The Poetry of Gottfried Benn

Studies in Modern German and Austrian Literature 106 The Poetry of Gottfried Benn Text and Selfhood von Martin Travers 1. Auflage The Poetry of Gottfried Benn – Travers schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2007 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 577 9 Inhaltsverzeichnis: The Poetry of Gottfried Benn – Travers Introduction Gottfried Benn: Text and Selfhood Gottfried Benn was not only one of the greatest German poets of the twentieth century, he was also a central voice within that “metaphys- ical renascence” in the arts that we know as Modernism (Hillebrand, Benn 192–3). Benn not only shared the radical aesthetic of that move- ment, he was also imbued with its characteristic sense of an ending, in which the dislocations of modernity became in their turn both the source of, and critical inspiration for, further energies of intellectual and cultural renewal. This was Benn’s “geistige Problematik” as he himself termed it (2: 306), a complex network of intellectual paradigms that the poet comprehensively explored and refined in a body of theoretical writing, which ranged over a period of forty years from his “Beitrag zur Geschichte der Psychiatrie” (“A Contribution to the History of Psy- chiatry,” 1910) through to “Probleme der Lyrik” (“Problems of the Lyrical Poem,” 1951).1 Any reader who wishes to understand Benn’s oeuvre in its entirety must certainly come to terms with the author’s polyvalent perspectives on the conceptual trajectory of recent Euro- pean history. These included reviews of the pioneering work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Edgar Dacqué, anthropologists who, he believed, had demonstrated the existence of atavistic traces in the mind of modern man, his preoccupation (following the lead of Austrian neurologist, Konstatin Alexander von Economo) with the process of “progressive cerebralization,” and an extended engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose analysis of nihilism framed Benn’s entire thinking.2 It is entirely understandable that the initial studies of the author, which appeared soon after the poet’s death in 1956, should have given priority to Benn’s “geistige Problematik” in their explication of his work.3 To have done otherwise would have been to neglect the conceptual core of Benn’s writing. But such studies did not avoid the 9 dangers that lay within what we might call this “theorist” methodology, such as the temptation simply to read off Benn’s poems and other texts, such as the Rönne novellas of 1914–1917, from, or see them as “examples” of, the discursive positions formulated in the essays.4 Such studies often neglected the fact (or, at least, the possibility of the fact – for this is by no means a consistent matter) that much of Benn’s poetry subverts or at least does not allow itself to be mapped on to the noted conceptual agendas.5 This criticism cor- respondingly tended to overlook those parts of Benn’s verse which appeared to lack an accompanying intellectual infrastructure, such as the late, colloquial writing of Phase II, whose looser form and quotidian projection of self clearly stood at odds with the aesthetic priorities of the “absolute” poem. Above all, where the theorist methodology inexorably (and predictably) led, when explication of Benn’s intellectual development was followed through to the social and political sphere, was to “der Fall Benn”: his trahison des clercs of the years 1933–1934, during which he offered vociferous support for Hitler and the in-coming Nazi state (Wulf 131). This short-lived but crucial act of political commitment became the dominant focus in the 1960s and 1970s, and around it discussions of all of his writing – theoretical and poetic alike – were grouped. Benn’s earlier poetry became disengaged from its moment of origin to be read as an anticipation of his later reactionary Modernism, allowing the distinctive textual properties of his writing to be subsumed into the discursive generalities of an ideological statement.6 The problematic nature of this approach emerged most starkly in the famously divergent readings made by Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács of Benn’s early poem, “Gesänge I” (1913).7 The poem was cited first by Lukács in his Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Against Those Who Misunderstand Realism, published in 1958, and better known in English as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism). Lukács set out in his book to explicate the “ideology” of Modernism, which he equated with a “distortion (a petrification or paralysis) of the human substance” (33). His central argument is that Modernist writers reacted to the ugly and depraved culture of late capitalism by returning to a mindless “primitivism,” a “perverted Rousseauism,” as 10 a way of compensating for their alienation from the processes of modernity (32). As an example of the “perversion and idiocy” involved in such a practice, Lukács cites Benn’s poem: Oh, dass wir unsere Ur-ur-ahnen wären. Ein Klümpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor. Leben