Готфрид Бенн: Жизнь и творчество немецкого писателя и врача

German writer and physician

Gottfried Benn (2 May 1886 – 7 July 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.

After the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in 1914, and spent a brief period on the Belgian front, then served as a military doctor in Brussels. Benn attended the court martial and execution of Nurse and British spy Edith Cavell. He also worked as a physician in an army brothel. After the war, he returned to Berlin and practiced as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist. During the 1920s, he continued having a close relationship with Jewish poet Else Lasker Schüler who addressed love poems to him. This bond to her is the subject of the film Mein Herz niemandem (1997) by Helma Sanders Brahms.

Hostile to the Weimar Republic, and rejecting Marxism and Americanism, Benn was upset with ongoing economic and political instability, and sympathized for a short period with the Nazis as a revolutionary force. He hoped that National Socialism would exalt his aesthetics and that expressionism would become the official art of Germany, as Futurism had in Italy. Benn was elected to the poetry section of the Prussian Academy in 1932 and appointed head of that section in February 1933. In May, he defended the new regime in a radio broadcast, saying "the German workers are better off than ever before." He later signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, that is, the "vow of most faithful allegiance" to Adolf Hitler. He decided to perform "the aristocratic form of emigration" and joined the Wehrmacht in 1935, where he found many officers sympathetic to his disapproval of the régime. In May 1936 the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps attacked his expressionist and experimental poetry as degenerate, Jewish, and homosexual. In the summer of 1937, Wolfgang Willrich, a member of the SS, lampooned Benn in his book Säuberung des Kunsttempels; Heinrich Himmler, however, stepped in to reprimand Willrich and defended Benn on the grounds of his good record since 1933 (his earlier artistic output being irrelevant). In 1938 the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the National Socialist authors' association) banned Benn from further writing.

During World War II, Benn was posted to garrisons in eastern Germany where he wrote poems and essays. After the war, his work was banned by the Allies because of his initial support for Hitler. In 1951 he was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. He died of cancer in West Berlin in 1956, and was buried in Waldfriedhof Dahlem, Berlin.

Benn had a great influence on German poetry immediately before World War I (as an expressionist), as well as after World War II (as the 'Static' poet).