SOURCE: “Aspects of Floral Imagery in Gottfried Benn's Poetry,” in Carleton Germanic Papers, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 1-17.

Ich muß nun wieder
meine dunklen Gärten begehn

“Lebe wohl—”

To talk of flowers when discussing Gottfried Benn may seem slightly eccentric, whether because such approaches seem quaint in the light of contemporary literary criticism's abstractions, or because other issues might seem more pressing in the case of this poet.¹ An answer to both reservations can only be that the theme was unmistakeably important in Benn's oeuvre. Even a casual reader will be struck by the frequency of references in the poems to specific flowers and to gardens and blooming in general. Against the assumption that floral imagery was only incidental to him, Benn insisted on seeing the very tragedy of existence represented in the fate of flowers, as in a letter to Hans Egon Holthusen:

Daß Sie alles, was mit Blumen zusammenhängt, dicht am Kitsch erblicken, interessiert mich am meisten. Blumen tragen die Sonne, den Sommer und die Nacht, ich empfinde sie als durchaus tragisch: sinnlos u schnell verblühend (“Blüht nicht zu früh, ach blüht erst, wenn ich komme—”).²

It is all the more surprising then, that, with occasional exceptions, not much has been said about flowers in Benn's poetry. For a poet who was both a modern and urbanized, an interest in flowers could not have been merely a reflection of the natural environment, and cannot be explained as such. A more thorough reading will help to expose some constants and patterns of Benn's systematic use of flowers and plants as both symbols and signs.

The prose works further support the importance of this theme. In the story “Die Eroberung,” first published in 1915, the semi-autobiographical character Rönne encountered flowers in the middle of the city:

Er war wieder auf der Straße. Eine Frau bot einen flachen Korb herum mit Veilchensträußen, blau wie Stücke der Nacht, mit Orchideenbündeln, weichen Zusammenflusses aus Hellblau und Orange.

Die Orchidee, lachte er selbstgefällig, die Blüte des heißen Afrika, der Liebling der Sammler, der Gegenstand so mancher Ausstellungen des In- und Auslandes, jawohl, ich weiß Bescheid, jawohl, ich bin nicht unkundig, selbst zu einem Fachmann fände ich Beziehungen.³

An ordinary encounter with a flower-seller becomes a moment of pride and satisfaction, mingled with irony, at knowing about the plants. Benn took such pride in his knowledge, which he contrasted, rightly or wrongly, to the ungrounded use of floral imagery by his contemporaries such as George or Rilke.⁴ If then we become more knowledgeable about the flowers which appear in Benn's texts, then it might be possible for us to come closer to understanding a poet who was indeed a “Fachmann” in such matters.

The use of the term “Fachmann” for those who know about flowers should be emphasized, for it involves an argument about the ordering of knowledge. A person who knows about an area of interest, such as orchids or roses, cannot be reduced to any partial category, such as botanist, historian, gardener, or the like. The “Fachmann” is involved at all levels and in many ways with the object of concern. In the case of flowers, knowledge which is relevant may come from areas which modern science would keep separated: botany, medicine, mythology, aesthetics, social history. A gentian would mean something different in each context, which prompts the question of how a unified meaning might be recognized. As Michel Foucault showed, even the very way of seeing has been divided as knowledge has been compartmentalized. In a passage which is especially interesting here, Foucault spoke of the shift in the clinic away from the “gardener's” gaze:

Le regard des nosographes, jusqu'à la fin du XVIII^e siècle, était un regard de jardinier; il fallait reconnaître dans la variété des apparences l'essence spécifique. Au début du XIX^e siècle, un autre modèle s'impose: celui de l'opération chimique, qui en isolant les éléments composants permet de définir la composition, d'établir les points communs, les ressemblances et les différences avec les autres ensembles, et de fonder ainsi une classification qui ne se fonde plus sur des types spécifiques, mais sur des formes de rapports […]⁵

Goethe might be taken as an example of someone who still sought out essences, as in his quest for the Urpflanze.⁶ But Benn, who had been trained in the techniques of medical diagnosis and classification elaborated by the positivistic sciences of the nineteenth century, could not be content with symbolic readings. For a poet who admired Goethe greatly and a doctor who insisted on the validity of the objective clinical gaze, the natural world was a theatre of intense struggle about how to see. Could a doctor, as a doctor, even look at flowers unless they were a symptom? The answer required Benn to develop a synthesizing vision in which the medical “Fachmann” and the “Fachmann” of the garden could understand each other.

Thus Benn was never indifferent to the botanical-biological aspects of plants. In his ecology, flowers bloom at the right time of year. Forsythias will bloom in the spring, asters in the autumn. But even passing references are correct in their gardening calendar. In “Valse d'Automne”, the autumn colours indicate the season:

Das Rot in den Bäumen
und die Gärten am Ziel—,
Farben, die träumen,
doch sie sagen soviel.

