[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 an army doctor in German-occupied Brussels—to become a dominating presence in modern German poetry. His writings blend intellectual sophistication with a powerful appeal to the emotions, expressing a cynical disillusionment with modern civilisation and a longing for the simplicities of primal being. He was thus admired by the radical left for his sceptical intelligence, and by the right for his regressive cult of more primitive values.¹

In a remarkable essay on Expressionism, published in November 1933, Benn analysed the presuppositions of avant-garde European art since 1910. Its essential principle (he argues) is the ‘deconstruction of reality’, or Wirklichkeitszertrümmerung. This subversion of the conventions of realism reflects the fact that ‘reality’ as an intellectual and social norm is also disintegrating. Modern science has undermined traditional conceptions of a stable universe, reducing space and time to mental functions. Society and the state are now perceived as functional constructs, not substantial entities. Economic analysis reveals that the notion of a stable ‘reality’ is a ‘capitalist concept’, concealing the underlying anarchy of production and profiteering, war and hunger, lawlessness and the lust for power. The First World War, with its turbulent aftermath, has transposed these disintegrative tendencies into political terms. There is thus a historical legitimation for the excesses of modern art, with its irrationality and distortions. But Benn also insists that Expressionism, like Futurism and Cubism, is not only an art of disintegration. Its exploration of the debris of bourgeois civilisation is also inspired by a positive impulse to ‘get to the root of things’—An-die-Wurzel-der-Dinge-gehen (1, 240-56).

The radicalism which Benn so persuasively defines contributed to the political indeterminateness of the avant-garde, particularly the Expressionists. These artists and writers may be united in their desire to return to the roots of human experience, but there is no consensus about what is to be found there. For some the essential nature of man is mystical, for others psychological (with a new emphasis on sexuality and the unconscious). Politically, the essential man who is discovered when the superstructure of bourgeois civilisation is swept away may equally well be the primitive predator or the exploited proletariat. This explains why among the writers of the Expressionist generation some (like Brecht and Becher) supported the communist movement while others (like Benn and Johst) gravitated towards National Socialism.

Benn's radical questioning of the values of rational man led him into wide-ranging speculations about the prehistory both of the human species and of the natural world. His cast of mind was essentially regressive. He began to speculate (in the manner of Nietzsche) about primitive human society, picturing an authentic community in which the strong could exult in their vitality—uninhibited by Christian morality or humanistic scruples. He sought to return to the roots of biological evolution, identifying that instinctual self which existed prior to that overdevelopment of the brain centres which has made us over-intellectual and endlessly at war with ourselves. He even began to invoke the findings of modern geology in order to measure the paltry achievements of Homo sapiens against the mindless grandeur of the millennia.

These primitive yearnings were a source of entrancing poetry. Benn combined his fragmented vision with a gift for melodic diction, and few poets have so eloquently expressed the longing to return to the womb of time:

O daß wir unsere Ururahnen wären.
Ein Klümpchen Schleim in einem warmen Moor.
Leben und Tod, Befruchten und Gebären
glitte aus unseren stummen Säften vor.
Ein Algenblatt oder ein Dünenhügel,
vom Wind Geformtes und nach unten schwer.
Schon ein Libellenkopf, ein Möwenflügel
wäre zu weit und litte schon zu sehr.
(Would that we were a prehistoric horde.
A lump of mucus in the dank, warm earth.
Out of our silent juices would be poured
life, death, fertility and giving birth.
Sea-weed or sand-dune underneath the sky,
shaped by the wind and weighty to the touch.
A seagull's wing, head of a dragonfly
would have evolved too far, suffer too much.)

(2, 25)

These early ‘Incantations’ (‘Gesänge’, 1913) continue with two further strophes which conjure up images of a primeval forest, with an unnamed god lurking in the background. The god to whom the poet longs to return is clearly Nietzsche's Dionysus, presiding over a pre-Darwinistic landscape of organic harmony. But Benn cannot simply be discounted as a romantic or irrationalist. His poetry of urban disillusionment uses sophisticated montage techniques to create a patchwork of conflicting historical references and psychological perspectives, before culminating in images which lure the reader towards an oceanic self-immersion—‘hin in des Meeres erlösend tiefes Blau’ (2, 31). Drugs, sexuality and the rhythms of the blood are blended with Spenglerian myths in an attempt to escape from individuality and cerebration.

