3 - Nature on Stage: Gottfried Benn — Beyond the Aesthetics of Shock?

Summary

THAT THE PLEASURES OF NATURE may have been, in the German case, guilty ones was overtly acknowledged in Gottfried Benn's Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912). This first published collection, which established his literary reputation straightway, begins with a famously sardonic burial of a little aster inside a human corpse during an autopsy.

Ein ersoffener Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt.

Irgendeiner hatt ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster

Zwischen die Zähne geklemmt.

Als ich von der Brust aus

unter der Haut

mit einem langen Messer

Zunge und Gaumen herausschnitt,

muss ich sie angestossen haben, denn sie glitt

in das nebenliegende Gehirn.

Ich packte sie ihm in die Bauchhöhle

zwischen die Holzwolle,

als man zunähte.

Trinke dich satt in deiner Vase!

Ruhe sanft,

kleine Aster!

[A drowned beerwagon driver was loaded onto the dissecting table.

Someone had stuck a darkly bright lilac aster

Into his teeth.

When I, proceeding up from the chest

Cut out his tongue and gums

From under his skin

With a long knife,

I must have bumped into the flower, for it slipped

Into the neighboring brains.

I packed it into his belly

Between wood shavings,

when we sewed him up.

Drink deeply in your vase!

Rest in peace,

Little aster!]

The Blue Flower of Romantic Nature is here ritually laid to last rest, together with the subject of humanist autonomy revealed as dissected anatomy, all to the ironized tones of an implicitly liturgical ceremoniousness: the concluding invocation, Ruhe sanft, / kleine Aster! invoking the words of the Requiem.