Without Excuses – Gottfried Benn

 

During the 1920s, the German essayist and poet Gottfried Benn (1886 – 1956) had found a small but informed following even in France. The acclaim created enemies, and as it so happened, most of them came from the socialist left. The playwright Bertolt Brecht compared Benn’s way of pairing up the most arcane rhyme-words with a brothel’s reception room, “where the girls are made to meet their clients in an atmosphere of perfectly casual convenience.” In 1926, Benn published a brief autobiography: “Born as the son of a Lutheran pastor and of a French women from a place near Yverdon,” he wrote, “I grew up in a hamlet of about three hundred people. I went to grammar school, then University, read two years linguistics and theology, then enrolled for medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Academy, served in the army as a doctor of the territorial forces, but was soon discharged – because during training a kidney loosened after six hours on horseback – continued my medical education, traveled to America, inoculated steerage passengers in the lower decks, went to war, conquered Antwerp, had a jolly time behind the front-line, lived for a period in Brussels. Now I live in Berlin, make my living as a specialist on dermatology and venereal diseases, consultation hours every evening five to seven.

I registered and certified, obtained degrees, practiced medicine as an intern, wrote on diabetes in the army, on vaccines for the clap, on hernia, on cancer statistics, received from the University of Berlin the golden medal for an essay on epilepsy; whatever I produced in literature I have written in spring 1916, except for the Morgue which had been published by A. R. Meyer in 1912.

I was the doctor of a clinic for prostitutes, a completely isolated post, lived in a confiscated house of eleven rooms, alone with my valet, had few duties, was permitted to go in civvies, had no obligations, no ties to anybody, barely understood the language; strolled through the streets, watched the foreign folk; an exceptional spring, three months beyond any comparison, not a day passed without a barrage at the Yser, yet it barely affected the daily routine; life swung like a pendulum in an air of silence and solitude; I lived on the edge where the existence is ending and the self is beginning. My thoughts often turn back to those weeks; this was the life, it will not come again, everything else is just blah” (Epilogue, 1926). In Brussels Benn was the physician attending the trial and execution of Nurse Edith Cavell. Benn was a man with many masks.

During the early 1930s he corresponded with three sweethearts at the same time. In his letters, Benn had a way of posturing in a slangy, slick, and very rapid idiom, dashing out his messages on everything that came to hand: postcards, prescription pads, foolscap and letterheads from his office. His hand was barely legible, even Benn himself would decipher it only with difficulties. He liked to fictionalize the addressee's persona and put her on a pedestal. To the actress Thea Sternheim, he would snuggle up as an old crony and comrade in arms, and in the next letter play up to the maternal instincts of the film-actress and playwright Elinor von Büller-Klinkowström, presenting himself as a crusty outcast who once in his life and only for her let slip his guard; this was Benn at his most intimate. And under the same post-date we read messages to Käthe von Porada, a seasoned journalist from Austria. With a grace and wit, reminding of Oscar Wilde, Benn would hit on her as the protective chaperon who watches over an innocent girl, lost in the jungle of life. Each of these woman, in fact all the women in Benn's life, were either emancipated professionals or seasoned society-women; they had sharp minds and strong personalities; they were tall, attractive, well educated and often well connected. Before 1933 Benn posed as the ostentatious city slicker: "only in the streets of the big city sing and mourn the muses." Under the Nazis, with a nod to their blood and soil ideology, he suitably remembered his barefooted childhood in the potato fields.

