TIME: Gottfried Benn, low-life delusional Gottfried Benn: Life - low delusion
life - low-mania!
dream for boys and servants, but you
of ancient lineage,
race at the end of the runway,
what do you expect here?
still intoxication
a Stundenvertauschung
of the world and you?
you looking for more men and women?
you was not all prepared
faith and how it
and destruction then slips away?
form is only faith and action,
the first of hands touched
but then the hands kidnapped
statues bear the seeds. on
The 24th July 1936 on the back of a picture postcard to his friend FW Oelze clever poem summarizes Gottfried Benn's World concept, much influenced by Nietzsche's idea that reality is relevant only as an aesthetic event. For Benn is actually a chimera, delusion low life and the belief that human activity may influence the course of things, a dream for boys, and servants. Development, no progress of history Gottfried Benn has in numerous poems, prose works as strongly repelled as fundamental error. Only the individual, the genius, is valid, loneliness is the probate of life and only the artists, it can, the senseless life to wrest something that endures: the form is only faith and action.
Benn's elite consciousness is deeply anti-democratic, so that expression of a general skepticism civilization that was common during the Weimar Republic to the left and right-wing intellectuals: left Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Hiller Johannes R. Becher, Ernst Jünger right or Gottfried Benn. In consequence, the political will of some to communism, others to fascism, especially the Italian variant of irrationalism, heroism and Gottfried Benn Auserwähltsein so fascinated that he is from 1932 to 1934 the Nazis approached. In the artistic consequence it led some to didactic or moralizing poem, in any case to trial, with the means of art awareness to change. It is this Stundenvertauschung of the world and you deny Benn, who announces in another poem: Evolution strangeness / is the depth of this statement.
Gottfried Benn, poetic and ideological antithesis of his contemporary of Brecht secular preacher does not know the shape of the Rufgedichts he wants to reach anyone to change anything. He mocks a life long any involvement and says any enjoyment of life, whether the prostitute or the diva, the millionaire with the champagne or the refuse driver in beer to jugglery of weaklings, for there are only two things: the emptiness / and I subscribed
- From: THE TIME 2000/42
