Benn, Gottfried | Edward Timms (essay date 1988)
Edward Timms (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: “Treason of the Intellectuals?: Benda, Benn and Brecht,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier, St. Martin's Press, 1988, pp. 23-32.
[In the following excerpt, Timms discusses Benn's controversial political orientation during the era of Nazi Germany, and the influence this had upon his poetry.]
Treason of the Intellectuals defines the norms against which we may assess the polarisation of political sentiment in Germany. The test case is provided by Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). Benn was one of the most influential figures in the Expressionist movement and exemplifies its political volatility—its tendency to generate impulses towards both left-wing and right-wing extremes. Unlike his gifted contemporaries Georg Trakl and Ernst Stadler, Benn survived the First World War—after serving as...
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