(13 May 2025)

(6 048 words)

(Time to read: 32 minutes)

1886:  Gottfried Benn was born on 2 May in Mansfeld (West Prussia), the son of the pastor Gustav Benn (1857–1939) and his Swiss-French wife Caroline, née Jequier (1858–1912).  As Benn later wrote, “I was born in 1886 as the son of an evangelical pastor and a French woman, from the area of Yverdon, in a village of three hundred inhabitants midway between Berlin and Hamburg” (Sämtliche Werke [SW] III, 127). His parents represented two entirely different genetic types: “physically my father was leptosomic, austere and gaunt; my mother was pyknic, alpine and squat in build. [He] was temperamentally the thorough cliff climber, transcendent and distrustful of animals, which are the features of the primeval hunter from the culture of the megalithic ice age; my mother was earthen, close to everything living, sowing and fertilizing gardens and fields: a peasant type, a lake-dweller type, with an authentic personality of tears and smiles” (SW IV, 160).

1887:  “When I was six months old, my parents moved to Sellin, in the Neumark [now in Poland]. That is where I grew up. A village with seven hundred inhabitants lying in the north German plains: a large rectory with a big garden, three hours east of the Oder and that today I still call my homeland, although I no longer know any people there” (SW IV, 156). Benn wrote a poem (“There is a garden …) about his childhood in Sellin: “There is a garden that I sometimes see, / east of the Oder, with flat-lands wide, / a ditch, a bridge, and I stand beside / lilac bushes, blue, their colour almost too much to bear. / There is a boy, for whom I sometimes mourn, / who took to the lake and to its reeds and waves. / Then the river that I now fear did not flow: / it promised first happiness and then forgetfulness. / There is a saying that I often ponder, / which says everything because it promises nothing. / I have weaved it into this book. / It was written upon a gravestone: – ‘tu sais’ – ‘you know’ -” (SW I, 322).

1897–1903: During this period, Benn attended the “Königliches Friedrichs-Gymnasium” in Frankfurt an der Oder. Perhaps because of his experience at school, where the caste system was rigid, Benn remained throughout his life acutely aware of social distinction, : “first came the landed nobility and the government … then the Army, but even this had its own clear hierarchy, which in descending order included (a) the Royal Grenadiers (b) the Twelfth Grenadiers (c) the 18th Field Artillery Regiment, and (d) the somewhat despised ‘Tipper’, i.e. the Telegraph battalion … Behind these groups came officials from the judiciary, from the rural and county courts, and finally there were municipal officials. Behind these (or on an equal level) were grouped, in no particular order, grammar schoolteachers and businessmen” (see Eta Harich-Schneider, Charaktere und Katastrophe: Augenzeugenberichte einer reisenden Musikerin. Berlin, 1978, p.16).

1903:  Benn received his “Abitur” (school-leaving certificate) in February 1903. He had done very well in Religion and Latin but only received a “satisfactory” for German. His character was assessed as “commendable”. In October, he enrolled at the University of Marburg to study philology and theology. “I was eighteen years old when I began my studies in Marburg. It was in the first decade of the century. I studied at that time philology and attended lectures by a Professor Ernst Elster, editor of the first great Heine edition. His course was called “Poetic and Literary-Historical Methodology”. It was a stimulating and by the standards of the day a very modern course … I attended the lectures by Elster and by Professor [Ferdinand] Wrede on the poetry of the Middle Ages, and number of others given by different professors” (Benn, Briefe an F.W. Oelze II, 258)

1904:  Benn left Marburg and continued his studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. It was not a success. Already midway through the first semester, there were signs that he was not performing well, and deliberately, because in the final analysis Benn did not want to study the Humanities but Medicine.

