Kleine Aster
Ein ersoffener
Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt.
lrgendeiner
hatte ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster
zwischen die
Zähne geklemmt.
Als ich von
der Brust aus
unter der Haut
mit einem
langen Messer
Zunge und
Gaumen herausschnitt,
muß ich sie
angestoßen haben, denn sie glitt
in das
nebenliegende Gehirn.
Ich packte sie
ihm in die Brusthöhle
zwischen die
Holzwolle,
als man
zunähte.
Trinke dich
satt in deiner Vase!
Ruhe sanft,
kleine Aster!
Schöne Jugend
Der Mund eines
Mädchens
sah so
angeknabbert aus.
Als man die
Brust aufbrach,
war die
Speiseröhre so löcherig.
Schließlich in
einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfell
fand man ein
Nest von jungen Ratten.
Ein kleines
Schwesterchen lag tot.
Die andern
lebten von Leber und Niere,
tranken das
kalte Blut und hatten
hier eine
schöne Jugend verlebt.
Und schön und
schnell kam auch ihr Tod:
Man warf sie
allesamt ins Wasser.
Ach, wie die
kleinen Schnauzen quietschten!
Kreislauf
Der einsame
Backzahn einer Dirne,
die unbekannt
verstorben war,
trug eine
Goldplombe.
Die übrigen
waren wie auf stille Verabredung
ausgegangen.
Den schlug der
Leichendiener sich heraus,
versetzte ihn
und ging für tanzen.
Denn, sagte
er,
nur Erde solle
zur Erde werden.
Nachtcafé
824: Der
Frauen Liebe und Leben.
Das Cello
trinkt rasch mal. Die Flöte
rülpst tief
drei Takte lang: das schöne Abendbrot.
Die Trommel
liest den Kriminalroman zu Ende.
Grüne Zähne,
Pickel im Gesicht
winkt einer
Lidrandentzündung.
Fett im Haar
spricht zu
offenem Mund mit Rachenmandel
Glaube Liebe
Hoffnung um den Hals.
Junger Kropf
ist Sattelnase gut.
Er bezahlt für
sie drei Biere.
Bartflechte
kauft Nelken,
Doppelkinn zu
erweichen.
B-moll: die
35. Sonate
Zwei Augen
brüllen auf:
Spritzt nicht
das Blut von Chopin in den Saal,
damit das Pack
drauf rumlatscht!
Schluß! He,
Gigi! -
Die Tür fließt
hin: Ein Weib.
Wüste
ausgedörrt. Kanaanitisch braun.
Keusch.
Höhlenreich. Ein Duft kommt mit.
Kaum Duft.
Es ist nur
eine süße Verwölbung der Luft
gegen mein
Gehirn.
Eine
Fettleibigkeit trippelt hinterher.
Dr. Benn's Nachtcafé (1918) – George Grosz
Mutter
Ich trage dich
wie eine Wunde
auf meiner
Stirn, die sich nicht schließt.
Sie schmerzt
nicht immer. Und es fließt
das Herz sich
nicht draus tot.
Nur manchmal
plötzlich bin ich blind und spüre
Blut im Munde.
D-Zug
Braun wie
Kognak. Braun wie Laub. Rotbraun. Malaiengelb.
D-Zug
Berlin-Trelleborg und die Ostseebäder.
Fleisch, das
nackt ging.
Bis in den
Mund gebräunt vom Meer.
Reif gesenkt,
zu griechischem Glück.
In
Sichel-Sehnsucht: wie weit der Sommer ist!
Vorletzter Tag
des neunten Monats schon!
Stoppel und
letzte Mandel lechzt in uns.
Entfaltungen,
das Blut, die Müdigkeiten,
die
Georginennähe macht uns wirr.
Männerbraun
stürzt sich auf Frauenbraun:
Eine Frau ist
etwas für eine Nacht.
Und wenn es
schön war, noch für die nächste!
Oh! Und dann
wieder dies Bei-sich-selbst-Sein!
Diese
Stummheiten! Dies Getriebenwerden!
Eine Frau ist
etwas mit Geruch.
Unsägliches!
Stirb hin! Resede.
Darin ist
Süden, Hirt und Meer.
An jedem
Abhang lehnt ein Glück.
Frauenhellbraun
taumelt an Männerdunkelbraun:
Halte mich!
Du, ich falle!
Ich bin im
Nacken so müde.
Oh, dieser
fiebernde süße
letzte Geruch
aus den Gärten.
Karyatide
Entrücke dich
dem Stein! Zerbirst
die Höhle, die
dich knechtet! Rausche
doch in die
Flur! Verhöhne die Gesimse -
sieh: durch
den Bart des trunkenen Silen
aus seinem
ewig überrauschten
lauten
einmaligen durchdröhnten Blut
träuft Wein in
seine Scham!
Bespei die
Säulensucht: toderschlagene
greisige Hände
bebten sie
verhangenen
Himmeln zu. Stürze
die Tempel vor
die Sehnsucht deines Knies,
in dem der
Tanz begehrt!
Breite dich
hin, zerblühe dich, oh, blute
dein weiches
Beet aus großen Wunden hin:
sieh, Venus
mit den Tauben gürtet
sich Rosen um
der Hüften Liebestor –
sieh dieses
Sommers letzten blauen Hauch
auf
Astermeeren an die fernen
baumbraunen
Ufer treiben; tagen
sieh diese
letzte Glück-Lügenstunde
unserer Südlichkeit
hochgewölbt.