(294)

Similarly, in “September,” the time of year is emphasized by the reference to the late-blooming phlox:

… über den Zaun gebeugt mit Phlox
(von Regenguß zerspalten,
seltsamen Wildgeruchs)

(329)

Or again, in “Finis Poloniae,” where there is mention of the hydrangea's late and long flowering period:

im Anschluß eine Hortensie, die ruhigste der Blumen,
die bis November im Regen aushält

(380)

Equally carefully, plants are located in appropriate settings, whether in grain fields (poppies, bachelors' buttons), in city gardens (geraniums), or in exotic places (almond, eucalyptus). Most importantly, the flowers are fully integrated into the cycle of reproduction. Even when caught in a momentary vision, this dimension will be present. Flowers blossom, make seeds, and then fade and drop, having completed their part in the natural process. The poem “Kelche” attempts to capture this fleeting sequence, which both does and does not make sense to human beings:

Unfasslich sind die Kelche
der Blumen im Gewind,
man fragt sich, wo und welche
die rätselvollsten sind.
Sie stehen flach und gläsern
doch auch mit Knoll und Stab,
sie stammen von den Gräsern
doch auch vom Fleische ab
Man kann sie nie erfassen
zweideutig, wesenlos
Erglühen und Erblassen
aus kaum verdeckten Schoss.

(367)

The precise vision of the botanist, who would catalogue the flowers by the shape of the bloom or by the kind of roots they have, is needed in order to describe. But this is only half the story. The history of the flower might be encompassed in one line, “Erglühen und Erblassen,” but that does not say much about the mystery of this multivalent presence.

In order to evoke that mysterious side more precisely, Benn returned to classical, particularly Greek, mythology. In that mythology, many flowers were signatures of the fates of gods, as the death of a god was metamorphically avoided through transformation into a flower. Names of the crocus, the hyacinth, or the narcissus are examples of such links.⁷ Within myth, the boundaries between animate beings and plants are easily crossed, unlike in the scientific classification. How Benn used this possibility of evoking transformation may be seen in the poem “Das Unaufhörliche,” where the story of Hyazinth becomes an ultimate commentary:

Säulen, die ruhn, Delphine,
verlaßne Scharen,
die Hyakynthos trugen, den Knaben,
früh verwandelt
zu Asche und Blumengeruch—:
da wohl noch mehr.

(222)

And these lines make the refrain which ends the poem:

Uralter Wandel, hell Gestein
Und Flucht der Herden bald verwandelt
zu Asche und Blumengeruch.

(223)

The lines are also a good example of something which is too often forgotten or neglected in reading antiseptic texts, namely that a reference to a flower will recall its various dimensions to mind. Anyone who has smelled the intense, penetrating aroma of the hyacinth will understand, will know, the reason why “Blumengeruch” is appropriately the last word, the one which lingers. Here and throughout, it is not enough to read the text without the world. It is not even enough to read “intertextually,” unless the world is taken as a text as well. The poet has a right to expect and demand of readers that they learn the meanings of flowers through encounters with them, before and after the poem.

The interpenetration of myth and the ordinary world can be mediated by flowers. A case in point might be the asphodel. Alice M. Coats reports that:

Asphodels are rare in gardens today, and one is apt to think them fabulous flowers, existing only in the starry imagination of the poets; yet in reality they are prosaic enough, and were well known to our ancestors; and if they are now banished from our borders it is to make room for better things, for they are perennials of rather ample growth, and look their best in their native home on the shores of the Mediterranean.⁸

The roots of the asphodel were eaten by the Greeks and down through the medieval period. Because it was believed the asphodels could nourish the dead, the Greeks planted them around tombs, and it was also thought by the Greeks that they grew in the underworld and on the banks of the Styx. The association with death and the underworld is alluded to by Benn in various poems:

Felder/ Sterben den Asphodelentod.

(“Englisches Café,” 55)

—Asphodelen,
der Proserpina geweiht—.

(“Henri Matisse: ‘Asphodèles’,” 298)

dann pflückt er sich Asphodelen
und wandert den Styxen zu—

(“Quartär—,” 350)

Die Schatten wandeln nicht nur in den Hainen,
davor die Asphodelenwiese liegt

(“Tristesse,” 452)

The references are consistent through the course of Benn's poetic career, over a span of forty years. Asphodels are a sign of death and the underworld, whether the larger background is sketched in or not. One may assume that whenever Benn referred to them, he meant to allude to the theme of death, as in the phrase in his address upon receiving the Büchner prize: “Tränen, Asphodelen und Blut.”⁹ Unless one is aware of the tradition and Benn's use of it, this allusion might seem merely flowery. It is only when the value of the floral sign is known to be constant within Benn's poetic language that a “decoding” can be successful.