After 1945 it was all city-talk again. Yet in 1932, Benn was still in a position to point out to his critics that he had repeatedly suffered rude attacks from the Nazis’ propaganda machine, which apparently had blacklisted him even before they came to power. Benn detested the Nazis' vulgarity; the Nazis detested the "decadent intellectuality of a pervert and sodomite.” In debates on the radio Benn liked to revel in his role of the tough talking cynic. His publications before 1933 contained passages which could be interpreted as "liberal;" in a remarkable essay he was the outspoken supporter of unrestricted abortion, but over the years, even well-meaning colleagues and friends began to sense something over the top in Benn's position of ‘uncompromising irrationality:’ “I read in Montesquieu, because the Emperor Caligula had descended from Anthony as well as from Augustus, he said he would penalize the senate if they dared to celebrate the holiday he had created to commemorate the victory of Actium, but he would also penalize them for not celebrating it; and when his sister, Drusilla, had died and been deified, he decreed that it was high treason to mourn for her, because she was a goddess, and at the same time it was a criminal offence not to mourn, because she was his sister. This gave me the idea. I had to think of this, when people faced up to me. It became the form in which I recognized whoever stepped into my way; it was these flip-sides of the same coin which revealed to me the people’s true nature. It is a structure of "either – or," in which man uses to operate when he is professionally involved or practicing safe sex. One way as well as the other, on both occasions the same anal retentive personality down to the dirt under the fingernails, and always coerced into social compromise; be it for food or for the next quickie, it is always this mediocre balance, this cheap and sheepish sub-text of "positive thinking" (Epilogue, 1926). So it shouldn’t be too surprising when we hear of critics who made a prediction of his disgrace, two years before it actually happened. Yet when in 1933 Benn emphatically committed himself to Hitler’s new regime, it still startled even the most outspoken of his opponents to actually see the prophecy fulfilled. Benn’s international reputation was immediately in tatters, and he alienated himself from most of his friends, many of whom now living in exile.

The new masters seemed to delight in having Benn’s good name join their cause and adding his prestige to their poor international standing. Benn was allowed to hold on to his position as senator of the Prussian 'Academy of Fine Arts,' an appointment of great prestige. For most of his admirers this was just beyond belief and one morning Benn found in his mail a letter by Klaus Mann (1906 – 1949), the son of Thomas Mann. He asked the hard questions:

"I couldn't make myself believing what I have heard about your statements on the recent events in Germany, that you – in fact as the only German author on which we had counted – have not resigned from the Academy. In what kind of company do you think you find yourself now? What is it that could make you lend your good name to characters so low, that they defy any comparison in the whole of European history; characters of such depravity that the world turns in disgust? Your name had been to us a symbol for the highest standards and an almost fanatical purity; how many friends must you lose to make common cause with this hateful rabble, and what kind of friends are you about to gain? Who is going to understand you there? Who of them has actually an ear for your language? It seems to be almost a law of nature, if one isn’t very careful, a strong leaning towards the irrational will practically by default end up in the arms of the extremist right. First the grand gesture against civilization, a move, which, as I know very well, can be very tempting for an intellectual, and all of a sudden we have a cult of violence and, before you know it, there is Adolf Hitler. I greatly appreciate any answer you are willing to give. My address: Hotel de la Tour, SANARY s.m. (VAR).”

This was a letter mailed to him in private, yet Benn decided to go on the airwaves for his answer: "I must tell you that one can speak about the events in Germany only to people, who have seen it with their own eyes. Only those who went through the thrills of the last few months, who, from hour to hour, perusing the dailies, listening to the radio and watching the torchlight parades have experienced it first hand, who day and night wrestled with their scruples, even those who did not open their arms to these events and found it more a cause for alarm, with these, one can talk. But with emigrants, who went abroad, one cannot. Because they have missed the opportunity to assimilate the true thrust of such outlandish term as the "nation," not in an intellectual and abstract way, but as a hands on experience. They have missed out to see the national substance, which, in your letter, you liked to address with such disparaging arrogance; have missed to see it doing the work of history, perhaps a tragic work, full of visions and imagery, but safely on the course to its destiny. You make it look as if what happens in Germany is a danger for civilization, as if barbarian hordes have invaded and threaten the ideals of humanity. But let me ask you, how do you think does history move on? Do you really think it is very active at your French spas?"

"I think you would see things much clearer if you left behind this novelistic view of history and would accept it for what it is, the fundamental grand sweep, the inevitable thrust; I think you'd be closer to an understanding of the events in Germany, if you stopped considering history in terms of a balance sheet from the bourgeois bookkeeping of the 19th century; history doesn't owe you anything, but you everything to her, she doesn't know your democracy, even not your perhaps arduously maintained rationality; history at her crossroad to a new human manifestation has no other method and no other style than giving birth from the inexhaustible womb of the race and let it fight its way to the top and create its vision from whatever substance is at hand, never retreating, suffering for its actions, driven by the laws of life.”