1905: In October 1905, Benn was allowed to transfer to the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for Military-Medical Instruction (otherwise known as the ‘Pépinière) in Berlin to train as a medical officer in the Army. The combination of the military and the medical were character-forming: “It was an excellent college … I owe everything to it. Virchow, Helmholtz, Leyden, Behring all had their origins here. It was the scientific spirit that reigned rather than the military, and the management of the institution was exemplary” (SW IV, 161). “Looking back, my present existence seems completely unthinkable without this turn to medicine and biology. During this period, the entire heritage of the inductive epoch was amassed, its methods, its mentality, its nomenclature, all of which now reached fruition. These were the years of its greatest triumph, where it scaled truly Olympian heights. And one thing in particular it taught the youth of that day: a principle of which they became masters: coolness in thought, sobriety, ultimate precision with concepts, providing evidence for every judgment, and an uncompromising critical attitude, self-criticism, in short, the creative side of objectivity” (SW IV, 162).

1910: Benn graduated from the Academy and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Medical Faculty for his essay, “The Etiology of Pubertal Epilepsy”. He published his first literary piece, “A Conversation”, which established his anti-Romantic base.

1911:  In March, Benn enlisted as a junior doctor with the 64th Infantry Regiment, Spandau. At the same time, he was employed in the “Charité” hospital, working and then conducting research under the guidance of Professor Arnold Hiller in the psychiatric department of Berlin university. In October, he passed the medical “Staatsexamen” and received his “Approbation” (license to practice medicine). Later that year, he retired from the army because of a recurring medical, kidney, complaint.

1912:  On 28 February, Benn was awarded his doctor’s degree with the dissertation “The Incidence of Diabetes mellitus in the Army”. Between May 1912 and April 1914, he worked as a pathologist at hospitals in the Charlottenburg-Westend and Moabit areas of Berlin. In March, his first book of poems appeared, iconoclastic, shockingly visceral, the Morgue cycle. “I wrote the Morgue cycle during the course of a single night. I was living at that time in the northwest of Berlin and was working in a hospital in the Moabit district, carrying out autopsies. It was a cycle of six poems, which arose all at once, just came out, appeared from nowhere. Before this, they had no existence at all. [After I wrote them], I felt empty, famished, giddy, and only with the greatest difficulty could I pull myself out a feeling of exhaustion” (SW IV, 178).

In April 1912, Benn’s mother died from cancer.  Because of the expense, the father refused to allow her pain to be alleviated by medication. A permanent rift took place between father and son.

In the same year, Benn met the poet, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), at the Café des Westens in Berlin and entered into relationship with her. As she later wrote, “long before I met him, I had read him. His Morgue poems lay on my bed: masterpieces of horror, dreams of death. Cemetries wander into hospital sickrooms and plant themselves before the beds of the suffering. His every line is a leopard’s bite, the leap of a wild animal. Bones provide the palate, with which he wakes up language” (über Gottfried Benn: Kritische Stimmen. Edited by Bruno Hillebrand. vol 1. Frankfurt am Main. 1987. p. 17).

1913:  In November, Benn became assistant doctor in a recently opened hospital in Sophie-Charlottenstrasse, performing autopsies and pathological tests. Benn became part of the Expressionist culture of Berlin. It was a vital movement: “what was in the air? Above all, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too. and Wedekind. What was wanted was a post-rational Dionysius. Van Gogh stood for expression and experience as opposed to Impressionism and Naturalism, flaming concentration, youthful sincerity, immediacy, depth, exhibition and hallucination” (see Ernst Blass, “The Old Café des Westens”, in The Era of German Expressionism, edited Paul Raabe. New York, 1974. p. 29). Benn published poems in the Expressionist journals, Die Aktion and Pan. Sons, his second book of poems, was published in October.  Feeling that he was being controlled by the older (and poetically more established) woman, Benn ended his relationship with Else Lasker-Schüler with the poem “I offer no consolation: “no one is the border to my path / Let your blossoms wither / My path flows and runs alone”. In the summer of 1913, Benn, while on holiday, met the actress, Edith Osterloh. They were married in 1914.

1914:  Benn became a ship’s doctor on the “Graf Waldersee”, travelling from Hamburg to New York. In June, he was employed as a locum in a sanatorium for tuberculosis in Bischofsgrün, Bavaria. He returned to his regiment on the outbreak of World War One and took part in the offensive on Antwerp where he was awarded Iron Cross II.