When the individual signs are considered as part of an overall system, the differences between them can be meaningful. Given the link between asphodels and death, why does an aster figure in the morgue, making one of the most notorious images in modern German poetry? Part of the explanation lies in the aster's colour, which is mentioned in different poems:

Irgendeiner hatte ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster
zwischen die Zähne geklemmt.

(“Kleine Aster,” 21)

Sieh' dieses Sommers letzten blauen Hauch
Auf Astermeeren an die fernen
Baumbraunen Ufer treiben

(“Karyatide,” 81)

schon eine blaue Jalousie kann reichen
zu Asterhaftem, das aus Gärten drang.

(“Primäre Tage,” 219)

In his detailed study of the function of “blue” in Benn's work, Reinhold Grimm has demonstrated that this colour marks transition, becoming.¹⁰ The aster's presence in the morgue and in the corpse counteracts the finality of death, by virtue of its colour alone. But the aster is also a flower which blooms from late summer into fall, making the transition with the seasons. The poem “Astern” is most definite on the temporality of this flower:

Astern—, schwälende Tage,
alte Beschwörung, Bann,
die Götter halten die Waage
eine zögernde Stunde an.

(268)

The aster, more complex than just the colour blue by itself, represents an interval, a hesitation in the flow of cosmic time, a possibility of reversal. In the poem “Dunkler Sommer,” the aster is beginning to bloom as the roses and poppies are ending, so that the aster becomes a link across the interval between seasons:

Denke auch: Die Aster wächst
Schon auf. Sein wird Gesang und Nüsse
Und Laub und Nebel über dem Planeten!

(116)

Because of its name, the aster is a star as well as a flower, connecting the terrestrial and the heavenly regions. These various aspects of transition and mediation clarify why just this flower should be buried in the cavity:

Ich packte sie ihm in die Bauchhöhle
zwischen die Holzwolle,
als man zunähte.
Trinke dich satt in deiner Vase!
Ruhe sanft,
kleine Aster!

(“Kleine Aster,” 21)

The speaker's imperatives, anthropomorphizing the aster, also suggest that it will move against the ghastliness of death and will—momentarily—postpone the inevitable. The aster serves as a kind of antidote against time here and in “Der Psychiater”:

Mich überkommt das Asterbeet,
Und ich kann nicht vergehen: weggeblühtes Land,
Herbst und der Bäume stillgewordenes Blatt——

(99)

Under the influence of the blue aster, time is immobilized. Although other flowers and the leaves have passed away, the aster will remain, a solitary opposition to the domination of winter and of death.¹¹

Quite the opposite of the life-affirming blue for Benn was red. His red flowers are all ones which negate and dissolve. The most powerful is the poppy. Benn's descriptions of the poppy were especially precise botanically, as in the story “Die Insel”:

‘Mohn, pralle Form des Sommers,’ rief er, ‘Nabelhafter: Gruppierend Bauchiges, Dynamit des Dualismus: Hier steht der Farbenblinde, die Röte-Nacht. Ha, wie du hinklirrst! Ins Feld gestürzt, du Ausgezackter, Reiz-Felsen, ins Kraut geschwemmt,—und alle süßen Mittage, da mein Auge auf dir schlief letzte stille Schlafe, treue Stunden—¹²

The passage is less “Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung” and more an account of how the poppy seed rattles in the dry seed-head, which has a zig-zag rim.¹³ An allusion in “Dunkler Sommer” reminds us of the derivation of opium from Papaver somniferum (the plants are slashed so that the white sap may be collected and refined):

          nun liegt im Korn der Mohn
Umständlich reif, fast milchig, daß die Zitze
Ihm läuft, und honighaft

(116)

In the Greek mythological tradition, the poppy is linked on the one side with sleep and forgetting, because of its narcotic properties, and on the other with fertility, because each seedhead is filled with thousands of individual seeds.¹⁴ The poppy was thus made a primary symbol of Demeter. After she imbibed of the poppy, she was able to sleep and gather strength, so that upon her wakening the crops could grow again. Benn referred to both aspects; sleep or forgetting occur in several poems:

Schlaf! aus mohnigem Feld,
Aus den lethischen Essen
Nicht ein Atem der Welt

(“Nacht,” 148)

Schlafdorn und Mohnkelch, frische,
daraus das Weiße quillt
der Lippe zu—

(Betäubung,” 161)

stygische Blüten, Schlaf und Mohn

(“Regressiv,” 203)

The most startling reference to the poppy in its union of dissolution and fertility came in an early poem:

Da lobe ich mir den tiefen Alt des Mohns.
Da denkt man an Blutflade und Menstruation.
An Not, Röcheln, Hungern und Verrecken—
Kurz: an des Mannes dunklen Weg.—

(“Vor einem Kornfeld sagte einer,” 46)

It is the myth which accounts for the introduction of sexuality and cycles of reproduction into the field of the poppy. The male is excluded from this as Orpheus was excluded from the underworld of Demeter/Persephone. And a medical doctor might also, upon seeing the poppy, remember that the derivatives of the Papaver somniferum are used in the hospital for those in greatest pain, but are misused by addicts on their way to dissolution.

