Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn burst onto the literary scene of Expressionism, bent on destroying reality and language and creating monologic, sometimes monstrous, visions. In this sense, he remained true to Expressionism his entire life. His literary career is punctuated by the intersection of the poetic and the political in three main steps: radical Expressionist beginnings, short-lived alliance with Nazi Germany and subsequent silence, and finally his comeback after World War II with a tempered, neo-classical modernism. Benn wrote in a letter after the war that the Nazis had publicly called him a pig; the Communists, an idiot; the democratic parties, a spiritual prostitute; the German exile writers, a renegade; and religious groups, a pathological ni