1915–1916: Benn was later transferred to Brussels, and worked at the “Saint Gilles” hospital, in charge of the section for treating sexually transmitted diseases: “I was a doctor in a hospital for prostitutes, a quite isolated post. I lived in a confiscated house of eleven rooms, alone except for my orderly. I had few duties, could go around in civvies, was not busy with anything and subject to no one. I barely understood the local language, crept through the streets: a foreign people”. “Life hovered within a sphere of silence and solitude. I lived on its edge, where existence dissolves and the self begins. I often think back to that time; that was life. Everything else was rupture” (SW III, 127-128). As a medical officer, Benn attended in 1915 the execution by firing squad of the English nurse, Edith Cavell

Daughter Nele was born.

1917: The volume of poems, Flesh, appeared in “Die Aktion”. Benn experimented with drugs (cocaine) and was s discharged from the army. In November, he opened a medical surgery as a “specialist for skin and bowel disorders” (sexually transmitted complaints) in his apartment at 12 Belle-Alliance-Straße, Berlin. The apartment became part of Benn lore: “three of the rooms looked onto the street, the fourth onto a backyard. Into this backyard, a café pumped out its music. I often listened to its enticing melodies.  Sometimes at night, when I went into my bedroom, I would open the window, put out the light and stand, breathing in the sound. I would remain there for a long time, staring out into the night that held nothing for me anymore, nothing but the twilight of my heart, a heart that was getting older: vague air, greying emotions, to which one gives oneself over, for which one despairs” (SW III, 203-204).

1918: The autobiographical stories “Diesterweg” and “Sectional View” were published.

1919:  Kurt Pinthus published a selection of Benn’s poems in his highly influential anthology of Expressionist poetry, Twilight of Humanity: A Symphony of the Newest Poetry. Benn was asked by Kasimir Edschmid, who was editing a volume of contemporary writing, to clarify his attitude to his art and writing. Benn wrote: “actually, I find in me no art at all, but only a biologically rooted reality that is similar to sleep or nausea, and a conflict with a single problem that confronts me: the problem of the Southern Word … It is words that galvanize me purely as associative motifs irrespective of their descriptive character, and it is then that I experience, in a quite tactile way, their quality as logical categories, which provide cross-sections through condensed catastrophes” (SW III, 109).

1920:  Benn wrote the essay, “The Modern Self”, in which he expresses a Spenglerian philosophy of cultural decline. It is an essay born out of “a hatred of scientific utilitarianism, of all knowledge based on financial gain, and a rejection of the state as simply the provider of welfare, with the citizen as a recipient of revenue. The thoughts expressed in this essay”, he later wrote, “harbored a dislike of mechanical life; their longings reached well beyond the empirical and the social substance towards creative substance, towards feelings that could transform, towards images and counter images arising out of the eternal stygian flow, which flowed to meet them from an identity of selflessness, which was itself bordered by decline” (Dichter über Dichtungen: Gottfried Benn. Edited by Edgar Lohner. Wiesbaden. 1969, p. 27).

1921:  Benn published the autobiographical prose work, “Epilogue”, and the poem “The late Self”. Benn started a relationship with Gertrud Zenzes (1984-1970). It was short lived. As he explained to her in a letter, “I have for the greater part of my time so many walls around me that I am incapable of showing the other person any understanding. I have become hard in this way so that my inner self should not dissolve. I have ultimately become very foreign to others and very solitary”(Benn, Ausgewaehlte Briefe. Limes Verlag. 1957. p. 21).

1922: In November, Benn’s wife, Edith, died after a gall bladder operation. Benn began his friendship with Danish soprano, Ellen Overgaard (1890-1976).

1923: In January, Benn’s Collected Writings appeared after legal difficulties. His daughter, Nele, went to live in Denmark as the adoptive child of Ellen Overgaard and her husband, Christen.

1924:  The poetry volume Rubble was published.