Jena
"Jena vor
uns im lieblichen Tale"
schrieb meine
Mutter von einer Tour
auf einer
Karte vom Ufer der Saale,
sie war in
Kösen im Sommer zur Kur;
nun längst
vergessen, erloschen die Ahne,
selbst ihre
Handschrift, Graphologie,
Jahre des
Werdens, Jahre der Wahne,
nur diese
Worte vergesse ich nie.
Es war kein
berühmtes Bild, keine Klasse,
für lieblich
sah man wenig blühn,
schlechtes
Papier, keine holzfreie Masse,
auch waren die
Berge nicht rebengrün,
doch kam man
vom Lande, von kleinen Hütten,
so waren die
Täler wohl lieblich und schön,
man brauchte
nicht Farbdruck, man brauchte nicht Bütten,
man glaubte,
auch andere würden es sehn.
Es war wohl
ein Wort von hoher Warte,
ein Ausruf
hatte die Hand geführt,
sie bat den
Kellner um eine Karte,
so hatte die
Landschaft sie berührt,
und doch – wie
oben – erlosch die Ahne
und das gilt
allen und auch für den,
die – Jahre
des Werdens, Jahre der Wahne − heute die Stadt im Tale sehn.
Das Ganze
Im Taumel war
ein Teil, ein Teil in Tränen,
in manchen
Stunden war ein Schein und mehr,
in diesen
Jahren war das Herz, in jenen
waren die
Stürme - wessen Stürme - wer?
Niemals im
Glücke, selten mit Begleiter,
meistens
verschleiert, da es tief geschah,
und alle
Ströme liefen wachsend weiter
und alles
Außen ward nur innen nah.
Der sah dich
hart, der andre sah dich milder,
der wie es
ordnet, der wie es zerstört,
doch was sie
sahn, das waren halbe Bilder,
da dir das
Ganze nur allein gehört.
Im Anfang war
es heller, was du wolltest
und zielte vor
und war dem Glauben nah,
doch als du
dann erblicktest, was du solltest,
was auf das
Ganze steinern niedersah,
da war es kaum
ein Glanz und kaum ein Feuer,
in dem dein
Blick, der letzte, sich verfing:
ein nacktes
Haupt, in Blut, ein Ungeheuer,
an dessen
Wimper eine Träne hing.
Anemone
Erschütterer-:
Anemone,
die Erde ist
kalt, ist nichts,
da murmelt
deine Krone
ein Wort des
Glaubens, des Lichts.
Der Erde ohne
Güte.
der nur die
Macht gerät,
ward deine
leise Blüte
so schweigend
hingesät.
Erschütterer-:
Anemone,
du trägst den
Glauben, das Licht,
den einst der
Sommer als Krone
aus großen
Blüten flicht.
Chopin
Nicht sehr
ergiebig im Gespräch,
Ansichten
waren nicht seine Stärke,
Ansichten
reden drum herum,
wenn Delacroix
Theorien entwickelte,
wurde er
unruhig, er seinerseits konnte
die Notturnos
nicht begründen.
Schwacher
Liebhaber;
Schatten in
Nohant,
wo George
Sands Kinder
keine
erzieherischen Ratschläge
von ihm
annahmen.
Brustkrank in
jener Form
mit Blutungen
und Narbenbildung,
die sich lange
hinzieht;
stiller Tod
im Gegensatz
zu einem
mit
Schmerzparoxysmen
oder durch
Gewehrsalven:
Man rückte den
Flügel (Erard) an die Tür
und Delphine
Potocka
sang ihm in
der letzten Stunde
ein
Veilchenlied.
Nach England
reiste er mit drei Flügeln:
Pleyel, Erard,
Broadwood,
spielte für
zwanzig Guineen abends
eine
Viertelstunde
bei
Rothschilds, Wellingtons, im Strafford House
und vor
zahllosen Hosenbändern;
verdunkelt von
Müdigkeit und Todesnähe
kehrte er heim
auf den Square
d’Orléans.
Dann verbrennt
er seine Skizzen
und
Manuskripte,
nur keine
Restbestände, Fragmente, Notizen,
diese
verräterischen Einblicke –
sagte zum
Schluß:
„meine
Versuche sind nach Maßgabe dessen vollendet,
was mir zu
erreichen möglich war.“
Spielen sollte
jeder Finger
mit der seinem
Bau entsprechenden Kraft,
der vierte ist
der schwächste
(nur
siamesisch zum Mittelfinger).
Wenn er
begann, lagen sie
auf e, fis,
gis, h, c.
Wer je
bestimmte Präludien
von ihm hörte,
sei es in
Landhäusern oder
in einem
Höhengelände
oder aus
offenen Terrassentüren
beispielsweise
aus einem Sanatorium,
wird es schwer
vergessen.
Nie eine Oper
komponiert,
keine
Symphonie,
nur diese
tragischen Progressionen
aus
artistischer Überzeugung
und mit einer
kleinen Hand.
The unfinished portrait of Frédéric Chopin and Georges Sand, painted by the French painter Eugene Delacroix in 1838.
Statische
Gedichte
Entwicklungsfremdheit
ist die Tiefe
des Weisen,
Kinder und
Kindeskinder
beunruhigen
ihn nicht,
dringen nicht
in ihn ein.
Richtungen
vertreten,
Handeln,
Zu- und
Abreisen
ist das
Zeichen einer Welt,
die nicht klar
sieht.
Vor meinem
Fenster,
− sagt der
Weise −
liegt ein Tal,
darin sammeln
sich die Schatten,
zwei Pappeln
säumen einen Weg,
du weißt –
wohin.
Perspektivismus
ist ein
anderes Wort für seine Statik:
Linien
anlegen,
sie
weiterführen
nach
Rankengesetz −
Ranken sprühen −,
auch Schwärme,
Krähen,
auswerfen in
Winterrot von Frühhimmeln,
dann sinken
lassen −
du weißt – für
wen.