The deep red is the antithesis of the possibilities afforded by blue. The poppy intensifies and amplifies, so that its fitting environment is the heat of noon in summer-time:

O Mittag, der mit heißem Heu mein Hirn
Zu Wiese, flachem Land und Hirten schwächt,
Daß ich hinrinne und, den Arm im Bach,
Den Mohn an meine Schläfe ziehe—

(“Ikarus,” 79)

Coming into the presence of the poppy is like being seared by the divine:

Wir gerieten in ein Mohnfeld.
Überall schrien Ziegelsteine herum.
Baut uns mit in den Turm des Feuers
Für alles, was vor Göttern kniet.

(“Wir gerieten in ein Mohnfeld,” 43)

A paradox of the poppy is that such moments of intensity can pass and will be supplanted by a sense of having woken from a deep sleep of forgetting. This lends poignance to the bleak reflections of “Ein Schatten an der Mauer,” where the poppy is the only fleck of colour:

stumm liegen,
die eigenen Felder sehn,
das ganze Rittergut,
besonders lange
auf Mohn verweilen,
dem unvergeßlichen,
weil er den Sommer trug—
wo ist er hin—?

(382)

The poppy of forgetting remains as the only trace of summer, heat, stillness, and fulfilment. Unlike the asters, these poppies do not indicate a possible future. They only punctuate the weariness of remembering.

Other red flowers also have negative connotations for Benn. Geraniums, which have brightened the urban landscape since the middle of the nineteenth century, and which are considered by many people to be rather a cheering flower, are ambivalent signs for Benn:

wenn von Geranienborde
dann noch Erlöschen weht,
rauscht durch die Saison morte
High life: Identität.

(“Dynamik,” 173)

das Laub, die Lasten, Abgesänge,
Balkons, geranienzerfetzt—

(“Viele Herbste,” 417)

The rôle of the geraniums is not clear: are they agents of destruction or victims? Their intense, shrill shades of red and pink would attest to a surge of biological energy, but without the power to transform an entire landscape into something positive.

One of Benn's most intensely personal poems with flowers, “Nimm fort die Amarylle,” also involves a red one. While the amaryllis need not necessarily be red—they do come in other shades—the poem makes it clear why the colour here has to be red. Someone troubled with thoughts of ending and destruction finds those thoughts intensified in the ultimate red of the flower:

Ich kann kein Blühen mehr sehn,
es ist so leicht und so gründlich
und dauert mindestens stündlich
als Traum und Auferstehn.
Nimm fort die Amarylle,
du siehst ja: gründlich:—sie setzt
ganz rot, ganz tief, ganz Fülle
ihr Eins und Allerletzt.
Was wäre noch Stunde dauernd
in meinem zerstörten Sinn,
es bricht sich alles schauernd
in Augenblicken hin.

(434)

This late poem, some three years before Benn's death, presents the large blossom of the amaryllis as a reminder of transience and mortality. The flower which has emerged from the bulb cannot represent a cycle of renewal through reproduction, since the lone amaryllis, normally propagated from bulbs, will be barren. It will have spent itself in this burst of colour and then the flower stem will wither.¹⁵ For the observer who feels threatened by a fragmenting worldview, there cannot be any assurance in this display.

Lest the impression be growing that all of Benn's flowers were negative signs, it is important to notice several areas of positive meaning. Among the domestic flowers, Benn had an eye for those which were humbler, “folksier.” Time and again the lesser-known flowers offer consolation by their presence:

Vereinzelt trösten Wegwart und Skabiose.

(“Herbst,” 37)

still ruht der See,
vergißmeinnichtumsäumt,
und die Ottern lachen.

