The Hour That Breaks: Gottfried Benn: A Biography

Description

The Hour That Breaks is the first biography of Gottfried Benn to appear in English. The author of this study charts in impressive detail the complex paths of Benn’s life, through the demands of his medical practice and military involvement in two world wars, his brief political advocacy of Hitler and Nazism in 1933, to his final «comeback» in post Second World War Germany. The author also engages with Benn’s extensive body of poetry which, inventive, challenging and formally wrought, was the product of mind that was both radical and conservative. The same propensity to invention and transformation also informed Benn’s personal and professional life, giving rise to a practice of role-playing and dissimulation that the poet termed a «double life». As Travers shows in this well-written and informative biography, this was a strategy of survival of which Benn, ultimately, was as much the victim as the master. This biography also offers fresh translations of many of Benn’s poems, a number of which appear here in English for the first time. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Life: A Provocation to Transcendence Chapter 1: A Garden East of the Oder: 1886–1912 A wound opens The Wings of Knowledge: Education Pathology and the Poetic Muse: the Morgue cycle Chapter 2: “A Troop of Vagabond Sons did Cry”: Gottfried Benn and Expressionism: 1912–1914 Expressionism: A Cultural Network “We have become Haters beyond Redemption” “One Heart is Too Small a Hill to Rest On”: Gottfried Benn and Else Lasker-Schüler Chapter 3: Art by other Means: Benn at War: 1914–1917 Bürgerliches Trauerspiel: Gottfried Benn and Edith Osterloh The Call of Duty: Officer Benn “What is your soul?” The Doors of Perception: the Rönne stories Chapter 4: “Moi haïssable”: The Late Self: 1917–1930 Under the skin: Dr. med. Gottfried Benn A Terminal Sensibility Synopsis “Through the Night the Scales That Fall” In Search of Integration Politics and Memory: The Case of Miss Edith Cavell “Life Seeks to Go Under” Chapter 5: A Public Voice: 1930–1933 The Music of Nihilism A Literary Season The Call to Unreason Chapter 6: The Crisis of the Spirit: 1933–1934 A State Official Another Voice “Une espace intime” Persona non grata Chapter 7: Into the Night: Inner Emigration: 1935–1945 Renuncio Berlin. Renuncio mundi: Hanover, 1935–1937 “Refinement, Decline, Sorrow” “Open Your Eyes Only to the Night” “You Are My Only Companion” “Walls of Stone, Walls of Glass” Domestic Resolutions Finis Civitas Germanicae “And Mocks All Action and the Spite of Time” Gottfried Benn: Phenotype 1944 Chapter 8: Selah, the Psalm is Ended: 1945–1956 A Broad Grave of Silence “Das Come Back” Mea Culpa? “Aprèslude”: Phase II New Poetry: New Readership Losses and Gains in the Material World Notturno: Final love Gottfried Benn: Chronology, 1886–1956 Notes Bibliography Abbreviations Primary Sources Secondary Sources (on Gottfried Benn) Secondary Sources (General) Index