1925:  In September the poetry cycle “Anaesthesia”, and in November the collection Division, appear. In the former volume, Benn returned to his experiments with drugs, first made in his Brussels period: “Intoxication, aconite / where desire and the cadaver beckons / Lernian fields / which drink my soul” (SW I, 115).

1926: The essay “The Crisis in Medicine”, in which Benn condemns the commercial aims of modern medicine, was published in the Querschnitt. The autobiographical “Summa summarum” was published in June in the Weltbühne. Benn turned forty. Resumed friendship with Thea Sternheim.

1927:  Benn’s Collected Poems appeared, and he gave his first poetry reading on the radio. Benn was plagued by tax woes (and his complaints were recurrent throughout his life). As he told Thea Sternheim, “I have been threatened again today with legal action by the taxation office if I don’t pay them immediately fifty-five marks.  These people are mad. The state must be destroyed. Private medical practices [such as mine], which provide no fixed income, no holidays, and no regular hours must once again help finance this bankrupt and corrupt state” (Gottfried Benn / Thea Sternheim, Briefwechsel. Wallstein Verlag. 2004. p. 76).

1928: Benn became member of PEN Club. He published an essay on the execution at the end of the Firts World War of the British nurse Edith Cavell (which he had attended) and justified the action: she was a spy. He also gave a funeral ovation to his friend, the poet, Klabund, who died in August.

1929:  In February, Benn’s lover, the provincial actress, Lili Breda (1887-1929), committed suicide. had tried to stop her but failed. As he wrote, “my ex-girlfriend, whom I continued to love, deeply love, although I am getting old and my capacity for feeling is dwindling, has taken her life. She threw herself out of the window of her fifth-storey apartment and died immediately on the street below. She phoned me to say she was going to do it, and I raced over in a car, but she was already lying there” (Benn, Ausgewaehlte Briefe, pp. 31-32).

Benn began soon after a relationship with Lili’s friend, also an actress, Elinor Büller (1896-1944), and entered into an acrimonious debate with J. R. Becher and E. E. Kisch regarding the political role of literature (political, according to the Communist-minded former; nonpolitical according to Benn). The essay cum prose fantasy “Primal Visage” (“Urgesicht”) was published. The text represented a move in Benn’s thinking to a regressive model of selfhood: “I saw the ‘I’, the gaze of its eyes. I dilated the pupil, looked deeply into it and out from it.  The gaze from such eyes is virtually expressionless, probing, as if sensing danger, primeval danger. And out of catastrophes in the making, catastrophes that preceded language, gruesome, atavistic memories of hybrid creatures, of animalistic forms, of sphinx-jawed apparitions, there emerged the primal visage” (SW III, 211).

1930:  In March, Benn gave a radio talk on “Can Writers Change the World?”. In the same year, he became acquainted with Klaus Mann and began a relationship with the actress (and ex-wife of the playwright, Frank Wedekind), Tilly Wedekind (1886-1970). He warns her not to expect full commitment from him, because “there exists around me a wall of frigidity and exclusiveness beyond which no one can reach. And climbing over it is not worth the trouble anyway. You will find nothing behind it, only hieroglyphs” (Benn, Briefe an Tilly Wedekind, 1930-1955. Stuttgart. 1986. p. 6).

Benn’s thinking was increasingly assuming an irrationalist dimension, a belief in the anthropological importance of the primitive. As he wrote in his essay “The Formation of Personality”, “what primarily constitutes the psyche of one’s personality and provides its basis, general affectivity, drives and instincts, also the motor responses, functionality, depends on the biologically older part of the brain, which stretches back to an earlier stage of its development: the so-called “stem brain” with its “stem ganglia”. And here we come across a highly remarkable state of affairs: the intelligent, rational part of the self was only formed within and as that part of the brain that developed much later; the earlier stage existed purely on the level of drives and instincts through the brain stem, over which the surface of the cerebrum subsequently developed” (SW III, 266-267).

