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” method- ology, 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 possibil- ity 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. The findings of Lévy- Bruhl proved that “the soul longs for something deeper than knowledge, a something that might give it totality and consum- mation.” Benn called this pre-logical reality “the dark circle of organic matter” (3: 92), and he found it, following his anthropological mentors, in the cultures of primitive peoples, where such deep regression survives “as the regulation of instinctual drives and the pressure of vegetative life, promiscuous in its effects with incest and polyandrous behaviour and the tones of miscegenation” (3: 92).10 Seen within this broader context, Adorno’s insistence that Benn was simply inflecting his “regressionism” through a purely playful ironic perspective cannot be upheld. It would be more accurate to describe “Gesänge I” as an early statement of a developing personal philosophy that was, in this instance, articulated within the Bürger- schreck idiom cultivated by pre-war German Expressionist poets such as Jakob van Hoddis and Georg Heym, whose poetry merged the extreme, indeed the apocalyptic, with a heightened sense of the grotesque and the promotion (by certain poets) of a neo-primitive vitalism.11 These qualities are all evident in “Gesänge I,” which was first published in February 1913 in the journal Die Aktion, as the central piece of a series of poems known as Alaska. Shortly after Benn’s poem appeared, the poet Paul Boldt was to publish, also in Die Aktion, his “Impression du soir.” It begins: “Die Wälder lechzen. Nacht kommt, sie zu säugen/ Die Kiefern stehen abendrot mit Blüten./ Und wir vom schrillen Weltgefühl Verbrühten/ Blecken die Zähne, röcheln

13 schwarz und äugen” (303). Boldt’s poem certainly lacks the assertive anti-humanism of Benn’s “Gesänge I” that so alienated Lukács; but the two poems share, nevertheless, a common idiom: a depersonalized collective subject, an abrasive position of speech, a neo-logistic angularity and, above all, an anthropomorphic neo-primitivist cross- over between human and natural predicates. In his Alaska series, however, Benn deepens this ethos into a provocative eroticism that goes well beyond the framework of Boldt’s poem, and he does this by adopting multiple personae: the anonymous collective in poem I of the series, the wounded religious apostate in poem II, the lover of the prostitute in III, the strangely androgynous lyrical subject of IV, the isolated misogynistic voice of V; all proceed the pathetic-regressionist collective “wir” of “Gesänge I.”12 The entire Alaska series is, in fact, a paeon upon sexual reproduction and, more pointedly, upon the role of the male principle and the phallus in this process that, through the trope “Männerblut,” usurps the fecundity of the female.13 The primal world described here is a realm governed by a visceral ontology of “Frühling: Samen, Schwangerschaft und Durcheinandertreiben” (1: 45). Within the Alaska sequence, “Gesänge I” is the central text because here human individuation has left the scene entirely (hence Adorno’s apposite Schopenhaurian reference). It is submerged in an ens realissima of “Leben und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären,” an essentialist philosophy that makes its impact through a syntagma of assertive substantives and its very paratactic simplicity.14 To understand fully Benn’s poetry, it is, therefore, essential to remain alive to the relationship between the fluid textuality of his poems, the intellectual values that inform them, and the complex personae and positions of speech, with their own fissures, tensions and points of conflict, that they articulate. Benn himself would have supported such an approach. In his autobiography, Doppelleben (Double Life), published in 1949, the poet pointed to the value of the discontinuity of identity, showing himself acutely, but positively, aware of the multi-layered nature of selfhood, and its relevance to the product of his art. As he noted there: “double-life, as I have led it in both a theoretical and practical sense, involves a conscious splitting of the personality, a process that is systematic and tendentious” (2: 451).

14 The notion was aesthetic, anthropological and, ultimately, political, the result of a systematic process of self-inquiry, of a developing Selbstverständnis, in which the kernel, the shell, not a self but selves, came to be constructed and deconstructed. The intellectual history of this notion Benn had already explicated in an early essay of 1920, “Das Moderne Ich” (“The Modern Self”). Here he explained that, after a generation of destabilizing theoretical initiatives made by Bergson, Dilthey and Freud, selfhood has now come to be regarded as a site of pure fragmentation. It is an unstable something, which (as Benn argued elsewhere) “survives on loss, frigidity, isolation from the centre, [and is] without psychological continuity, without biography, without a centrally viewed history” (3: 453). As Benn argues in “Das Moderne Ich,” as a result of its loss of totality in the modern period (and he lays bare in detail the scientific and philosophical sources of this loss in the first part of his essay) “the world has been cleft into innumerable objective single existences, under which the ego is a single entity like all others, and does not enjoy any privileged position” (3: 43). The individual now must continue “without faith and without knowledge, without science and without myth, just with a consciousness that is entirely without inherent meaning, eternally tortured” (3: 44). But, far from being a matter of loss, this lessening of self, this slackening of firm identity and stable self-consciousness, has become the necessary precondition for, indeed, something synonymous with art itself. So much is clear from Benn’s most extended statement on his aesthetic practice, the essay “Probleme der Lyrik.” This essay is often discussed in terms of Benn’s promotion of the notion of the “absolute poem,” where the constructed text is projected as something autotelic, a verbal icon. But the essay can also be read as an extended meditation on what we might term the phenomenology of the poetic self, as an aesthetic meditation that problematizes the entire notion of an easy relationship between the creative subject and its material object. The former is neither the clear determinant nor sole reference point in the artistic process. As Benn explains, “the lyrical self is a penetrated self, a latticed identity, experienced with flight, dedicated to mourning” (3: 519); it is a layered mechanism of semantic desire. Seen from this point of view, self-consciousness confronts itself as an