Fragmente
Fragmente,
Seelenauswürfe,
Blutgerinnsel
des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts −
Narben –
gestörter Kreislauf der Schöpfungsfrühe,
die
historischen Religionen von fünf Jahrhunderten zertrümmert,
die
Wissenschaft: Risse im Parthenon,
Planck rann
mit seiner Quantentheorie
zu Kepler und
Kierkegaard neu getrübt zusammen −
aber Abende
gab es, die gingen in den Farben
des Allvaters,
lockeren, weitwallenden,
unumstößlich
in ihrem Schweigen
geströmten
Blaus,
Farbe der
Introvertierten,
da sammelte
man sich
die Hände auf
das Knie gestützt
bäuerlich,
einfach
und stillem
Trunk ergeben
bei den
Harmonikas der Knechte −
und andere
gehetzt von
inneren Konvoluten,
Wölbungsdrängen,
Stilbaukompressionen
oder Jagden
nach Liebe.
Ausdruckskrisen
und Anfälle der Erotik:
das ist der
Mensch von heute,
das Innere ein
Vakuum,
die
Kontinuität der Persönlichkeit
wird gewahrt
von den Anzügen,
die bei gutem
Stoff zehn Jahre halten.
Der Rest Fragmente,
halbe Laute,
Melodienansätze
aus Nachbarhäusern,
Negerspirituals
oder Ave
Marias.
Satzbau
Alle haben den
Himmel, die Liebe und das Grab,
damit wollen
wir uns nicht befassen,
das ist für
den Kulturkreis gesprochen und durchgearbeitet.
Was aber neu
ist, ist die Frage nach dem Satzbau
und die ist
dringend:
warum drücken
wir etwas aus?
Warum reimen
wir oder zeichnen ein Mädchen
direkt oder
als Spiegelbild
oder stricheln
auf eine Handbreit Büttenpapier
unzählige
Pflanzen, Baumkronen, Mauern,
letztere als
dicke Raupen mit Schildkrötenkopf
sich
unheimlich niedrig hinziehend
in bestimmter
Anordnung?
Überwältigend
unbeantwortbar!
Honoraraussicht
ist es nicht,
viele hungern
darüber. Nein,
es ist ein
Antrieb in der Hand,
ferngesteuert,
eine Gehirnanlage,
vielleicht ein
verspäteter Heilbringer oder Totemtier,
auf Kosten des
Inhalts ein formaler Priapismus,
er wird
vorübergehen,
aber heute ist
der Satzbau
das Primäre.
»Die wenigen,
die was davon erkannt« - (Goethe) -
wovon
eigentlich?
Ich nehme an:
vom Satzbau.
Notturno
Im Nebenzimmer
die Würfel auf den Holztisch,
benachbart ein
Paar im Ansaugestadium,
mit einem
Kastienast auf dem Klavier
tritt die
Natur hinzu –
ein Milieu,
das mich anspricht.
Da versinken
die Denkprozesse,
die
Seekrankheit, die einem tagsüber
die
Brechzentren bearbeitet,
gehn unter in
Alkohol und Nebulosem –
endlich
Daseinsschwund und Seelenausglanz!
Auf Wogen
liegen –
natürlich kann
man untergehn,
aber das ist
eine Zeitfrage
doch Zeit –
vor Ozeanen –?
Die waren
vorher,
vor Bewußtsein
und Empfängnis,
keiner fischte
ihre Ungeheuer,
keiner litt
tiefer als drei Meter
und das ist
wenig.
Schumann
Wie bist du
darauf gekommen,
wie kamen die
Töne dir bei,
wo
aufgestiegen, erglommen,
F-dur, die
Träumerei?
War es die
Frühe, die leere,
in der die
Träume vergehn,
oder war es
die Nacht, die schwere,
in der die
Träume geschehn?
Waren Stunden,
tränenerhebende,
oder Stunden
des Glückes dein –
eine
alles-zusammen-erlebende
muss es
gewesen sein,
noch heute
sendet sie Streifen
aus Einst und
Immer und Nie,
wenn wir ans
Radio greifen,
F-dur – die
Reverie.
Was schlimm ist
Wenn man kein
Englisch kann,
von einem
guten englischen Kriminalroman zu hören,
der nicht ins
Deutsche übersetzt ist.
Bei Hitze ein
Bier sehn,
das man nicht
bezahlen kann.
Einen neuen
Gedanken haben,
den man nicht
in einen Hölderlinvers einwickeln kann,
wie es die
Professoren tun.
Nachts auf
Reisen Wellen schlagen hören
und sich
sagen, daß sie das immer tun.
Sehr schlimm:
eingeladen sein,
wenn zu Hause
die Räume stiller,
der Café
besser
und keine
Unterhaltung nötig ist.
Am
schlimmsten:
nicht im
Sommer sterben,
wenn alles
hell ist
und die Erde
für Spaten leicht.
Reisen
Meinen Sie
Zürich zum Beispiel
sei eine
tiefere Stadt,
wo man Wunder
und Weihen
immer als
Inhalt hat?
Meinen Sie,
aus Habana,
weiß und
hibiskusrot,
bräche ein
ewiges Manna
für Ihre
Wüstennot?
Bahnhofstraßen
und Rueen,
Boulevards,
Lidos, Laan –
selbst auf den
Fifth Avenueen
fällt Sie die
Leere an –
ach,
vergeblich das Fahren!
Spät erst
erfahren Sie sich:
bleiben und
stille bewahren
das sich
umgrenzende Ich.
