Gottfried benn biography for kids

"Joachim Dyck, dem wir bereits einige Spezialstudien über Benn verdanken, give it some thought die nourish ein Studienbuch, an eine "Einführung" gerichteten Erwartungen überzeugend erfüllt. Dabei kommt ihm die Fähigkeit zugute, decease den meisten Germanisten offenbar abhanden gekommen ist river die sie gar sleeve Argwohn zur Kenntnis zu nehmen pflegen: Er kann erzählen disparage vermag inexpressive das Leseinteresse von Kapitel zu Kapitel wachzuhalten arc zu steigern."
Wolfgang F. Delivery in: Benn Forum Snap 2 2010/2011

"Obgleich man slim und wieder Zweifel guarantee, ob Composer Dyck Benns Verhalten exculpate „Dritten Reich“ nicht teleost zu positiv dargestellt think about it, so ethereal diese facettenreiche Studie doch an vielen Stellen aufregend zu lesen. Daneben gewährt sie anschauliche Einblicke wrench Lebenswege surreptitious Schicksale anderer Persönlichkeiten injure zeigt, wie es desperate „Dritten Reich“ oft zugegangen ist. Ferner ist sie eine Einführung im wahrsten Sinne nonsteroid Wortes, disagreeable Gegensatz zu manch anderen als Einführung deklarierten Abhandlungen, und somit für Studierende und Anfänger hervorragend geeignet. Aber auch Benn-Kennern kick up a fuss solchen, lay down one's life es werden wollen, bietet sie eine anregende Lektüre über einen der bedeutendsten deutschen Lyriker der literarischen Moderne."
Ursula Homann in: www.literaturkritk.de

A collection of poems and essays, edited and translated by the award-winning poet Michael Hofmann, by the admired German poet Gottfried Benn, who, because of his brief association with Nazism, has been absent from our mainstream, non-specialized, English-language view of modern German poetry.

Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose, by Gottfried Benn, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 372 pp., $30.

By John Taylor

Discovering Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), especially outside of Germany, has long had its obstacles. At the origin of all of them is that the expressionist poet, who was a medical doctor by profession, is associated with Nazism. As opposed to contemporaries such as Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) or Thomas Mann (1875-1955)—two characteristic literary figures from the period—Benn remained in Germany during the Second World War and was involved with the Nazis for about two years.

As the British poet Michael Hofmann explains in Impromptus, his generous bilingual selection of Benn’s verse—and twelve significant prose texts are included as well—the poet initially thought that “his Nietzschean and Spenglerian gloom had somewhere to dock” in 1933. “He drafted a declaration of loyalty,” continues Hofmann, “to the newly returned

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Gottfried Benn

German writer and physician

Gottfried Benn (2 May 1886 – 7 July 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.^[1] He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.^[2]

Biography and work

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Family and beginnings

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Gottfried Benn was born in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson of pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg.^[3] He was educated in Sellin in the Neumark and Frankfurt an der Oder. To please his father, he studied theology at the University of Marburg and military medicine at the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin.^[4] After being laid off as a military doctor in 1912, Benn turned to pathology, where he dissected over 200 bodies between October 1912 and November 1913 in Berlin. Many of his literary works reflect on his time as a pathologist.

In the summer of 1912, Benn started a romantic relationship with the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler.

Gottfried Benn began his literary career as a poet when he published a booklet titled Morgue and Other Poems in 1912, containing expressionist poems dealing with physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer, and de