“In your letter you are saying: "First the grand gesture against civilization, then a commitment to barbarity, and before you know it, there is Adolf Hitler." This you have written at a juncture, when the bankruptcy of your opportunistic understanding of progress had become apparent almost everywhere on Earth, when it becomes obvious that it was a narrow, frivolous, and hedonistic idea, that never at any crucial point in time, the essence of man had been interpreted other than in irrational terms. 'Irrational,' as in being close to Creation, as in being creative. Why won't you understand in your Mediterranean ambience, that the events in Germany have nothing to do with political maneuvers, nothing to do with anything that could be explained, turned and twisted in your well known methodology; this is the arrival of a new biological type, history goes through another mutation, and a people is ready to improve on its breeding."

"Of course the breeder understands, that man is a rational being, but more importantly, man is profound and rooted in mythology. So of course it is understood that in the future interventions at the biological foundation have to happen, because man is older than the French Revolution, more complex than thinkers of the enlightenment would like to believe. So of course man is perceived largely in natural terms, closer to creation, so much more wonderful and one with nature, than the barely two millennia of the old antithesis between idea and reality would give him credit for. If only you amateurs of civilization, you troubadours of modern progress could see it, we are not talking here of policies and government; this is a vision of the rebirth of mankind, perhaps a very ancient notion, perhaps the last and grandest idea of the Caucasian race. I commit myself to the new state, it is my people who are opening a new road.”

“Who am I to exclude myself, do I know any better? No! I can try to guide my people to the best of my abilities, but if I fail, it still is my nation. 'Nation' means so much! I owe this nation my intellectual and economic existence, my entire life, my relationships, the sum of my understanding. From this nation rose my ancestors; to it my children shall return. I grew up in a village and between the herds; I still know what 'home' means. The metropolis, industry, and intellect, the epoch under whose shadow I walk, all the powers of the century which my work addresses – there are moments when all this tortured life is sinking away and nothing else is left, than the open plains, the wide horizon, the seasons, soil, simple words, folk.”

“I am not a member of a political party, unacquainted with any of their leaders, I don't expect to make new friends. It is my fanatical purity for which you give me so much credit in your letter, my purity of thought and sentiment, that compels me to give you this answer.”

 “It is the increasing reduction of the human stature that motivates to breed a stronger race. And a new race can only rise from a terrible and violent turmoil. It is something a liberal and individualistic era seems to have forgotten, so you are in no position to accept the challenge and foresee the political consequences. All of a sudden everybody has to make a decision, and this is also true for me: either to live in comfortable privacy or commit myself to the state. I have decided for the state and I must accept it as a consequence of my commitment, if you from your place is sending me his farewell” (A Reply to the Political Emigrants, 1933).

Apparently, it never occurred to Benn that people would flee into exile to avoid imprisonment or getting shot. In retrospect one realizes how much of Benn’s own beliefs was contained in this speech, convictions going back at least to 1929, four years before the Nazis came to power. It gives us an inkling what Benn and the Nazis may have had in common. When Benn broadcasted this response, he had been on air with a whole series of speeches on breeding and eugenics. In his essays Benn noted with approval the rating system introduced in the United States to facilitate an extended program of genetic screening. Then came 1934 and the night of the long knives, the so-called 'Roehm-Putsch.' The realization dawned on Benn that it is one thing to spit on democracy and the right to vote and another no longer to be safe in your house and face arrest or worse at any whim of an unpredictable regime. In his private circle Benn became dangerously vocal about this, in another essay, prepared to go on air, Benn pleaded that "poetry is in need of more inner Freedom." Benn could have known better and not just with hindsight. He could have taken the cue from another author in exile, a man he had admired and for whom he prepared to broadcast the obituary.

The highly acclaimed Stefan George (1868 – 1933) had lived a solitary life, carefully shielding his homosexuality from the public eye and surrounded by a circle of adolescent friends with connections to Germany's aristocracy and right wing conservatives. The elitist outlook in George's publications, his social affiliations and some of his oracular expressions led the Nazis to believe that he and his considerable prestige could be pulled in, in support of their cause. Like the death-squad in Dirty Harry the Nazis badly misjudged the man's intentions. In fact in 1944, Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg (1907 – 1944), a former protégé of Stefan George, almost succeeded in assassinating Hitler.