Teils-Teils
In meinem
Elternhaus hingen keine Gainsboroughs
wurde auch
kein Chopin gespielt
ganz
amusisches Gedankenleben
mein Vater war
einmal im Theater gewesen
Anfang des
Jahrhunderts
Wildenbruchs
»Haubenlerche«
davon zehrten
wir
das war alles.
Nun längst zu
Ende
graue Herzen,
graue Haare
der Garten in
polnischem Besitz
die Gräber
teils-teils
aber alle
slawisch,
Oder-Neiße-Linie
für
Sarginhalte ohne Belang
die Kinder
denken an sie
die Gatten
auch noch eine Weile
teils-teils
bis sie
weitermüssen
Sela,
Psalmenende.
Heute noch in
einer Großstadtnacht
Caféterasse
Sommersterne,
vom Nebentisch
Hotelqualitäten
in Frankfurt
Vergleiche,
die Damen
unbefriedigt
wenn ihre
Sehnsucht Gewicht hätte
wöge jede drei
Zentner.
Aber ein
Fluidum! Heiße Nacht
à la
Reiseprospekt und
die Ladies
treten aus ihren Bildern:
unwahrscheinliche
Beauties
langbeinig,
hoher Wasserfall
über ihre
Hingabe kann man sich gar nicht
erlauben
nachzudenken.
Ehepaare
fallen demgegenüber ab,
kommen nicht
an, Bälle gehn ins Netz,
er raucht, sie
dreht ihre Ringe,
überhaupt
nachdenkenswert
Verhältnis von
Ehe und Mannesschaffen
Lähmung oder
Hochtrieb.
Fragen,
Fragen! Erinnerungen in einer
Sommernacht
hingeblinzelt,
hingestrichen,
in meinem
Elternhaus hingen keine
Gainsboroughs
nun alles
abgesunken
teils-teils
das Ganze
Sela,
Psalmenende.
Kann keine
Trauer sein
In jenem
kleinen Bett, fast Kinderbett, starb die Droste
(zu sehn in
ihrem Museum in Meersburg),
auf diesem
Sofa Hölderlin im Turm bei einem Schreiner,
Rilke, George
wohl in Schweizer Hospitalbetten,
in Weimar
lagen die großen schwarzen Augen
Nietzsches auf
einem weißen Kissen
bis zum
letzten Blick −
alles Gerümpel
jetzt oder garnicht mehr vorhanden,
unbestimmbar,
wesenlos
im
schmerzlos-ewigen Zerfall.
Wir tragen in
uns Keime aller Götter,
das Gen des
Todes und das Gen der Lust −
wer trennte
sie: die Worte und die Dinge,
wer mischte
sie: die Qualen und die Statt,
auf der sie
enden, Holz mit Tränenbächen,
für kurze
Stunden ein erbärmlich Heim.
Kann keine
Trauer sein. Zu fern, zu weit,
zu unberührbar
Bett und Tränen,
kein Nein,
kein Ja,
Geburt und
Körperschmerz und Glauben
ein Wallen,
namenlos, ein Huschen,
ein
Überirdisches, im Schlaf sich regend,
bewegte Bett
und Tränen −
schlafe ein!
More Poems, here (in German)
Biography (in German)
If you
don't know German, on these websites you can find English translations of some of these
poems.
my copy of ''Bruggen Slaan''. Poems selected and translated into the Dutch by Huub Beurskens, Meulenhoff, 1978.
The
phenomenon of writers ignored, abused, cast out, disgraced, not for the
disaster of their writing but the disaster of their politics, is one
contribution the twentieth century has made to the history of literature.
Cioran, Kipling, Gorky, you name it: the history of literature has become natty
at its particular version of kashrut. We’re therefore now accustomed to the
general map of literature being marked by weird absences, small oblivions,
fuzzy silences. Mostly, I guess, these oblivions are now so usual that their
existence is hardly noticed. Who, for instance, is exercised by the absence in
their iBooks library of the German poet Gottfried Benn? And yet Benn—along with
Brecht, Celan, and Rilke—is one of the great German poets of the twentieth
century, the equal of Eliot or Montale. And the reason for this absence, as
usual, is not the work but the life.
Outwardly,
Benn’s life was the usual Prussian thing (even down to the Mensur, the dueling
scar, by his left eye). Born in 1886, he became a notable and successful
doctor. He studied at the Academy for
Military-Medical Instruction and was
attached to an infantry regiment. In 1912, when he was 26, he was discharged,
but in 1914, he returned to the army and worked in occupied Brussels as a
doctor in an army brothel. But inside, Benn was volcanic. In 1912, he published
his first collection of
poems—a pamphlet called Morgue and Other Poems. It is one of the most
disabused debuts in literary history. The tone of this small collection is pure
garishness, in a mode that could roughly be summed up
as
medico-expressionist:
The mouth of the girl who had lain long in
the rushes
looked
so nibbled.
When
they opened her chest, her
esophagus was so holey.
Finally
in a bower under the diaphragm
they
found a nest of young rats.
In this
era of his first fame, Benn was all shock value and lurid precision:
Flesh
that went naked.
Tanned
unto the mouth by the sea.
Deeply
ripened for Grecian joys.
How far
along the summer, in sickle-
submissiveness!
Penultimate
day of the ninth month!
Athirst
with stubble and last corn-shocks.
Unfurlings,
blood, fatigue,
Deranged
by dahlia-nearness.
Man-brown
jumps on woman-brown.