Benn’s fame had increased, and he was invited to give public readings of his poetry, including in March to The Prussian Academy of Arts. A member of the audience recounts how “he stepped up to the lectern. A full, somewhat fleshy face that remained almost masklike in its immobility. A round broad head with hair carefully brushed back. A cyclopic brow, which was bent over the book in a stern, almost vexed fashion. Then he began to read from his work.  He read the hard, succinct terse blocks of words that had come from his resolute manly existence. He read out the curt, bitter, tense, rhythms of his singular and solitary lyrics. He read them as if they were fragments, a selection. Those who knew Benn recognized the selection” (Harry Scheck as quoted in Holger Hof, Gottfried Benn: Mann ohne Gedaechtnis. Stuttgart. 2011. p. 135).

1931: In November, the first performance of Paul Hindemith’s oratorio The Never-Ending (with libretto by Benn) took place.  The philosophy expressed in the oratorio was in full accordance with Benn’s own. As he wrote in the Introduction, “we know nothing of creation apart from continual change, and The Never-Ending should be an expression for the ultimate background of life: the elementary principle of constant flux and the ceaseless upheaval of form” (SW VII/ 1, 185).

In March, Benn gave a “Talk for Heinrich Mann”. Benn’s fame had spread to France, finding the esteem of writers such as André Gide. In July 1931, Thea Sternheim brought the noted writer with her on a visit to Benn in his apartment: “when we entered his apartment, Benn was beside himself”, Sternheim later recalled, “the German with his normally so carefully constructed exterior met the offer of Gide’s hand by opening his arms into an embrace. This encounter touched me deeply, and I stood to one side. Benn and Gide understood entirely what was going on. When Gide eventually left, I stayed with Benn for a number of hours” (Gottfried Benn / Thea Sternheim, Briefwechsel and Aufzeichnungen. Wallstein Verlag. 2004. p. 74).

1932:  In January 1932, Benn was elected as a Fellow of the Prussian Academy of Arts (Literary Section). In December he began his correspondence with the Bremen businessman, F.W. Oelze. The essay volume “After Nihilism”, published towards the end of this year, with its emphasis upon form, integration and the “volkhaft”, confirmed his growing sympathy for the radical conservative camp (SW III, 213).

1933: The National Socialists seize political power, and Benn supported them and the cultural initiatives of the “new Germany” by becoming Secretary of the Literary Section of the Academy. In this role, he sent the following ultimatum to his colleagues: “are you prepared, recognizing the changed historical circumstances, to continue to put your person as the disposal of the Prussian Academy of the Arts? Answering in the affirmative to this question means desisting from all political activities aimed against the government and commits you to a loyal cooperation with the national-cultural tasks that are a part of our statutory obligations within the changed historical circumstances” (Inge Jens, Dichter zwischen Rechts und Links. Munich.1971. p. 191). Benn gave the radio talks an “Answer to the Literary Emigrants”, criticizing the anti-Nazi emigration movement, and “The New State and the Intellectuals”, In the latter, Benn painted an idealized portrait of Hitler: ” ‘Führer’: that is the principle of creativity. He embodies not only responsibility, danger and decisiveness, but also the irrational core of the will of history, which has only now become manifest through him” (SW IV, 34).

In spite of his support for the new state, Benn was attacked (and this will be the first of many such attacks) on account of his Expressionist past by the conservative faction within the Academy, including the ballad writer, Börries von Münchhausen. As a reply, he wrote in November “Belief in Expressionism”, in which he argued for the relevance of modernist art to the new state.

1934: Benn felt increasingly alienated from the culture and politics of the Third Reich. and to defend himself against attacks wrote the essay, “Literature requires Inner Space”, which appeared in January. Such attempts were to no avail. As he noted after his final meeting in the Academy in June, “I remained completely in the background, but I remember quite clearly how a number of new [Nazi] members could hardly bring themselves to offer me their hand as they greeted me. After that meeting, I no longer saw or heard from the Academy again” (SW V, 100-101). In November, the Berlin medical authorities refused to grant him a license to practice. Benn decided to re-enter the army. It was “the aristocratic form of emigration” (Briefe an Oelze, p. 7).