George did not live to see von Stauffenberg's gallant attempt and execution. He had left Germany as soon as the new regime extended an invitation to fill a position as the new president of the Prussian 'Academy of Fine Arts.' George died eleven months later in exile. At first, the Nazi’s commissioned Benn to go on air with an obituary. But then, after reading the script, the new masters changed their mind and preferred to smother George's grave in Switzerland under a wreath with a huge swastika on a ribbon of the size of an un-scrolled lavatory towel. The broadcast about "the most impressive phenomenon of crossbreeding and diffusing influence in all of Germany's history" (Gottfried Benn) was postponed indefinitely. Benn was losing his uses for the regime and he found himself stricken from the list of GPs permitted to write prescriptions under the national health insurance act. In his profession this was tantamount to a death sentence; with no inheritance and no other means, Benn knew no longer how to pay the rent for his tiny apartment in Belle Alliance street.

Emigration, he felt, seemed out of the question, so in 1935 he enlistment in the army's medical corps. Benn called on the assistance of influential friends from the Great War to make it happen. He had lost nothing of his pomposity, however. He coined the phrase "The army is the aristocratic form of emigration." Not quite the same as "realizing his error," as most of his biographers like to describe this act of self-preservation. In fact Benn continued to appear in print with a leading publisher until 1936. Only in 1938 he was officially banned from further publication. Once he had been silenced there was no danger of further persecution. Although it is also true that on the height of German victories, Benn privately circulated a number of savagely critical essays and a rather inflammatory poem. Had it fallen into the wrong hands, it could have meant his imprisonment or worse. The writing was on the wall.

In 1944 the autumn is dangerously parched. “The fields are infested with mice, the potato harvest has been catastrophic, carrots and beetroots contain not enough sugar. The loss of the territories to the East means for the nation the loss of two months of bread, one month of fat, one month of meat. The rations are further reduced. There is no more leather for boots; no more prosthetic limbs for the amputees, no shoestrings, no dentures, no bandages, no Petri-dishes and not enough doctors; entire divisions take the field without a surgeon. The civilians depend on one practitioner per 25,000 people, and she has no petrol for her car. On a day in November, I need to go to Berlin on business. A regular train service is no longer running."

"At two o’clock a.m. a wonderful train stops, eight sleeper cars, four coaches of the 1st and 2nd class, each almost empty, an armored antiaircraft coach at the end. I board the train. Immediately I am followed by an SS man and asked to get off. I don’t understand. The man reports to me that it is the train from the supreme command, only for use by the top brass. Now I understand. I could carry a hand-grenade in my briefcase. So I take the next train and squeeze into a toilet of the 3rd class, I in my colonels uniform, with two laborers from the East squeezing my elbows. The door to the toilet remains open, women and children can’t help using it, the door is jammed, and moving away is impossible, but nobody seems to mind. I need to change trains. In the next one I find a 2nd class compartment. Three underage punks, in party uniform, stretch out on the cushions. White haired women, and mothers with babies are left standing in the aisle. The master race whips out a bottle of brandy and a bundle of cigars (for lesser mortals the daily rationing allows for one cigar and no brandy) and for the next three hours they go on invigorating themselves for party-duties ahead (“Strength through Joy”). In the newspapers we read that the largest numbers among war casualties and those receiving decorations come from the ranks of the party, way more than the national average. Exemption from service is something unheard of. And then the sentence: “Appearances to the opposite, as occasionally seen, are completely misleading.” Apparently these prigs were a part of this misleading appearance” (Barrack II, Room 66). But even as late as 1949, after the demise of “The Third Reich” and fully aware of the horrors of the extermination camps, Benn still had the gall to say in a private letter that "even today, I am of the opinion, that the N.S. was a genuine and profound attempt to rescue the teetering West" (Letters).

Why had he to be such an ass?

Benn was dead serious on the subject of eugenics; to him this was proper science and a necessity to deal with hereditary diseases. We have a letter to his closest friend, from 1937; it is rather hysterical in tone. "My sister has been diagnosed with glaucoma. A mutation in the genetic material, there was never anything of this kind in the family before, most of us have excellent eyesight and my father never needed specs, not even in his eighties. As her next relative I have to be tested too. This is awful. It means all of a sudden this branch of the family is finished, our genes can't be permitted to pass on, we all have to be sterilized" (Letters to Oelze). This leaves little doubt that Benn, at least in principle, was in agreement with the “science” behind the Nuremberg Laws. Based on these laws the Nazis committed "mercy killings" of the mentally impaired and called for the mandatory castration of carriers with hereditary diseases. By then Benn was no longer permitted to publicize except in his function at the medical staff of the German High Command.