Benn was not the only poet of his generation to derive potent images from such dubious intellectual sources (there are parallels with Yeats and Pound). The problem arises when the poet begins to confuse vision with blueprint, poetic image with political programme. In a series of essays, Benn asserts that the random processes of social development and biological evolution must be brought under control. The ills of our alienated civilisation are due to a biological imbalance between overdeveloped brain centres and an enfeeblement of the blood. This leads him to endorse eugenic theories and argue for a new social ‘discipline’ based on selective ‘breeding’ (Benn's keyword, ‘Zucht’, combines both meanings). These ideas brought him, even before 1933, into proximity with the racialist theories of National Socialism. Indeed, the fundamental aim of his essay on Expressionism was to show that the radical artistic tendencies of which he was the leading exponent were not degenerate, but derived their vitality ‘from Germany's loyal blood’.

It is easy with hindsight to see the links between the regressive poetry and the reactionary politics. But Benn's public support for National Socialism was nevertheless a spectular betrayal of values he had hitherto upheld. During the early years of the Weimar Republic he had prided himself on his position as an outsider, holding aloof from both journalistic cliques and political factions. He lived a ‘double life’, gaining few financial rewards from his poetry, but scraping a living in one of the less salubrious suburbs of Berlin as a doctor specialising in the treatment of venereal diseases. There is a certain dignity about his attempts, towards the end of the 1920s, to maintain a ‘reserved’ position while all around him were becoming political ‘fellow-travellers’.² But even at this stage it is clear that his hostility to ‘politics’ is directed primarily against writers of the left, especially Johannes Becher, the Expressionist poet who had become a committed communist.

It was the political crisis which followed the Wall Street collapse of October 1929 which brought Benn into the limelight. Germany, whose financial recovery had been dependent on American loans, was plunged into three years of economic and political chaos, during which the institutions of parliamentary democracy became almost totally discredited. In a series of fiercely fought elections, which frequently erupted into violence, the political struggle became polarised between anti-democratic extremes. For writers like Benn it was tempting to see the political anarchy as a vindication of the Expressionist vision. The political ambivalence of his position was identified as early as autumn 1930 in a perceptive essay by his admirer Klaus Mann. And in 1931 Benn found himself simultaneously being attacked by the Fascist journal Der Angriff for his internationalist and ‘defeatist’ outlook; and denounced by the left-wing Tagebuch for sliding so far towards the ‘Fascist camp’ that he was becoming a ‘spiritual comrade’ of Hitler.³ In January 1932, at the height of the crisis, Benn was elected to the Literary Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, a prestigious body which supposedly stood above politics but which was also becoming sharply polarised, with the novelist Heinrich Mann the leading figure on the left. Benn had been one of Mann's most fervent admirers. But as the political struggle reached its climax, the former allies were to become bitter antagonists.

From the moment in January 1933 when Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, Benn swung his intellectual prestige behind National Socialism. And for almost eighteen months he was to be Hitler's most prominent literary supporter. He immediately joined forces with the right-wing clique in the Prussian Academy, in order to force Heinrich Mann and other left-wingers to resign. And he greeted the burning-down of the Reichstag, which gave Hitler the pretext to start a reign of terror, as the signal that a ‘new epoch’ had begun.⁴ After the general election in March, which enabled the Nazis (with forty-four per cent of the vote) to assume dictatorial powers, Benn made the first of his notorious statements in support of the regime. Using the most public medium available—a radio broadcast—he denounced all those who opposed the new German state: intellectuals, liberals, democrats, internationalists and Marxists. A ‘new biological type’ (he proclaimed) had triumphed over ‘disintegrating European democracy’ with its spurious ideal of intellectual freedom (‘Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen’, 1, 440-9).