1935:  Benn enlisted in March as a senior military doctor in a Reserve Division, based in Hanover. His period of inner emigration had begun: “I live with my lips tightly pressed together on the outside as well as the inside. I cannot go on. Certain matters have delivered the final blow to me. A terrible tragedy!  The whole thing begins to appear like a cheap theatre troupe, which continues to announce that it will stage Faust, but their cast only allows the staging of [the popular jingoistic play] ‘Husarenfieber’. How great did it all start out; how filthy does it look today. But it is not yet finished, by a long way” (Benn, Ausgewaehlte Briefe, p. 58). As Benn wrote in a poem of that year, “On the Bridge’s Parapet”, ” ‘I have thought far and wide: / now I abandon things, / leaving their connections / to the new power ‘” (SW I, 152). Benn started to lead a double life: an official life and one entirely private. As he wrote, “sometimes I feel that there exists here a delicious opportunity for leading a double life and for enjoying demonic magic. During the day, it is a matter of ‘yes, certainly’, ‘as you order, sir’, as I bow low. But in the evening, it is miscegenation and outrage … During the daytime. I am Baldur, devoted to light; at night, I am Loki, the rat piper” (Benn, Briefe an Elinor Büller, 1930-1937. Stuttgart. 1992, p. 109).

1936:  Benn’s Selected Poems appeared in March. Publishing a collection of his poetry under such political circumstances, where he had to censor what was most radical in his poetry, brought about an intense moment of soul searching: “I got down yesterday evening to the new volume. I read the first part, poems that I had not read for ten years. I was lost for words, was confronted by something inexplicable, namely, how at one time thoughts of such originality, almost of genius, were so much a part of my mind and thoughts, and at the same time, deep, deep sorrow that all of this, and particularly that which was truly original, that pointed to new connections and extra levels of feeling, I would now have to disown completely, erase, omit. I sat long into the night and wanted to give up the project of the book. The infinite shame at my decline, and that of a life that was too long, my survival and infinite sorrow for the betrayal that I was planning to commit on myself, left me shattered” (Briefe an Oelze I, 99).

In spite of his self-censoring, Benn’s volume was heavily condemned by the Nazi press, and Benn denigrated as a “degenerate”, his poems “obscene”. Benn successfully, however, defended himself before his army superiors against the Nazi slurs.

Benn began writing the prose fantasy, Weinhaus Wolf, a covert critique of the empty values of the Third Reich. He met the typist, Herta von Wedemeyer, whom he married in 1938.

1937:  In July, Benn took up a new position as a senior doctor with the III Army Division (Department Provisions and Claims for Compensation) in Berlin.  The Nazi art critic, Wolfgang Willrich, attacked Benn in his Cleansing the Temple of Art: A Culturally Political Critical Publication for the Purging of German Art through Nordic Means. In December, Benn moved into 20 Bozener Straße. It would remain his domicile for the rest of his life.

1938: In March, Benn was excluded from the “Reichsschrifttumskammer” (the State Literary Chamber, of which all writers were expected to be members) and was prohibited from future publication. Benn married Herta, who moved in with him in Bozener Straße. The marriage was, above all, a matter of convenience. As he explained to Tilly Wedekind, “I am old and very tired [Benn was 53] and cannot go on alone. I have decided to marry, and indeed soon. There is no passion involved, no illusions, just a need for order, comradeship and mutual support. I have to have someone who will look after the apartment, since I spend the entire day away from it, someone whom I can talk to, who is interested in my existence, both its inner and outer dimensions, I am talking about the young woman from Hannover. She is twenty years younger, a good worker, intelligent, comes from a military background and is familiar with its milieu” (Benn, Briefe an Tilly Wedekind, pp. 267-268).

1939:  Benn’s father died at the age of eighty-two. Benn attended the funeral in Mohrin. In September, Benn was transferred to German High Command as an assessor for claims for medical insurance and pension payments, and in

1940: wrote a learned paper on the incidence of suicide amongst military personnel for his department, in which he argued that the will to self-destruction was not abnormal.