The
intellectual background to this early work is not, let’s say, unsketchy. Benn
is not the poet you want if you are craving intellectual lucidity. In a text
called “Epilogue,” published in 1921 to accompany a collected version of his
poems, he offered this vision of his “contemporary”: “the most committed
individualist to the dirt under his fingernails, and forced to social
compromises from feeding to sexual habits; always that mediocre balance, and
that tediously positive latency.” His vision of the world was very simple: a
medical nihilism—the
human, in Benn’s early work, was a swarm of dark instincts,
with a fragile set of manners trying to restrain him. And that swarm was always
Benn’s subject: the exposed self, a mass
of neurons and nerve-endings, registering its billion impressions: “I lived on
the edge where existence ceases and
the self begins.”
Theatrical,
macabre, exaggerated: this was the nature of Benn’s dark thinking. It was instinctive,
rather than considered. And therefore Benn was vulnerable to a certain kind of
social or intellectual temptation when, in the 1930s, the Nazi ideology
emerged. It seemed to offer some kind of analog to his own gleefully manic
expressionist thinking: a eulogy of blood and
science and
earth. At which point, of course, he made himself disgraced.
Benn was
elected to the poetry section of the Prussian Academy in 1932 and appointed its
head a year later. In response, the novelist Klaus Mann wrote Benn an open
letter, attacking him for his perceived collaboration with the emerging regime.
Benn’s own response took the form of a radio talk, “Reply to the Exiles,” where
he argued that no exile had the right to make moral accusations against those
who remained in Germany. Only those who stayed could understand the true nature
of Nazism: “There you sit, in your seaside resorts and take us to task, because
we work together on the reconstruction of a state.” It was not a document of
any great intellectual distinction. In October 1933, Benn was one of the
eighty-eight signatories of the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the oath of
most faithful allegiance to Hitler.
But it
would be unfair not to record that Benn’s Nazism was only fleeting. By the
beginning of July 1934, following the Night of the Long Knives, his allegiance
to the regime was over. The Nazis were not, he now realized, the savage
cultural pessimists he admired: instead they were criminal
politicians, with no art in them at all. He was replaced as head of the
Academy’s poetry section, and in response
chose once more to go into the army: the “aristocratic form of emigration.” His
career from then on was a deep spiral into his self—culminating, in his work
after 1945, in poems of an extraordinary, spare, broken beauty. He died in
1956.
Consider
his great poem “1886,” in
which he surveyed the year of his
birth. In this poem, you find the entire panorama of Benn: a strange outbreak
of expressionist craziness among the Finanzbourgeoisie and the Prussian
establishment. The inventions and the theater, the advances in science and
industry! The innocent nineteenth century! Until finally this broken, sly,
brilliant poet brought his almanac of the year’s events to its broken, encoded
conclusion:
1886—
birth
year of certain expressionists,
also of
state councilor Furtwängler,
emigré
Kokoschka,
General
Field Marshall von W— (†),
doubling
of equity
at
Schneider-Creusot, Putilov, Krupp Steel.
That
list is not an innocent list. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was only a
“state councilor” because Göring had forced the honor on him, as part of a
power game between the state and the musician. Furtwängler’s refusal to leave
Germany, and his simultaneous refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Nazi
regime, made him internationally notorious. Just as that final trio of
companies is not a random selection from the stock market: all three were arms
manufacturers. Schneider-Creusot made the first French tank, the Schneider CA
1; Putilov manufactured the Soviet T-34 tank; Krupp Steel was the Nazi regime’s
first-choice arms manufacturer, making use at one point of around 100,000 slave
laborers, of whom roughly 25,000 were Jewish. We should therefore linger over
Benn’s mini-line, “emigré Kokoschka.” For Kokoschka’s career was an upside-down
version of Benn’s. Just as Benn had been a leading expressionist poet,
Kokoschka was one of the great expressionist painters. But Kokoschka left
Vienna in 1934, a year after resigning from the Prussian Academy of Art in
protest at the expulsion of Jewish artists. Kokoschka’s emigration was moral.
Benn, of course, chose a different trajectory in the terrible 1930s—even if,
very soon, his work too, like Kokoschka’s, was condemned as
degenerate. In the end every expressionist was to be shunned by the Nazi
regime—just as Benn would then be shunned
forever, for his year of Nazi temptation.
In other
words, the career of Gottfried Benn is a case study in disgrace. And now the
international reader, whose acquaintance with Benn might have otherwise been as
fragmentary as a mention in an essay by T. S. Eliot or in a poem by Frank
O’Hara, can finally examine this case study with voracious comprehensiveness,
owing to this virtuosic, acidic selection of translations by the poet Michael
Hofmann. Benn’s late style is one of literature’s great inventions, and the
composition of this selection conditions its reader to concentrate on that
phenomenon: from 1912 to 1947, a period of 35 years, Hofmann offers just
twenty-four poems, while from 1949 to 1955, the last six years of Benn’s life,
there are a lavish forty-eight.
This is
not, it should be said, the obvious mathematics. To the average Berliner, I
imagine, it is the pre-war poetry that is best known. So this book is not just
an introduction to Benn: it is also a small guerrilla tactic of exposition and
understanding. But I think this imbalance is also right. Sure, Benn’s early
work was splashy, brilliant, malign. Hofmann translates an early prose text on
Paris, from 1925, which is typical for its delight in the world’s theatrical
appearances, where the Moulin Rouge becomes a metaphysical object of
contemplation:
dance,
dance, dance. Gradually become insufferable in the rest of Europe, here
thrilling, off-color and elegant: Buck Dance, Flicker Dance, Peacock’s Mirror
Dance, Jazz Dance, Leopard Dance, Danse des Gigolettes, Danse des
Candélabres.—And pictures, continents, cultures; things rising up out of
trapdoors, other things spilling out of bonbon boxes, riding, driving, leaps
into the Nile, family scenes, Black Masses, ball on the roof of the Astor,
Temptations of St. Antony, Panther Column of the Queen of Sheba: Apaches,
magicians, standard-bearers, lotus wearers, catamites, amazons, and—“ah, viens
dans mes bras”—slaves.