Benn was ordered to produce a study on the causes for suicide. He knew it could cost war widows their pensions if their husband had committed suicide in the trenches. After collecting suitable sources from every part of the world he supported the assertion that suicide is a spontaneous act, born out of a moment's despair. The widows continued to receive their pensions. Because of the constant air raids the high command transferred disposable personnel to bases in the East.

“The garrison held the high ground, overseeing the city like a citadel. “Montsalvat” said a lieutenant, apparently an opera aficionado, and indeed it was almost inapproachable.”

“The immediate surrounding is full of strange features; the streets are mere dirt roads, some leading into gullies, some navigating the hills, the houses isolated with not a single path directed to them, it’s a mystery how people actually arrive at the door. The fences are like in Lithuania, moss covered, low and dripping wet. A man appears in the evening with a cat on his left shoulder, the cat has a piece of cord around the neck, is keeping a precarious balance, tries to get down; the man laughs. Low drifting clouds announce coming rain, everywhere are poplars, black under a purplish light, with barely ever a brighter opening in between. A sense of the unreal prevails, almost theatrical, flat like a film set. Over the guardhouse, in big letters, it says: “General von Strantz, base.” For three days I amuse myself asking the guard whether he knows anything about this general from the Great War. The man stands to attention, but I never get an answer, completely unknown this general, gone, sunken, with his standard, motorcade and staff milling around his person. Only two decades have passed and already nobody remembers” (Barrack II, Room 66).

Christmas 1944 was approaching. “We receive 100 grams of liverwurst as an extra ration, and in addition to the weekly meat ration there is 25% of gravy powder. And also, who is willing to give up on 30 grams of margarine and 100 grams of sugar can place an order for a stollen. I sign up to the list. Christmas carols are prohibited, instead it is officially suggested to reflect on the solstice and the renewal of the light emanating from the womb of Mother Nature; the commanding officers are instructed accordingly. The grounds linger under a grey light, a grey like the wings of seagulls diving into the oceans. Christmas eve has arrived. In the morning there was a tremendous air raid on Berlin; one wonders whether the apartment is still intact, and who among the few remaining acquaintances left to live there, has survived it. Then it is evening, the stollen is delivered to the door. I ask the orderly how he is coping with his respiratory troubles; he is hard of hearing, we communicate with some difficulty. I look again out to the grounds, into the distance towards the lowlands and the eastern steppe – so near and immediate, soaking up uncounted generations who never had the time to arrive at some modicum of clarity and understanding. Eve is descending, it is Holy Night” (Barrack II, Room 66). And then came the end.

For Benn the war ended in Berlin, the place of the most savage fighting in the last days of the Reich. “If on January 27, 1945 you had the nerve to approach the town’s commandant and ask “when the Russians are coming what are we going to do with our belongings here, now, after we had them brought from Berlin with so many difficulties,” his aide de camp, a SS-captain, says “who is talking like this will be shot; the Russians won’t break through, perhaps a stray tank may appear in the distance, but the town will be held, and who is sending his wife back to Berlin is going to be shot, too.” The following night at five o’clock a.m. the alarm sounds, we are under artillery fire and with nothing but a briefcase we walk home through a blizzard in -10º Celsius, on icy allay ways, choked by endless trains of horse-drawn wagons with dead children dropping over the side. In Küstrin we get a place on an open bullock cart, which carries us the sixty kilometers to Berlin arriving at Bahnhof Zoo under constant antiaircraft salvos. At home we found strangers squatting in the flat, the rooms were emptied of any furniture, we fell asleep on the floor, covering ourselves with my cloak and with newspapers, and in the morning we awake to the howling of the sirens” (Barrack II, Room 66).

Because of the savage fighting in the streets, Benn evacuated his wife to a small village on the river Oder, deemed to be a safer place, while he remained in Berlin. For days she heard nothing of her husband and as the approaching armies entered the village she believed him dead. When the raping of women started, Benn's wife took poison. A refugee from the East conveyed the news.

© – 5/10/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,650 words, all rights reserved