(“Stilleben,” 387)

wo immer noch die Sonnenbräute (Helenium)
wirksame Farben in den Garten tragen—

(“Begegnungen,” 389)

Ein Jubel aus Süden, ein Liebesschwarm
von Malven über den Stufen
zum Saale, zum Garten, die Brunnen warm

(“Jener,” 421)

The hydrangeas, still, patient, quiet with their colours lasting through the autumn rains, have already been cited above. One remarkable introduction of a flower which has not had much of a literary heritage comes in “Der Traum”: “Mischfarben, Halbblau der Kartoffelblüte” (339). The precision of the observation helps lift the potato blossom into an artistic context. Similarly, the buttercup gains in grandeur when it is placed into a poetic setting:

denke, doch wisse, die Allererlauchtesten
treiben in ihrem eigenen Kiel,
sind nur das Gelb der Butterblume,
Auch andere Farben spielen ihr Spiel—

(“Spät, V,” 407)

The connection between yellow and the godly presence had already been a highlight in the essay “Der Garten von Arles” (1920). There the dandelion's brilliant colour was a focal point:

Schon soll Gemäh werden, gegen Löwenzahn, gegen Taraxacum, als Tee, als Kaffeesurrogate, nun muß ich eilen, Sommer wird zu Laub, bald kann Vergehen kommen, was Verschleierung bringt.

Irrsinnig diese Doldensteppe, ganz irrsinnig diese Hälse oder auch Keulen, dieser Wasserkopf von Gelb, diese Sultanszeltbahn einheitlicher Farbengebung, dieses Elefantendickhäutrige—kurz das ist reines Gelb.

Das löst wie Zuckerei. Da kann Gott nicht weit sein.¹⁶

One can almost taste the slightly sweet, buttery yellow dandelion heads. We tend to disparage these flowers as “weeds,” or to process them for their utility, as a tisane or, commonly in central Europe during scarcity, as a coffee substitute. Forgotten in this utilitarian vision is the singular gift of the pure yellow colour, which would serve well as a reflection of divinity.

Also positive for Benn in their implications were white flowers, such as the flowering chestnut:

mit einem Kastanienast auf dem Klavier
                                                                                tritt die Natur hinzu—
ein Milieu, das mich anspricht.

(“Notturno,” 373)

aber die Fälle, deren man sich erinnert,
sind die Glücke der tiefaufatmenden
weißen weichen Kastanienblüte,
die im Mai uns segnet.

(“Bauxit,” 462)

The sense of harmony and happiness aroused by these white flowers is consistent with the pattern Edgar Lohner noted for the function of white in Benn's works.¹⁷ One of the other “common” flowers to which Benn seems to have been particularly drawn was the stock or matthiola, which goes in German under the older name of Levkoje (Leucoium). With their pretty colours and pleasant scent, they have long been a popular flower, and were favoured by weavers for their cottage gardens in Upper Saxony in the nineteenth century.¹⁸ Perhaps Benn had encountered them in that tradition, as a contrast to the drudgery of the Industrial Revolution. The stocks are filled with life in “Levkoienwelle,” surging against decline:

wo du noch eine Heimat siehst,
ergieb dich der Levkoienwelle,
die sich um Rosenletztes gießt

(176)

And in “Radio,” they also serve as a quotation of nature amidst the modern technology:

Radio, Zeitung, Illustrierte—
wie kann man mir da sowas bieten?
Da muss man doch Zweifel hegen,
ob das Ersatz für Levkoien,
für warmes Leben, Zungenkuss, Seitensprünge

(435)

As in the case of the dandelion, the ordinary flower becomes a point of opposition to the utilitarianism of the modern period.

If the sympathy and contentment of local flowers represented one posssbility of escaping the mundane, then more distant and exotic plants were quoted by Benn in order to illuminate distant places, to which one might flee. Best known are perhaps the references to the eucalyptus trees on Palau:

Rot ist der Abend auf der Insel von Palau,
Eukalyptenschimmer
Hebt in Runen aus Dämmer und Tau

(“Rot,” 142)

Various examples of exotic flora could be cited from Benn's work:

eine Insel voll Nelkenwaren
und der Blüte der Bougainville

(“Orphische Zellen,” 197)

Das Tal stand silbern in Olivenzweigen
dazwischen war es von Magnolien weiß

(“5. Jahrhundert,” 334)

Meinen Sie, aus Habana,
weiß und hibiskusrot

(“Reisen,” 384)

Wir holen aus Cannes Mimosen
für eine Stunde her

(“Wir ziehn einen großen Bogen—,” 385)

Hier singt der Osten und hier trinkt der Westen,
auf offenen Früchten rinnt es und vom Schaft
der Palmen, Gummibäume und in Resten
träuft auch die Orchidee den Seltsamsaft.