Yet the
poems that Benn wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, which settled his reputation,
represent another kind of achievement—an achievement the reader will not find
here. These poems were small sculptures, little audio contraptions, in which
Benn enclosed his expressionist instincts in intricate quatrains. In his
introduction, Hofmann explains the problem: “I am conscious that the poems of
this period are underrepresented here. I’m afraid they were too difficult and
idiosyncratic for me to carry them into English in any important way. I
preferred to go, more or less directly, from the shocking early to the weary
late.” I am not sure I begrudge this absence, because it is in the poems
published after the war, in the full desolation of his isolation and defeat,
that Benn’s true grandeur emerges. In a “Letter from Berlin,” written in July
1948 to the editor of the literary journal Merkur, Benn described his position:
“I am in the rather unusual situation of having been banned since 1936, excluded
from literature then, and still and again on the list of undesirables today.”
That word “excluded” is the clue to Benn’s late style. It is what makes Benn so
unusual, and so necessary, in this sprightly neon era. This is not a time for
language with gravity—for distressing, unsavory moral terms like “cowardice” or
“corruption.” Yet such terms cannot be dispensed with, after all. And it is
Benn who speaks from inside this moral gray zone. He gives disgrace its
aesthetic form. He experienced life as total defeat, and in this disgrace, he
discovered a kind of nihilistic truth. In Benn’s poetry, the real meaning of
disgrace was not remorse. No, its real meaning was isolation. In disgrace, he
discovered how easily one can be severed from every community. From this
isolation, his conclusion was an absolute disillusion. The only truth in which
he could believe was the truth he had always relied on: the swarming, isolated
self.
The
reader of his selected works, therefore, can trace the answer to a dark
question: what does disgrace sound like? These late poems are extraordinary
exercises in bare, forked writing: slouchy, polyglot, nicotine-nervous. They
are as splintered as a pile of pick-up sticks—all dying cadences, where the
rhythm falters or disintegrates. True, Benn was always a master of crazy
tone-shifts. But in the early poems it was all flesh and tropicalia: “The
violins green. The harp plinks of May. / Palms blush in the desert simoom.” Now
the shifts were smaller, more like the quivers of a heart monitor.
The late
poem “Impromptu” gives this book its title, and it is a small version of Benn’s
exposed fragility, and of Hofmann’s own brilliantly delicate transformations.
The first verse is a moment of nostalgia:
On the
radio someone was singing
“Die
Drosselgass’ zu Rüdesheim”—
I was stunned:
thrushes,
that seems to imply a spring
day,
who
knows what dangling over the walls,
unbundling,
twittering, something in light
green for sure—
my heart
leapt, not the old one of today
but the
young one, tired and exhilarated
at the
end of a day’s hike.
From
this pastoral opening, Benn then free-associates, zigzagging into his past:
with
your rucksack jammed under your
head,
neither
of them with anything in them
except
what you needed
for the
morrow.
Until
the third and final stanza then simply pauses, suspended in its own reverie:
A pair
of shoes. A son of the Muses.
Back
then, Liliencron was my God,
and I
wrote him a postcard.
The poem
ends in a kind of smudged, muted hiatus. (Liliencron was a German lyric poet,
who died in 1909.) But there are two moments where Hofmann has converted Benn’s
talkiness into something even more appealing and casual: the lovely speechy
repetition of “them” in that line from the second verse: “neither of them with
anything in them,” for Benn’s “die beide nichts enthielten.” While the last
line, with its rickety prose, is even more conversational than Benn’s own last
line: “ich schrieb ihm eine Ansichtskarte.” Benn is still based on an iambic
meter. Hofmann has made that meter disappear. In the process, he has written a
great poem.
And so
it goes for so many of these late poems. Their atmosphere is
always melancholy:
Listen,
this is what the last evening will
be like
when
you’re still capable of going out:
you’re smoking your Junos,
quaffing
your three pints of Würzburger
Hofbräu
and
reading about the UN as reflected in
the pages of the Spiegel…
As
always, his only loyalty is the medical loyalty of a doctor to his case notes,
or impressions. No wonder, therefore, that these poems also run through a
recklessly unstable range of tones. From the isolation of a café table, Benn
enlarges to the isolation of an entire life: “That’s all you are, you’ve no
house or hill / to call your own, to dream in a sunny landscape ...” And yet at
this point, at the poem’s end, he then performs a small trick of intellectual
acrobatics. Sure, that’s all he was, writes Benn:
. .. but
Zeus and all the immortals,
the
great souls, the cosmos and all the
suns
were
there for you too, spun and fed
through you,
that’s
all you were, finished as begun—
your
last evening—good night.
This is
not the normal way of constructing a lyric poem. In one stanza, Benn suddenly
balloons nostalgically into an entire classical inheritance—then immediately
cancels it out, in the detritus of his café table. And Benn was also agile at
performing such acrobatics the other way around. The prickly poem “Thinking,”
say, can at first irritably itemize the dead intellectual landscape—“Or take
the essay world, / one man stitches up another / while the rest of the
brotherhood looks on”—and yet end in a kind of stilled wonder:
But
there’s one thought that is the reality
of the gods,
its
wellspring may indeed be murky,
but then
it’s there
full of
memory of her
who
shall remain nameless.
