Gottfried Benn

Born in 1886 as son of a Lutheran pastor and a French women from a place near Yverdon, I grew up in a village of approximately three hundred people. I went to grammar school, then the University, read two years linguistics and theology, after that enrolled for medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Academy, served in the military as a doctor in the territorial forces, but was soon discharged - because during an exercise, after six hours on horseback, a kidney had loosened - continued my medical education, traveled to America, inoculated passengers down in the lower decks, went to war, conquered Antwerp, had a heck of a 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 from 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 gaps in the peritoneum, 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 doctor at a clinic for prostitutes, a completely isolated post, lived in a confiscated house, 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 - but it barely touched the everyday routine - life swung like a pendulum in an air of silence and solitude, I lived on the fringe where the existence ends and the self begins. My thoughts often turn back to those weeks; this was the life, it will not come again, everything else was rot.

As far as I can follow the 4,000 years of human history, there are two basic types of neurological response, separated by a different sensitivity for the interplay between the whole and its elements and represented in a certain irritability against holistic concepts of a more total perspective. Here you have the primacy of the whole, of "en kai pan," the incidental play of forms, painful and centripetal as with the Hindus, the speculative types, the introverts, the expressionists, and on the opposite end there is the individual as absolute measure of all things, who pigeonholes the world in ideas: the casuistic activist, ethical and working out. I rather keep company with the primacy of the whole, with the harbingers of chaos, and this to such extent, that I think of Darwin as a midwife and of his monkeys as a branch of arts and crafts: we invented space to kill time, and time to motivate our will to live; in fact nothing happens and nothing develops: the category in which the cosmos reveals itself is the category of hallucinations.

I am the child from the century of exact sciences; I know exactly where I am standing.

In a bacchanal of singularities, in a triumph of the concrete, I am drilled like no one else in formulas and transformations and summing up in a synthesis, my inner self is distorted to a grotesque persiflage; and by the way, I must add, that I did not always ply my present trade, the skin diseases.

Initially I had been a psychiatrist, until a strange phenomenon occurred, which turned into a crises, and to make a long story short, this meant that I was no longer able to pay attention to the individual case. It became physically impossible for me to concentrate my interest on a new patient, or to continue to survey individually the old cases. It caused me pain beyond description to inquire into the history of their illness and pay attention to their lifestyle, and to test a patient's IQ and assess what may motivate him morally. My mouth became dry, my eyelids inflamed, I would have gone berserk, if my superior, before he fired my sorry ass, had not summoned me and demanded an explanation for my utterly inadequate keeping of the charts.

I tried to understand what it was that had caused my troubles. From textbooks on psychiatry I moved on to modern publications, some quite remarkable, especially when coming from the French; I took particular interest in what goes under the term of "depersonalization syndrome" or alienation to sense perception; I began to envision the self as an entity so powerful, that it makes gravity appear to be the kiss of a snowflake, and it pulls towards a condition, where none of the intellectual capacities that occupy so much attention in modern culture would matter any more; instead, what in the wake of mainstream medicine had become odious in our civilization - nervous breakdowns, fatigue, psychotic disorders - had to be seen for what it really was: the profound, age-old and mythological alienation of man from his world.

Impossible to be sociable any longer, impossible to find a point of reference in life or work; the brackish condition of antithetic structures has become too obvious, this compromising intercourse of potbellied contradictions is too disgusting.

I read in Montesquieu, because he descended from Anthony as well as from Augustus, the Emperor Caligula had 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 as his sister, Drusilla, had died and been deified, it was high treason to mourn for her, because she was a goddess, and 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 was this form in which I recognized them, when ever somebody stepped into my way; it was this line which revealed to me their true nature.

It was the structure of "either - or," in which these people use to operate when they act professionally or practice safe sex. One way as well as the other: the same anal retentive personality, complete and 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, and this generalizing sub-text of "positive thinking." Lemurs, they dream up grand schemes and shriek under a night-mare, in gutta-percha galoshes they squish through the soggy void; words Horatio, words! The lips balloon like blisters and spew semen out as gossip.

Time and again I close shop, lock the door behind me and travel. Time and again I have to get on my way, because I can't find a desert in Europe. Before me, in my consultation room, there sits a gentleman; he addresses me, his speech is full of the communality of experience and of a life of honest work, "take heart my friend, things are going to look up," he says, soothing and agreeable.

I look away through the window and across the street another gentleman is dusting his jacket. But at this precise moment, there are many gents dusting their jackets; where ever you turn, always these simultaneous events, back and forth, between established certainties and the unquestionably vast, between ideas and totality; back and forth.

How shall we live?

Who says we must!

Vulnerable in the coronary area, neurotic and incontinent, we keep taps on the carnal self, keep taps on the coming of the apocalypse, often rather schizoid and dissociated instead of responding with affection. Instead of celebrating our fertility we abort into every direction under the sky, self-centered and solitary, festering and one-eyed, like Cyclops over the ram's back; the desired spoil clings to the belly underneath of the animal and is not mapped out on an abstract grid of Cartesian gradients. Thirty seven years and completely worn out, I have nothing more to write: one should write with intestinal worms and with coprolites, I have stopped reading - what is there to read? The good old titans with wings of a dragonfly sticking to their sandwich wrapper?

I think no longer for myself, no longer follow other people’s thoughts to their conclusion; it is so cute this image of the Western thinker who still musters the courage to confront chaos with his only weapon, the cookie cutter of definitions. It is David's slingshot, fighting for his life and fighting another day until the West is going to sink into the night; the Sun is setting over formalistic methodology, but what touches me in passing is the notion of a method beyond the latent antinomies which never cease to underpin our psyche, a metaphysical syndicalism.

Now they have been published, these Collected Works, one volume, two hundred pages, very slim; I should be ashamed, if I were still alive. It would surprise me if anybody should care to read it; already it speaks to me from a great distance. I throw it over my shoulder like Deucalion threw the stones. Perhaps the emerging hobgoblins turn human, but which way ever they turn out to be, I do not love them.

By Gottfried Benn, 1926