1941: In February, Benn’s half-brother, Hans-Christoph, was killed in fighting near Moscow. The poem “Monologue”, a satire on Hitler, was written in April and circulated clandestinely: “his bowels are nourished on snot, his mind with lies – / Chosen people, the dupes of a clown”. The same disenchantment with the Third Reich informed his essay, “Art and the Third Reich”, where he castigated the Germans for their support of the regime: “they are a people without any discernible taste. On the whole, untouched by the moral and aesthetic refinements of neighboring civilized countries, they are of a philosophically confused idealistic worldview, prosaic, slow-witted, coarse, a practical people that knows, as its evolution testifies, only one path to spirituality, i.e. through myths or vacuous universals” (SW IV, 281-282).

In August, Benn was moved to a position in the Command Headquarters of the III Army in Berlin. The Biographical Poems were published in a clandestine edition.

1942: Twenty-Two Poems is published for private circulation. These are poems where Benn seeks to place himself beyond time, as in “A Word”: “A word, a sentence –: out of signs arises recognised life, sudden meaning. The sun stands still, the spheres fall silent, and all things concentrate towards it. A word –, radiance, a flight, a fire, a leap of flame, a stretch of stars –, and darkness once again, enormity, in empty space around world and self” (SW I, 384).

1943: To protect it from Allied bombing raids over Berlin, Benn’s unit was transferred in August to Landsberg an der Warthe, one hundred and thirty kilometres east of Berlin (now in Poland).

1944: Benn started writing Novel of a Phenotype. It is not a novel in the conventional sense but a loosely assembled mosaic of cultural observations, philosophical digressions and anecdotes. The Phenotype is modern man (and particularly Gottfried Benn as modern man): sceptical, without base values and an observer rather than a doer. As he wrote at the time, phenotypes are born nihilists who do not accept values of humanists, “in face, we refuse to believe in the substance from which sentiments come, we refuse to believe in their experiences and their experiences and their joys, we query the methods that they use to represent themselves, we doubt their imagery” (SW II, 168).

At the same time, Benn began to assemble a new collection of verse, Static Poems. Writing to his Swiss publisher, Peter Schifferli, in 1947, Benn explained the philosophy behind the notion of “static”: “it is a concept that not only reflects my inner aesthetic and moral condition; it also corresponds to the formal method of my poems, and more specifically to the construction of the material that has found a still centre within itself. More pointedly it contains the anti-dynamic.”. The title poem, “Static Poems”, begins:  “Estrangement from evolution / is the profound choice of the wise man. / Children and the children of children / cannot unsettle him: / they do not touch him within. / To support schools of thought /, to be active, to travel here and there: / this is the sign of a world / that cannot see clearly” (SW I 323).

1945:  In January, Benn and his wife, Herta, returned to Berlin: “we sleep on a straw sack, because our bedding is still in Landsberg. Every day, there are blackouts that last seven to eight hours, So, we live in the dark, since our windows, long since broke, are nailed up. The alarm sounds three to four times a day. We look grey and old, and live from stale bread. It is the evening of our lives, just as it is written in the Book” (Benn, Briefe an Oelze I, 385).

To escape the immanent Russian occupation of Berlin, in April Herta left for Neuhaus (on the Elbe), believing that she would be safe there. But that area had been consigned to Russian occupation, and Herta committed suicide in July.

1946:  In August, Benn wrote the poem, “The Death of Orpheus”: “it is sweet to think of the dead: / they are so distant. / One hears their voices more clearly” (SW I 182). Benn was suffering. In April, his daughter, Nele, now an officer in the Danish army, visited her father: “he opened the door himself.  There he stood, looking like I’d never seen him before. My father had been since his thirties a full-bodied man: we won’t say fat. He had always been portly and thickset, with a healthy corporeal physique. On this afternoon, in April 1946, however, there stood before me in the doorway, a small, thin man, who looked older than sixty. His eyes were circled to black rings, which lay deep in their sockets. And yet I often thought later how profound and impressive his head looked” (Nele Soerensen, Mein Vater Gottfried Benn. Wiesbaden. 1960, pp. 53-54).