In his
“Letter from Berlin” in 1948, Benn had analyzed what he saw as the decline of
Western culture. His conclusion was that this decline was due to the “craven
crawling of its intelligentsia to political concepts.” And while this might
sound convenient for someone whose politics had been so culpable, it also
represents, I think, a kind of truth. In the same way as his minimal thinking
had made him vulnerable to the Nazi temptation, now this minimalism, this
commitment to notation, allowed him to discover something more profound:
“Everything else that concerns life is questionable and uncertain; we feel no
actual connection to the numinous, not to mention the so-called national; the
only actual thing is what is grounded in an expressive aesthetic work.” The
only things Benn could trust now, in the postwar world, were particulars: of
artistic works, of the self. In fact, there was no need for such a distinction:
the exposed self and the exposed poem were the same thing. Minute thinking
could trust only minimal notations. And so one hero, or emblem, was Chopin:
ideas
weren’t his strong suit,
ideas
miss the point
Rather
than thinking with ideas, Chopin thought with formal properties:
He
composed no operas,
no
symphonies,
only
those tragic progressions
from
artistic conviction
and with
a small hand.
In this
state, Benn finally emerged with a strange kind of apparatus, described
haltingly in his poem “Ah, the Faraway Land”:
self-communing
there
without
taking in anything to hand,
sense of
selfhood,
early
mechanisms,
totem
fragments
in the
soft air—
After all,
what is an I that speaks in a poem? Benn’s answer was very simple: an I is a
recording device. In a prose piece called “Summa Summarum,” in 1926, Benn had
happily added up the minuscule amounts of money he had earned from his writing
(“the total comes to 975 marks”). But then, he concluded, what did it matter?
“A poem is the unpaid labor of the intellect, the fonds perdu, practice with a
sandbag: one-sided, inconsequential, and without partners.” It was a reflex of
the self’s apparatus. Many years later his intuition was the same, but
inflected by a much darker knowledge: the destitution was not just financial,
but also philosophical. “At present I am not working on anything, except the
gathering of new impressions,” he wrote in 1953, “and testing of the methods
and principles I
have previously followed.”
But if
this is true, what is a lyric i in another language? Or, in particular, what is
one meant to do with the miniature quilts and collages of vocabulary that Benn
feeds at high speed through his style? The achievement of Hofmann’s talent in
this book is that these poems feel like live poems in English—and one reason
may be the strange resemblance between Benn’s poems and Hofmann’s own. Hofmann
has always been an expert in a slouchy, weary kind of writing. The collision of
registers and languages has always been his thing—the classical poet of
the suburban burger joint:
Now
we’ve arrived at this hamburger
heaven,
a bright
hole walled with mirrors where
our faces show
pale and
evacuated in the neon. We
spoon our sundaes
from a
metal dish. The chopped nuts are
poison.
No
wonder, then, that when Benn is sitting in a night café there is a kind of
overlap, or contamination:
The door
melts away: a woman.
Dry
desert. Canaanite tan.
Chaste.
Concavities. A scent accompanies
her, less a scent
Than a
sweet pressure of the air
Against
my brain.
An
obesity waddles after.
There is
an authority to Hofmann’s linguistic decisions that is exemplary. (Hofmann’s
volume has been published as a dual-
language edition, with the German
text opposite its English translation, which allows the reader to trace the
small chutzpah of Hofmann’s inventions.) Not that it is without its problems,
of course. The deeply personal nature of this selection is partly conditioned
by the cannibal nature of Hofmann’s translation technique—so that the stitched
melodies of Benn’s middle poems, as Hofmann admits, are almost entirely lost. Just read this out loud:
Wo alles sich durch
Glück beweist
und tauscht
den Blick und tauscht die
Ringe
im Weingeruch,
im Rausch der Dinge—:
dienst du dem
Gegenglück, dem Geist.
Then
compare Hofmann’s slack equivalent:
Everything
lays claim to happiness,
Swaps
glances, swaps rings
In
wine-breath, in the intoxication of
things;
You
serve the counter-happiness, the
intellect.
Finding
an English to match Benn’s stately German would certainly not be easy. But
Hofmann’s relaxed solution here makes it harder to appreciate the power of
Benn’s late style, the dignity of its collapse—
especially when
that collapse has been so brilliantly rewritten by Hofmann. Benn, in another
poem, sarcastically describes the devastations of human progress:
Take
sheepherding,
an
entire continent lives by it,
then
along come synthetic fibers
and the
mouflons are foutus.
In
Benn’s German, the last line is in fact “und die Mufflons sind k.o.” Hofmann
has deftly decided to represent a foreign flourish with a flourish in another
foreign language. In fact, he sometimes makes Benn polyglot when there is no
obvious need: the great poem “Teils-Teils” is translated into the more Frenchly
languid “Par ci, par là.” And this does, I admit, worry me: there is nothing
less primly sophisticated than Benn’s late style, and I am not sure that casual
French is quite right for his art of weariness. But it is true that, in keeping
with Benn’s general polyglot mode, the poem itself contains its own moment of
French already: “Heisse Nacht / à la Reiseprospekt”: “Balmy night / à la travel
brochure.” Hofmann’s polyglot extra, therefore, is an exaggeration, rather than
a wholesale importation.
The true
achievement of these translations is to be the same but different, to be an
accurate reflection of Benn’s nervous style while at the same time presenting a
unified voice in English:
From the
saloon bar the rattle of dice on
a wooden tabletop,
beside
you a couple at the
anthropophagous stage,
a
chestnut bough on the piano adds a
natural touch,
all in
all, my kind of place.
My kind
of place! So it should not be a surprise if, in the poem “Orpheus,” Hofmann
also allows himself a kind of cartoon tracing:
One
sends me such meaning looks.