und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären Glitte aus unseren stummen Säften vor. Ein Algenblatt oder ein Dünenhügel, vom Wind geformtes und nach unten schwer. Schon ein Libellenkopf, ein Möwenflügel Wäre zu weit und litte schon zu sehr. – (1: 47) Lukács sees in the poem the articulation of a quite unambiguous socio-political philosophy, one that posits the “opposition of man as animal to man as social being” (32). This is a worldview, Lukács argues, which has clear affinities with the reactionary ethos espoused by Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Klages and the Nazi “theorist,” Alfred Rosenberg. All of these promoted (and individual distinctions are not broached) a regressive philosophy that, Lukács assures us, led straight to “a glorification of the abnormal and to an undisguised anti- humanism,” to fascism, in short (32).8 Adorno’s reply, in the form of the essay “Erpreßte Versöhnung” (“Forced Reconciliation”), was published first in a journal in 1958, and then later in his Noten zur Literatur (Notes on Literature, 1961). Here, Adorno accused Lukács of pursuing a naively mimetic and crudely reductionist modus operandi. In particular, he criticized the latter’s “moralistic coloration” of his assessment of the poem, which argues that Benn undermines notions of healthy social and, more pointedly, socialist normalcy. Lukács, Adorno maintains, entirely overlooks the “stylization” of the poem, the way, for example, its montage-like structure and repetitive biologistic terms have the effect of alienating the reader from the apparently regressive sentiments expressed in the poem. Above all, Adorno concludes, Lukács fails to consider “the impulse of the poetic subject [which] presents itself as humorously inauthentic, as part of a melancholy game.” The latter can be seen in the poem as the “grin” that is built into the hyperbolic 11 appellation of our “Ur-ur-ahnen” in the opening line. In short, Lukács overlooks the possibility that Benn is being ironic (272). Adorno was surely right in stressing the complex textual mechanisms through which meaning is constructed in “Gesänge I,” and he might well have made reference to other distancing effects used by Benn, such as the mock pathetic apostrophic “O” of the initial line (the reader hears the exclamation mark rather than sees it), and thematically throughout the text the rhetorical over-determination of the Naturphilosophie of late-Romantic figures such as Ludwig Klages, as further support of his exegesis.9 And yet, Adorno’s argument is not without its own aporia, evident most notably in his assumption that meaning is largely secured within the internal semantic framework of the poem. As Adorno well knew (and demonstrated elsewhere when he was in a less formalistic mode), the communicative act of a poem cannot be read off simply from within its linguistic discourse. It ultimately is the product of a complex semiotic process that consists of text, context and a variety of inter-texts, historical, aesthetic and personal. Lukács’ reading may well have been, in one sense, reductionist; but had it been articulated within a more extensive treatment of the broader intellectual framework of Benn’s writing its conclusions would have been far from spurious. For “Gesänge I” gives voice to a theme that will become increasingly marked in Benn’s work: the notion of “tierische Transzendenz” (“animal transcendence”, 3:453). This the poet defined in a later essay, “Nietzsche nach 50 Jahren” (“Nietzsche after 50 Years,” 1950), as a rediscovery or reconstruction of that “animism of our early selves which, in a magic union with nature and its creative forces in people, comes to be the producer of yet further powers and transformations” (3: 503). This desire to regain contact with the elemental sources of selfhood grows in insistence in Benn’s work throughout the 1920s, reaching its apogee in a number of “anthropological” poems such as “Ostafrika,” “Meer- und Wander- sagen,” “Orphische Zellen” and “Trunkene Flut.” These poems exhort the individual to penetrate beneath the surface of history in order to restore that unity of identity that has been lost as the result of Enlightenment rationality, and hence recapture those eternally present primitive energies that make and remake the universe. Suffering 12 caused by the principium individuationis ceases only when the self finds its way back to the dissolution of selfhood and the reabsorption of the body into the energies of the atavistic mind. That such primitive energies could be recreated in the con- sciousness of modern man, Benn had little doubt. Through his reading of the work of the paleontologist, Edgar Dacqué, such as the latter’s Vergleichende biologische Formenkunde der Fossilen niederen Tiere (1921), and the French ethnologist, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, most notably his L’âme primitive, a study of the tribal customs, rites and ceremonies of the natives of New Guinea, published in 1927, Benn believed that he had clear evidence of the continuing existence of pre- cognitive mental states amongst living peoples.

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