The same sad story continued in a series of further broadcasts, speeches and essays. Against left-wing writers like his erstwhile admirer Klaus Mann, who had been forced into exile, Benn deployed the full range of his biologising pseudo-history in order to defend Nazism as ‘the last grandiose project of the white race’ (4, 239-48). The great enemy to be destroyed (he argued in subsequent statements) was ‘intellectualism’.⁵ There must be a return from the corruption of the great metropolis to a more authentic ‘feeling for the soil’ (‘Ackergefühl’, 1, 231). The ‘purification of the body politic’ requires that the state should stop wasting its resources on handicapped children. These inferior elements are to be ‘eliminated’ (‘auszuscheiden’, 1, 235). ‘German eugenics’ require that ‘Offices of Health and Heredity’ should be set up to regulate all marriages according to a ‘system of points’. The values of the mind (‘Geist’) depend on race and breeding (‘Rasse und Züchtung’) (1, 232-9).

It is a dismal spectacle to see so gifted a writer lending his intellectual prestige to such arguments. Benn also spoke with the authority of a specialist in sexually-transmitted diseases (the sordidness of his medical experience may even have contributed to his longing for racial purity, as in the case of Céline—a writer whom he admired). A further irony is that as late as March 1934 Benn was still trying to convince himself that Fascism was the fulfilment of the avant-garde artistic vision. In the spring of 1934 Marinetti arrived in Berlin as leading literary representative of Mussolini's Italy. And it was appropriately Benn himself who delivered the official speech of welcome. Speaking in the name of the ‘Führer, whom we all without exception admire’, Benn sought to identify Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto of 1909 as the inspiration, not only of Italian Fascism, but also of the German national revival (1, 478-81). Benn's speech echoes the hope expressed in his essay on Expressionism that radical art might gain recognition from a reactionary regime. But he was labouring under a double misapprehension. The relationship between Futurism and Fascism was much more complex than Benn supposed…. And Expressionism, far from gaining recognition as authentic German art, was soon to be publicly vilified in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art….

By the summer of 1934 it was becoming clear that Benn's position was untenable. He might capitalise on attacks by literary opponents abroad. But he was vulnerable to accusations from within the German Reich that he himself was in reality one of those rootless intellectuals he despised. His poems were denounced by a right-wing opponent as ‘masterpieces of typically Jewish art’. And rumours were soon in circulation that Benn himself was of Jewish origin (his name sounded suspiciously similar to the Hebrew prefix ben). Benn hastened to have his papers authenticated by the Office of Racial Purity, in order to establish that he was ‘100٪ Aryan’, for the allegation of Jewish origins threatened not only his literary reputation in Germany, but also his livelihood. Nazi edicts had deprived Jewish doctors of the right to practice in certain areas, and the ensuing shortage of qualified medical staff offered Benn the prospect of professional advancement and increased earnings. Hence his panic when the German Medical Association threatened to strike Benn himself off the register, because of alleged Jewish antecedents.⁶

Benn's public pronouncements became increasingly tight-lipped, and his private letters from July 1934 onwards express his disillusionment with Nazism: ‘No words are adequate for this tragedy. A German dream—has once against come to an end.’ As both his intellectual and his professional position became untenable, he opted for what he called ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’—service in the German army.⁷ And this enabled him to survive the Nazi reign of terror, even though in 1938 he was officially banned from writing and expelled from the writers' union. The poetry which he wrote in this period expresses a stoical fortitude. Its restrained resonance was to win the poet, despite his Nazi past, a new reputation after the Second World War, as one of the tragic survivors of the Expressionist generation. But it remains an unresolved paradox that one of Germany's greatest modern poets should have been so deeply implicated in intellectual treason.⁸ …

Notes

1. Quotations from Benn's writings are based on his Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, Wiesbaden, 1959-61, and are identified by volume and page number. English translations are by the present author. For a selection of Benn's writings in English, see Primal Vision: Selected Writings of Gottfried Benn, ed. E. B. Ashton, London, 1961.

2. See Benn Chronik: Daten zu Leben und Werk, ed. Hanspeter Brode, Munich, 1978, p. 70.

3. Ibid., pp. 76, 79.

4. Ibid., p. 90.

5. Ibid., p. 96.

6. Ibid., pp. 105-11.

7. Gottfried Benn, Briefe an F. W. Oelze 1932-1945, Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 36, 39.

8. For a wide-ranging review of the debate about Benn's politics, see Jürgen Schröder, Gottfried Benn: Poesie und Sozialisation, Stuttgart, 1978.