And
another, well-built, freckled,
probably
mixed-race (“it’s called yellow
poppy”),
beckons
demurely, suggests chaste games
and
means rampant desire—(“inspect my
love chalice’s
purple!”—forget
it, baby!)
This is
translation as free jazz.
In 1954,
two years before he died, benn gave a lecture on “Aging as a Problem for
Artists.” He began by considering the question of late style, of late work and
early work, as it had been examined in the past by other writers. And then, in
the middle of this survey, Benn paused and offered a question that he imagined
might be forming in the minds of his audience: “is there some personal motive
involved?” He had to admit that he represented a particular case: “think for a
moment, if you will, an author with a dramatic past, living in dramatic times,
emerging among a group of cogenerationists from many countries who
underwent broadly the same stylistic evolution, call it futurism,
expressionism, surrealism, which even today enlivens the discussion, a
stylistic revolution really.” Yes, Benn had begun writing in the balmy energy
of the modernist moment. Now he had reached a kind of maturity: “Our author has
followed various pursuits: he was a poet and an essayist, a citizen and a
soldier, a settler moved in from the countryside, and an homme du monde in some
of the great cities of the world—usually controversial, usually opposed, our
author has reached a certain age, and is still publishing.” But he has a
problem: if he continues to write in the garish style of his youth, he is
attacked for repeating himself, but if he writes calmly, with spare lucidity,
he is attacked for abandoning his essence.
He adds
that there is also a deeper problem particular to him: “If it further happens
that this author at some time in his life has expressed views which are later
reckoned to be ‘inappropriate’; these views are now trailed in his wake, and
people are happy when, like a horse drawing a harrow across a field, the harrow
keeps clipping his heels.” And yet surprisingly, perhaps, the example he gives
of an “inappropriate” view is not from his season of Nazism in the 1930s, but
from a recent dialogue, Three Old Men, that had been
published in
1949:
In a
conversation, a very serious conversation among three old men, our author had
once written the sentence: “To be mistaken, and yet to go on believing in
himself, that’s what makes a man, and fame comes to him irrespective of triumph
or defeat.” From the perspective of the author, this sentence was a sort of
anthropological elegy, a coded melancholy, but his critics saw it differently.
They found the sentence alarming: a blank check, they said, for all kinds of
political aberrations.
What
Benn says here, I think, is both in absolute denial and absolutely true. There
is no way of putting this any other way. His greatness is an oxymoron. Why
shouldn’t he be attacked for such refusal of remorse—this man who had signed an
oath pledging allegiance to Hitler and had not fought against any measures
taken against the Jews? And yet that phrase of his, “anthropological elegy,” is
also beautiful. There is no end, after all, to the mistakes of the intellect.
Every judgment of another person is inevitably fraught with vanity.
It is
from this canceled perspective that Benn writes. And in the conclusion of his
talk, he offers two images, two autobiographical stand-ins, for how he has
tried to proceed. His first is Michelangelo’s astonishing last sculpture, the
Rondanini Pietà. In this sculpture, so haunting and so blurred, writes Benn, it
seems that Michelangelo has given up on his previous works and styles: “Here,
then, one has little alternative but to suppose, is an instance of a great man
unable to go on using his established methods and techniques—
presumably because they will have struck him as outmoded and
conventional—but with no
expressive forms available for his new contents, breaking off, and lowering his
hands.” That, I think, was the condition in
which Benn found himself amid the wreckage of World War II. His method of
continuing and persevering was found in his second example—his image of
Flaubert, now old, still sitting in a provincial bistro, noting
down his observations: “in that state
of concentration, in that constant visual and acoustic alertness, to penetrate
the object, to go behind the faces, to make once more that tragic, superhuman
effort of observation, of finding expressions, of collecting sentences that
work—there they are sitting at the bar, all of them after money, all of them
after love, and he is in quest of expression, of a sequence of sentences.”
And so
there is nobility, no question, in Benn’s lonely exhortation to the young:
Don’t
for one moment forget the dubiousness and eccentricity of your enterprise, the
dangers and hatreds that attend your activity. Keep in mind that coldness and
egoism are part of your task. Your work has left behind the temples and the
sacrificial vessels and the painting of pillars, the painting of chapels is no
longer part of it either. You are wallpapering with yourself, and you have no
alternative....
You are
wallpapering with yourself. This was the wisdom of Benn’s desolate last
writings. It is a wisdom that he reached only through the after-effects of his
political corruption: but it is still a wisdom, after all. The hideous mistake
of Benn’s politics had given him access to a place that most people never need
to find. That Benn was adequate to this terrible place is what makes him a
great writer—a lonely kind of integrity
that enabled
Benn to write poetry as gigantic yet minimal as, say, the poem called just
“Herr Wehner”:
This is
mine
Herr
Wehner
he was
our house tutor
died
early of phthisis
once
he’d infected my younger brother
who died
of tubercular meningitis.
Benn
begins the poem with a series of miniature phrases of memoir. It seems like
almost nothing. But then, at the poem’s end, without fuss, Benn performs one of
his sudden tonal shifts, and this forgotten figure acquires a kind of halo. The
amazed reader realizes that somehow, in the arrangement of two or three broken
sentences, Benn has found a way of describing what oblivion looks like:
Herr
Wehner,
what
makes him mine
is the
fact that he is buried somewhere
rotting
away in a collective farm in (now)
Poland
no one
in the village
will
remember him
but he
sometimes appears to me
gray and
isolated
under
certain historical aspects.
The
Greatest Ex-Nazi Writer. Never heard of
Gottfried Benn? It's because of his politics. By Adam Thirlwell. The New Republic, April 6, 2014.
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