In October, Benn met Ilse Kaul, who was providing him with dental treatment. They were married in December.

1947: Benn wrote The Ptolemaist, although he remained a prohibited author for the Allies.

1948: In October, Static Poems appeared in heavily modified from in Switzerland with the Arche Verlag. Benn had become famous but he was reluctant to appear in public: “when, for over a period of fifteen years, one is publicly vilified by the Nazis as a pig, by the communists as an idiot, by liberals as an intellectual prostitute, by the emigrants as a renegade, by the religiously minded as a pathological nihilist, then one is not terribly keen to return to the public realm,. And even less so, when one feels no inner connection with that realm” (SW V, 56-57).

1949: In March, the first complete edition of Static Poems was published by the Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden, along with two collections of his poetry and prose, World of Expression and Drunken Flood.

1950: In March, Benn published his autobiography, A Double Life. Its title reflects Benn’s view that the personal self is essentially a fractured unstable phenomenon. As he retrospectively observed (quoting from his play “Three Old Men:): “we lived differently from what we were; we wrote differently from what we thought; we thought differently from what was expected and what remained was different from what we had intended” (SW V, 143).

1951: The poetry volume Fragments was published.  Benn saw it as representing his “Phase II”, in which he employed an urbane and more contemporary idiom. As he wrote at the time, “Phase II represents the post-ancient/classical man, who moves in the direction of the ‘Montage-Person’, the style of the robot. Man, as such, does not exist anymore; he is assembled out of common expressions, stale cliches and a groundout vocabulary.  Everything lies within quotation marks, and the strange thing is that it comes across, to a certain extent, as genuine” (Benn, Briefe an Oelze, 225). This is the modern poem, the absolute poem, and in a talk at Marburg University called “Problems of the Lyrical Poem”, he specified what this poem is: ” the absolute poem, the poem without faith, the poem without hope, which is made for no one, the poem of words, which are arranged so that they captivate” (SW VI, 16).

In the same year, Benn received the Georg Büchner Prize. He received his first letter from Astrid Claes, who was writing a doctoral study The Lyrical Language of the Poems of Gottfried Benn (Der lyrische Sprachstil Gottfried Benns).

1952: Benn gave a talk on Else Lasker-Schüler at the British Centre in Berlin. In September, as the German representative. He attended the international literary congress in Knokke, Belgium. In December, he was awarded for his literary achievements the “Bundesverdienstkreuz” of the Federal Republic.

1953: Benn retired from his medical practice. The poetry volume, Distillations, was published.

1954: In August, Benn started a relationship with Ursula Ziebarth.

1955: Benn’s final collection of poetry, Aprèslude, was published. These are poems of quiet termination, gentle and unassuming texts in a minor mode (in music an aprèslude comes after something grander). The final stanza of the title poem reads: “no one knows where seeds nourish themselves, / no one whether the head of a flower will ever bloom again – / Hold out, persevere, nurture yourself, / Darken, age gracefully, aprèslude” (SW I, 469). 

1956: On 2 May, Benn celebrated his seventieth birthday: “the older one becomes, the more difficult things are. One is supposed to come to results but one does not come to any. One is supposed to find answers but there remain only questions. One is supposed to reach conclusions, but everything remains open. Perhaps one should just have the decency to stay silent”.  (Benn, Ausgwaehlte Briefe, p. 243).  In June, Benn was diagnosed with cancer and went to a spa in Schlangenbad in search of a cure. On 7 July, Gottfried Benn died and was buried in Berlin-Dahlem cemetery. Before dying, he had written one final poem, “No Need for Sorrow” (“Kann keine Trauer sein”), anticipating that his end was near. Its final lines read: “no need for sorrow: too far, too distant, / untouchable, the bed and the tears. / Neither no, nor yes. / Birth, the pain of the body, and faith: / a wave, nameless, a scurrying / stirring in our sleep, / moved both bed and tears. Sleep well” (SW I, 476).