(“Sprich zu dir selbst, dann sprichst du zu den Dingen,” 411)

Because they had not yet been incorporated into the European gardens, unlike other plants which had come from distant places, these plants often are associated by Benn with a pre-historic time. This might be taken one step further analytically. Like the algae of “Gesänge,” these plants were difficult to classify botanically, especially the orchids, the magnolias, and the eucalypti. Their discovery in the course of the European exploration and expansion from the seventeenth century onwards would become part of the intellectual crisis which was resolved by the acceptance of Darwin's theories. Although there would not be one Goethean “Urpflanze,” the incorporation of plants such as magnolias into European botanic thinking required an acceptance of the idea that some plants were still located earlier on an evolutionary line.¹⁹ These plants, which had evolved in unique ways, drew attention to the origin of plants and hence of all life.

The complex layerings of historical evolution and process would be recalled by flowers in another way as well: through their names. With the presumptuousness which generally characterized European imperialism, the plants of the world were given their “real” names by European botanists. Often, the botanists immortalized each other. Thus forsythia, dahlia, georgina, bougainvillea and magnolia were named after William Forsyth, Anders Dahl, J.G. Georgi, Louis Antoine de Bougainville and Pierre Magnol respectively. These are vain and empty labels which say nothing about the nature of the plant (sunflower) or even its mythological background (narcissus). Benn mocked such self-important nomenclature in the poem “Nasse Zäune,” which deals with the “Tulipmania” of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries:²⁰

Nasse Zäune,
Gartenabgrenzung,
doch nicht für Abkömmlinge
der berühmten Tulpe Semper Augustus,
die Paris im 17. Jahrhundert mit unerhörten Preisen
bezahlte,
oder die Hyazinthe ‘Bleu Passe’
(1600 fl. anno 1734),
man trug seinen Namen in ein Buch ein,
erst mehrere Tage später
führte einen ein Gartendirektor vorbei—,
vielmehr für die alten bewährten Ranunkeln Ostades.

(322)

The arrogance and ignorance of those who would pretend with fancy flowers and fancy names are defeated by the “Fachmann” and, in the long run, by the humbler garden flower. Even the front garden can become a historical text which teaches the vanity of certain enterprises.

Once flowers are involved in human history, they too become subject to historical processes—such as the doings of the market economy—or to fashion. The one flower which Benn used to link himself to modern history was the lilac. The poem “1886,” i.e. the year he was born, has lilacs in its opening:

Ostern am spätesten Termin,
an der Elbe blühte schon der Flieder

(324)

The geographical location is somewhere in the east, in Prussia. The lilacs represent both Benn's life and that particular region. It is not the blue cornflower which represents Prussia, as one might expect. Instead, the lilac, which one might well associate with French perfume, has been transplanted to a relatively inhospitable environment.²¹ As the history of Prussia takes its tragic course, this is shared by the lilacs and Benn. In several poems, they serve as reminders of a homeland which has been lost. In “Nachzeichnung,” an image of sickly yellow lilacs summons up a total sense of defeat:

Fliederblüte gebeugt, kaum hochblickend
narzissenfarben und starken Todesgeruchs

(314)

The poem is gloomy and filled with nostalgia for “Wäldern / die ich einst durchfuhr” (314). And with very similar images and sentiments, there is the poem “Es ist ein Garten,” in which the speaker stands beside the lilac bushes in a garden “östlich der Oder, wo die Ebenen weit” (359). The lilacs mark a vague frontier which has since moved westward. The historical moment is brought into focus in the ironical juxtapositions of “Bar”:

Flieder in langen Vasen,
Ampeln, gedämpftes Licht
Und die Amis rasen,
wenn die Sängerin spricht

(432)

Although still to be seen in an occupied Germany, the lilacs have been removed to a vase, separated from any landscape, and made inconsequential in this artificial setting. After the war and his disastrous failure to understand his own era, Benn felt increasingly that his life had been compromised somehow. One of his final poems returned to the lilac as a point of identification between his life and larger historical processes. “Letzter Frühling” is filled with weary resignation:

Nimm die Forsythien tief in dich hinein
und wenn der Flieder kommt, vermisch auch diesen
mit deinem Blut und Glück und Elendsein,
dem dunklen Grund, auf den du angewiesen.

(471)

The lilacs which awaited his birth in “1886” will, in the order of nature, be mingled with his death.

However, this poem continues to its end by mentioning roses, the flowers most difficult to grasp in Benn's poetry:

dann tragen dich vielleicht die Stunden
noch bis zum Juni mit den Rosen hin.

(471)

The function of the rose here, as a sign of anticipation, of desire, and of hope, hints at the extent to which Benn followed the tradition of mysticism for which the rose was the flower par excellence.²² Benn referred to roses more than to any other kind of flower, but they are rarely described with any botanical or local precision. The poem “Rosen” repeats the themes which have always been suggested by this flower in the Occident:

Wenn erst die Rosen verrinnen
aus Vasen oder vom Strauch
und ihr Entblättern beginnen,
fallen die Tränen auch.
Traum von der Stunden Dauer,
Wechsel und Wiederbeginn,
Traum—vor der Tiefe der Trauer:
blättern die Rosen hin.
Wahn von der Stunden Steigen
aller ins Auferstehn,
Wahn—vor dem Fallen, dem Schweigen:
wenn die Rosen vergehn.

