Result Of Perspectives (1930)

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RESULT OF PERSPECTIVES (1930)

by Gottfried Benn
(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister © 2002)


II

Result of perspectives. The world power heads debate. In Central Europe unite steel works from Bengal, barrages from the Amazon River, mercury from Hungary, Korean coal. The changing hall glows in the ornament of flags of fifty nations, from the ceiling of the round room hang banners in green, purple, orange, pink, blue and red, the emblems of the five continents. The president beats the silver gong with the silver hammer.

The White Man is in parts of the Earth. Niggers, hired from the kraal hidden deep in the bushes, a pumpkin full of drink on his back, he drifts through regions without water between lions and dog-hyenas in the washed-out sand of the silver mine, at night in the tin huts on the cemented mass banks intoxication breaks out with faecal pleasure and sodomy. Through slaves, bought cheap at the Congo, in the Confederate States sold for whisky and guns, on the way back plundering a Spanish silver ship in the name of the Virgin Queen, he established his immense wealth; with the Palmadorra in the hands, the whip with holes in it, that produces blisters, he becomes biblical: who has got something, is given, therefore the cross on the mission houses and the coconuts in the storage shed. Wherever he sets his foot, it becomes green: fire water, patent leather shoes, aluminum pottery for the children of the wilderness; the Hindu women, liberated from the widow burnings, he sends to regulated work with their children for sixteen hours in the mines; the soft peach bloom he leads to life: in the bar of the Majestic Hotel in Shanghai he teaches them to drink the cocktail with the elegance of a small bird.

On top of the old castles of the Grand Moghuls antennas clap; destruction of space: on the slopes of the Himalayas, on the edge of Tibet, in view of the Mount Everest stands the eight-tube-apparatus and here Grimsby and Koenigswusterhausen dictate. First the pirates, then the military, now the scientists. Magic of technology: The Atlantic is being led into the Kalahari, new skies, new rainfalls, new climates, and from the Sudan to Nyassaland the cotton trusts from Lancashire plant their own Malvaceae.

Bicycles to Uganda! In the Punjab in turn his view encompasses the forests, the maiden-like silence. These are views, these are deep views, these are downright transpiration views -: there the palms are sweating margarine and the acacias rubber,- of the two thousand eight hundred different trees of the Indian forests, five hundred are in the world trade, sixty in high demand, this view rests on leaf-roof amortisations, bamboo mortgage bonds, the children of Flora, dreamily out of the soil pounds and guineas grow.

The evening sets. In Nanking Road, Shanghai, the most pompous shopping street of Asia, the parade of limousines floats, splendor of enamel, the dreams of women. The bully dog matches the armchair shade after shade, the gramophone covered in the leather of the cushions, purse like folding boat in the native valeurs of the yellow river, tarnished silk scarfs, newly embroidered: the Dragon of Manchu and the Leopards of the King.

Another Empire: the English-Chinese diarchy, headquarter Delhi, Imperial Delhi: Australia not much further than South Africa, Cairo as close as Singapore - the evening sets, the White Race still rules, but it taught the Yellow one, already it is above it, already high-rises on the Brahmaputra, already vines are blooming on the Ganges, another fifty years and the Unceasing sways back. A new Khan, a new flag, a new green flag of the prophet, Vishnu awakes, Asia colonizes, through the ruins of the Indian campagna, over the yellow earth, from the white flowers of the tea fields, over the Great Wall, rises, surrounded by the ghosts of the Mingh graves, a yellow God.

The White Race is finished. Technical magic, a thousand words of Rebbach, text standardized, score of numbers, that was its last dream. Import from Asia: Bicycles to Ulster, lollipops to Halberstadt, beer warmers for the union house. Farewell, opportunism from the stock market to psychiatry! Grainless land, exhausted shafts, empty docks. Who cried for the fallen family - Iliads to and fro! The Unceasing visits the Pole, sprinkles earth on Scott's grave, soon people of the fire lands are growing roses there. The Unceasing, from sea to sea, moonless worlds too early, here, down.

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Poetry Criticism | Benn, Gottfried - Introduction

Gottfried Benn 1886-1956

German poet, essayist, and novelist.


INTRODUCTION

One of the major poets of German Expressionist movement, Benn is widely considered one of the of the most important German poets of the twentieth century. Benn's poetry frequently draws from his experiences as a physician, evoking imagery of disease and decay. His early volumes of poetry, Morgue (1912) and Fleisch (1917) draw from his clinical association with death and the human body. Benn was a controversial figure in terms of his political sympathies, and throughout his life was simultaneously accused by Nazis of being anti-German and accused by others of being a Nazi sympathizer.