15 alien presence, for “in our depths lies the never ending Other, that which constitutes our being, but which, however, we can never see” (3: 533). Such a view of the fluid nature of personal identity was a core component of Benn’s personal philosophy, informing his theory and poetry alike. As one commentator has noted,

he creates roles for himself – the “tavern wolf,” the “Ptolemean,” the “radar thinker” – and he assimilates his life and personality to topoi – the thinker-artist from the parsonage, the persecuted artist-victim, the schizophrenic artist with the split mind and the double life. (Adams 125)

Ultimately, the “real” Benn was neither here nor there. He was a shifting thing, complex and fragmentary, whose sense of identity was dependent upon the time, place and context of its formation.15 The present work is the first full-length study of Benn’s poetry in English.16 Its title, “text” and “selfhood,” signals its methodological priorities. Without neglecting the noted “geistige Problematik” of Benn’s writing, his developing concern with nihilism, moral rela- tivism, anthropological recovery and the historical phenotype (to name but a few of the key tropes within that conceptual ambit), the emphasis in this study is upon the distinctive idiom of Benn’s poetry: its rhetorical self-fashioning, its classical iconography, color motifs and chiffres, the often confusing array of its historical semantics, the seemingly self-constituting “absolute” poem, and the regained col- loquial idiom of the late verse: the “text,” in short. It is here that his writing finds its greatest and most lasting achievement, rather than in his political, aesthetic or anthropological theories. My focus is also on the complex formation of the poetic self evident in Benn’s poetry, where selfhood translates into persona, the sometimes hermeneutically variable position of speech articulated by the poem, and, as such, to a lyrical subject that stands in a non- determined way to “Gottfried Benn,” author of the text, discrete categories that I bring under the notion of “selfhood.” Indeed, Benn’s concern with the predicament of consciousness in the age of modernity, and the impact of the non-unity of consciousness upon personal identity, runs like a leitmotif throughout his work. In the final

16 analysis, Benn’s attempts to resolve these matters manifest themselves not only thematically in his poetry, but also formally, in a style that strains to articulate itself within that discursive space between definition and dissolution. To move the critical optic in this direction is in no way to take Benn out of history or to de-politicize him, and even less to provide an apologetic for his actions in 1933 and 1934. Revision does not mean revisionism. My thesis is not one forged in the post-structuralist idiom, which would argue that the essentially self-deconstructed poet stands beyond moral choice and hence moral censure, the denizen of the realm of “absolute” poetry, and would see Benn’s writing as necessarily subverting/resisting intention, leaving the “real” Benn ontologized elsewhere. Concerns for the multi-layered nature of selfhood, the use of multiple voices, and explorations into the fragmentation of identity do not allow us to dispense with the reality of authorial agency. As I have argued above in my qualifying comments regarding Adorno’s reading of “Gesänge I,” Benn’s poetic personae do not displace his biographical or historical ones. They do, however, force the reader to read the latter in a more complex and broader context, one that respects the multiplicity of speaking positions within Benn’s work and the varied textual forms that they assume (most evident in the variously employed pronominal makers of “Ich,” “Du” and “Wir” used throughout these poems). It is a rhetoric of selfhood that moves (just to name the early verse alone) from the clinical distance and self-effacing narrative impassibility of the Morgue cycle, to the strained pathos of Expressionist poems such as “Der junge Hebbel,” through to the empathetic immersion in the figure of the self-sacrificing Icarus, and finally to the Olympian solipsism of the “selbst-erregend” voice heard in the poem “Synthese” (1917). And within all of these projected identities, there are fissures, qualifications, and clear signs of ironic distance, where one self views another self agonizing over, or feeling guilt towards, yet a third self, in a process in which it is often difficult to identify a clear enunciating subject or unambiguous centre of consciousness. But throughout all of this, Gottfried Benn (born Mansfeld, West Prussia, 1886, died Berlin 1956: the author rather than implied author) does not disappear from view. On the contrary, while it may be the

17 case that all the poem can ever give us is persona or lyrical subject, these positions of speech are, ultimately, at some point, tied to an experiencing individual who possesses a life history, and whose animus, social, erotic, pathological or quotidian, may or may not act as the source of the poem, but nevertheless also has its place between text and selfhood, to be taken into account in any process of interpretation. For, as Benn himself noted: “deviation and error, a life without continuity and an end, which justifies nothing and explains nothing – all of that stands behind the poem.”17

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