(342)

The dropping of the petals, one by one, is likened to the falling of tears and the passage of time. Essences dissipate as if in a dream. Repeatedly, Benn returned to the gesture of the rose petals silently passing away:

Komm, es fallen wie Rosen
Götter und Götter-Spiel.

(“Spuk,” 141)

Tief mit Rosengefälle
Wird nur Verwehtes beschenkt

(“Die Dänin,” 154)

Rosen, die blühten und hatten,
und die Farben fließen ins Meer

(“Prolog,” 273)

so enden die Rosen
Blatt um Blatt.

(“Spät II,” 403)

Unlike the poppy, the rose does not display the world's fierceness. Its movement is from “Being” to “Has Been,” without surrendering its positive qualities, but Benn's allusions to roses are perhaps too evanescent. The sign of the rose overwhelmed personal experience and hence personal expression. If at least there were a Blakean worm on any of these roses, or a drop of blood from a thorn-pricked finger! Benn's roses are less realized than his more ordinary garden flowers. One wonders whether the flower which would have assuaged Benn's most intense floral desires might not have been that as yet unavailable blue rose?

Remarkable throughout Benn's poetry is the strong sympathetic vision of an observer who transcends the clinical gaze and sees essential being in all forms of life. In an age when many were writing poetry in praise of airplanes, factories and progress, Benn looked to the past and gave voice to a primal sense of loss:

Oh, dass wir unsre Ur-ur-ahnen wären.
Ein Klümpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor.
Leben und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären
Glitte aus unseren stummen Säften vor.

(“Gesänge,” 47)

But the wish will remain in the subjunctive. It is no more regressive—and no more attainable—than a wish to be like roses or poppies or lilacs. Between such an identity of observer and observed lies the gap of knowledge. The best that can be hoped for those who have learned to see clinically is that they might learn sympathy for all forms of life. Benn populated his verse with our relatives, the flowers, and found himself intimated in them. Intimations of botany? It is an ancient awareness which Benn translated into a modern language. Unfortunately, the modern world which speaks of “mushroom clouds” is indifferent to the humble fungus and the mute weather. I will not end this brief survey on that note, but rather with one of Benn's late fragments, which never came to fruition, but reminds us of a deeper logic than has been possible to calculate fully here:

üppige kurze Blüten
was schnell erblüht
hat tiefe Farben

(494)

Notes

1. Although most perceptive in some ways, works such as Oskar Sahlberg, Gottfried Benns Phantasiewelt: ‘Wo Lust und Leiche winkt’ (München: edition text + kritik, 1977), often presume an understanding of the work prior to interpretation. This criticism has also been made by Angelika Manyoni, Consistency of Phenotype: A Study of Gottfried Benn's Views on Lyric Poetry (Bern/New York: Peter Lang, 1983), 1-2.

2. Gottfried Benn, Ausgewählte Briefe, ed. Max Rychner (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1957), 230, letter of April 19, 1952. Rychner discusses Benn's relationship to flowers in the afterword to the same volume, 321-322. Other treatments of the topic include Hunter G. Hannum, “Gottfried Benn's ‘Gladiolen’,” Modern Language Quarterly 22 (1961), 167-180; H.G. Hannum, “George and Benn: The Autumnal Vision,” PMLA 78 (1963), 271-279; Harald Steinhagen, Die Statischen Gedichte von Gottfried Benn: Die Vollendung seiner expressionistischen Lyrik (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1969), “Anemone,” 94-106, 292-4, and “Henri Matisse: ‘Asphodèles',” 160-174, 303-305; and Theo Meyer, Kunstproblematik und Wortkombinatorik bei Gottfried Benn (Köln/Wien: Böhlau, 1971), 191-197, 337-338.

3. Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden II: Prosa und Szenen, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1958), 24.

4. Despite its politeness, Benn's critique was merciless: “Aus Deutschland gehören die berühmten Namen George, Rilke, Hofmannsthal zum mindesten begrenzt hierher. Ihre schönsten Gedichte sind reiner Ausdruck, bewußte artistische Gliederung innherhalb der gesetzten Form, ihr Innenleben allerdings, subjektiv und in seinen emotionellen Strömungen, verweilt noch in jener edlen nationalen und religiösen Sphäre, in der Sphäre der gültigen Bindungen und der Ganzheitsvorstellungen, die die heutige Lyrik kaum noch kennt.” “Probleme der Lyrik,” Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden I: Essays-Reden-Vorträge, ed. Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1959), 498. In the same essay, Benn took issue with Rilke's use of metaphor in “Blaue Hortensie,” 504.

5. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 120.

6. Useful are Adolph Hansen, Goethes Metamorphose der Pflanzen: Geschichte einer botanischen Hypothese (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1907); and Valentin Haecker, Goethes Morphologische Arbeiten und die neuere Forschung (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1927). Benn's relationship to Goethe may be read in his essay “Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften,” Gesammelte Werke, I, 167-200. See also Walter Müller-Seidel, “Goethes Naturwissenschaft im Verständnis Gottfried Benns: Zur geistigen Situation am Ende der Weimarer Republik,” in Zeit der Moderne: Zur deutschen Literatur von der Jahrhundertwende bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Hans-Henrik Krummacher, Fritz Martini and Walter Müller-Seidel (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1984), 25-53.

7. Percy Preston, A Dictionary of Pictorial Subjects from Classical Literature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983), “Flower,” 116-7.

8. Alice M. Coats, Flowers and their Histories (London: Hulton Press, 1956), 26; Josef Murr, Die Pflanzenwelt in der griechischen Mythologie (Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Walter, 1890, rpt. Groningen: Verlag Bouma's Boekhuis, 1969), 240-243; Steinhagen, Die Statischen Gedichte, 170-171.

9. “Rede in Darmstadt,” Gesammelte Werke, I, 534.

10. Reinhold Grimm, Gottfried Benn: Die farbliche Chiffre in der Dichtung (Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1962), passim. Although asters, especially the garden varieties, come in different colours, when Benn made explicit mention of their colour, they were always a shade of blue. Peter Schünemann, Gottfried Benn (München: C.H. Beck, 1977), makes an interesting point about the naming of the colour in “Blaue Aster”, 40: “Benn vermeidet die biologisch korrekte Bezeichnung der Farbe der Zungenblüten der Aster: blauviolett. Sie hätte auch nicht die Wirkung, die sie im Gedicht trägt. Der seltsame Kontrast dunkel-hell-(lila) evoziert eine eigentümlich umwirkliche Spähre—eben jene, in die das Gedich übergeht.”

11. It would be worthwhile to examine the extent to which Benn was indebted to Goethe for this association. In Die Wahlverwandtschaften, for example, asters are mentioned in a very similar context: “Daß der Herbst ebenso herrlich würde wie der Frühling, dafür war gesorgt. Alle sogenannten Sommergewächse, alles, was im Herbst mit Blühen nicht enden kann und sich der Kälte noch keck entgegenentwickelt, Astern besonders, waren in der größten Mannigfaltigkeit gesäet und sollten nun, überallhin verpflanzt, einen Sternhimmel über die Erde bilden.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), ed. Erich Trunz (München: C.H. Beck, 1981), VI, 425.

12. “Die Insel,” Gesammelte Werke, II, 41-42.

13. To differ slightly with Manyoni, Consistency of Phenotype, 119.

14. Murr, Die Pflanzenwelt in der griechischen Mythologie, 183-186.

15. Cf. the gladioli discussed by Hannum, “Gottfried Benn's ‘Gladiolen’,” 172-173.

16. “Der Garten von Arles,” Gesammelte Werke, II, 92.

17. Edgar Lohner, Passion und Intellekt: Die Lyrik Gottfried Benns (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), 235-237.

18. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, 165. The Matthiola incana or stock was falsely named for the Leucoion or white violet. Cf. Murr, Die Pflanzenwelt in der griechischen Mythologie, 259-264.

19. According to The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1985), 13, 665, “… most students of plant evolution now regard the Magnoliales order as including the most primitive components of the angiosperms.” Peter Coats, Flowers in History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 110-120, discusses magnolias.

20. The tulip craze is also featured in Alexandre Dumas père, La Tulipe noire (1850).

21. One is reminded of the strongly scented flowers which bloom so mysteriously “im märkischen Sand” at the end of Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, V, 10:

    Der Prinz von Homburg
                        Ach, wie die Nachtviole lieblich duftet!
                        spürst du es nicht?
                                            (Stranz kommt wieder zu ihm zurück.)
    Stranz                    Es sind Levkojn und Nelken.

    Der Prinz von Homburg
                        Levkohn?—Wie kommen die hierher?

    Stranz                                                                                          Ich weiß nicht.—

    H. v. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München: Carl Hanser, 1982), 2, 708-709.

22. On the rose as “The most evocative and beautiful of flowers,” see Peter Coats, Flowers in History, 161-194.

Poems will be quoted from Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke in der Fassung der Erstdrucke IV: Gedichte, ed. Bruno Hillebrand (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), with page numbers in parentheses.