Biographical Information

Benn was born in Mansfeld, Westprignitz, Germany, on May 2, 1886. His father was a German and a Lutheran minister, and his mother was from French-speaking Switzerland. From 1905 to 1912, Benn studied medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Akademie, which trained physicians for the armed forces. In 1914, he married the actress Edith Brosin, and later adopted her son from a previous marriage. Their daughter, Benn's only child, was born in 1915. During World War I Benn served as an army physician in a hospital for prostitutes located in Brussels. In 1917, after the War, Benn set up a private practice in Berlin, specializing in skin and venereal diseases. The first of a series of tragic deaths of his close female companions occurred in 1931, when a friend committed suicide by jumping out of a window, immediately following a telephone conversation in which Benn had attempted to talk her out of killing herself. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Benn was initially in favor of Nazism. In 1934, however, upon becoming aware of violent acts perpetrated by high-ranking members of the Nazi party, he became an outspoken critic of Nazism. Accordingly, Benn was criticized by the government and his works banned from publication. Upon being proclaimed a Jew, Benn did not hesitate to prove his non-Jewish identity through official documentation. However, because of ongoing suspicions that he was Jewish, Benn's medical practice suffered, and in 1935 he chose to rejoin the armed forces as an army physician. Nonetheless, he remained embroiled in political controversy throughout the 1930s. In 1938, his first wife having died, Benn married Herta von Wedemeyer, who was twenty-one years younger than he. In 1945, shortly after the German surrender to the Allies, she committed suicide. In 1946, he married Dr. Ilse Kaul, a dentist, who was also considerably younger than he. He retired from medical practice in 1953. On July 7, 1956, at the age of seventy, Benn died of spine cancer. Since his death, critics and biographers have striven to make sense of the complicated evolution of Benn's political sympathies, resulting in ongoing disagreement over the implications of the poet's relationship to Nazism.

Major Works

Benn's first volume of poetry, Morgue und andere gedichte (Morgue and Other Poems) was written in response to his experiences in an autopsy course, where he dissected cadavers. It includes clinical descriptions of flesh in various stages of decomposition, as well as local Berlin slang mixed with medical jargon, written in unrhymed or loosely rhymed free verse. As its title indicates, Benn's second volume, Fleisch, continues in this vein. Benn's next three poetry volumes were Schutt (1924), Betäubung (1925), and Spaltung (1925). The poems of this series are characterized by themes of mystical visions and the primordial human condition. Unlike the earlier volumes, these poems are written in classical rhymed verse. In 1936, in honor of Benn's fiftieth birthday, a collection of his poetry, Ausgewählte gedichte, 1911-1936 was published. Statische Gedichte (1948) includes works written between 1936-1947. In 1949, Trunkene Flut, a collection of his more recent poems, was published. Benn's next two poetry volumes were Fragmente (1951) and Destillationen (1953). The last volume of Benn's poetry to be published during his lifetime was Aprèslude, in 1955. Collections of his poetry in English translation include Primal Vision (1960), Selected Poems (1970), and Prose, Essays, Poems (1987). In addition to poetry, Benn wrote numerous essays and several novellas. His autobiography, Doppelleben, was published in 1950.

Critical Reception

Throughout his literary career, and for half a century after his death, Benn has been considered one of the most important German poets of the twentieth century, and a major poet of German Expressionism. However, although Benn was never a staunchly political person, his literary reputation, both during his lifetime and since his death, has always been embroiled in controversy over his political sympathies. He was attacked from all sides of the political spectrum. John Mander quotes Benn as stating that he had been “publicly labeled a swine by the Nazis, an imbecile by the Communists, an intellectual prostitute by the deomocrates, a renegade by the emigrants, and a pathological nihilist by the religious.” Critics generally agree that, although there is some development in his style, Benn's poetry remained essentially uniform and static during some forty years of publication. His early poetry, such as the first volume, Morgue, was immediately embraced by the avant-garde and German Expressionists. It was also, however, harshly criticized as offensive to the predominantly romantic literary sensibilities of the time. During the inter-war years, Benn was often banned and frequently discouraged from publication, due to hostilities toward his poetry on the part of Nazi authorities. After the World War II, he received renewed recognition as a great poet, but was also compelled to defend himself against charges of being a Nazi-sympathizer, based on his early pro-Nazi statements (made during the years 1933-34). By the time of his death in 1956, however, Benn was recognized internationally as one of the greatest German poets of the twentieth century, and an important figure in the German Expressionist movement.