Gottfried Benn’s Poetry and Unbracketing the Expressionist Image

Abstract

After studying the prevailing expressionistic attitude in Benn’s early poems such as “Nachtcafé,” the paper traces the loosening of imagery in Benn’s more psychoanalytic and mythological poems. The paper then offers a close reading of “Das sind doch Menschen,” a poem from Benn’s latest period, which exemplifies a distinct break in his poetics and the emergence of a markedly performative and personal voice. The backdrop of expressionism, his early fascination with mythology and mid-career attempts to achieve a perfect lyric structure continued to have obvious influences on Benn’s later writing but this personal and anecdotal period occasions a new balance between poetic image, lyric self, and abstract statement. In addition, the paper also traces Benn’s attempts to recover a more agentic lyric self within the larger poetic context of the post-war era, turning to poetic theories advanced by contemporaneous poets such as Ingeborg Bachmann and in Benn’s own momentous lecture on poetics, Probleme der Lyrik.