsteht,
will auch Zermalmung
his in dasGliederlos,
his in die Leere,
tief in denSchbpfungsschoss
diimmernder
Meere.
rot ist der Abend
aufder Insel vonPalau
undim Schattenschimmer
hebt sich steigendausDiimmer
undTau:
" NiemalsundImrner";
alle Todeder Welt
sindFiihrenundFurten,
undvon Fremdem
umstellt
auchdeine Geburten-einmaImit Opferfett
aufdemPiniengeriiste
triigt sichdeinFlammenbett
wieWeinzur Kiiste,
Megalithenzuhauf
unddie GrliberundHallen,
Hammer
des Thor im Lauf
zu den Asenzerfallen--

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~ncounter

58
wiedie GSttervergehn
unddie grossen
Ciisaren,
yon der Wangedes Zeus
emporgefahren-singe, wandertdie Welt
schonin fremdestem
Schwunge,
schmecktunsdas Charonsgeld
liingst unterder Zunge-DeinMeetbelebt
Sepien,Korallen,
wassuchnochhi~It undschwebt,
will auchzerfallen,
rot ist derAbend
auf derInsel yonPalau,
Eukalyptenschimmer
hebt in Runenaus DiimmerundTau:
NiemalsundImmer.
Paarung.

"Eveningis red on the island of Palau

and the shadowssink--"
sing, fromwomans
chalices too
it is goodto drink,
deathlythe little owlscry
and the death-watchticks out
very soonit will be
Lemuresand night.
Hotthese reefs. Fromeucalypti there flows
a tropical palmconcoction,
all that still holdsandstays
also longsfor destruction
downto the limbless stage,
dovcnto the vacuum,
backto the primalage,
dark oceans womb.
Eveningis red on the island of Palau
in the gleamof these shadows
there issues rising fromtwilight anddew:
"Never and Always";
all the deathsof the earth
are fordsandferries,
~vhatto youowesits birth
surroundedwith strangeness-oncewithsacrificial
fat on the pine-woodfloor
your bed of flames wouldtravel
like wineto the shore,
megaliths heapedaround
andthe gravesandthe halls,
hammerof Thor thats bound
for the Aesir, crumbled,falls--"

as the godssurcease,
the great Cresarsdecline,
fromthe cheek of Zeus
onceraised up to reign-sing, already the world
to the strangest rhythmis swung,
Charonscoin, if not curled,
long tasted underthe tongue-Coupling.Sepias your seas
and coral animate,
all that still holdsandsways
also longsto disintegrate,
eveningis red on the island of Palan,
eucalyptusglaze
raises in runes fromtwilight and dew:
Never and Always.
It is certainly true to say of this poemthat it
transcends Nihilism, as any sustained creative
act is boundto do; but I believe that Bennis
mistaken in postulating a creative act that
affirms no values other than ~esthedc ones.
This poemwould not be successful ifBenn had
not believed in it while he wrote it--with his
senses, certainly, but with his intellect as well.
Benns best poems succeed in spite of his
intentions--because he cannot keep reality out
of them. He can be indifferent to the meaning
of his poetry and to its impact on others; he
can disclaim responsibility for it on the grounds
that he has no other purpose than to express or
to please himself; but he cannot prevent the
fragmentary fact and the autonomous image
from turning into symbols. He can banish himself to an island, but he cannot makethat island
vanish from the universe.
In other words, Nihilism is incompatible
with Art, though it is compatible with many
of those unformed or half-formed products
that pass for works of art. As Benns recent
work shows, poetry cannot go further than--or
even as far as--pure abstraction in painting;
the next stage would be the empty canvas and
the blank page, the best possible expressions of
Nihilism, and the most honest. The stage after
that calls for a different sort of courage: the
courage to turn back and, as far as possible, to
begin again with the rudiments. Whether he
likes it or not, Bennhas entered this stage, a
stage moredifficult than any other. The danger,
once more, is reaction, the temptation to fall

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Art and Nihilism:

The Poetry of Gottfried

into a false primitivismor a stale neo-classicism. No~esthedcprogramme

is of any use at
this stage; whatis neededis a greater readiness
to see, hear, andfeel, instead of an arrogant
preoccupationwith ones ownhltellect. This,
of course, is more easily said than done-everythingis againstit; but the alternative is
Benns"progressivecerebralisation"carried to
the point whereart ends and thought becomes
an affliction. If Bennsbiological determinism

Benn

is right, artists haveno morechoicethan the

doomed
civilisation to whichthey belong; if,
as I amsure, it is wrong,Bennsexplorations
will not havebeen in vain. Noone will wish
to follow himall the way;but he has written
the "six or eight consummatepoems"which
he believes to be all a contemporarylyrical
poet can achieve; and, moreoften than not,
evenhis failures havethe fascination of uninhabitableregions.

Patric Dickinson

Ullswater
Besidethe lake the lovers
Hadpitched their green tent,
Andsweet they were to see
As the bright day wound
Thehills with shadow.
Nowit wastime to go.
O hardly could he bear
To draw her image
Fromits palacein the lake,
Andso he held her close
Andkissed her lips in trance
Thoughthey were both awake.
Then with glad grace they moved
Asin a dance
To loose a rope and turn

59

Tolift a pegandturn
Toloves repeatedfigure:
At last the pole wasdown
Andall was stowed away
Into the panniers
Of their motorbike,but still
They could not go. Nearby
Twochildren on a rock
Cockcrowed
to wakethe hills,
Thatstirred andin a flash
Hadthe flesh off their bones
Andthe bones groundto dust;
Thenthrew themback the voices
Of their ownchildren, years
Unborn.It wastime to go.

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