Benn wrote a number of poems as a young man. Most remained unpublished, although they are now available in his SΓ€mtliche Werke. They are short and highly crafted texts, which give voice to a poetic sensibility that is still in an early stage of self-definition. Gefilde der Unseligen. My coast seeks to feel itself walked upon by the warm feet of the living; The spring murmurs in giving cravings and seeks to quench throats. And everything seeks to rise up into foreign blood, and drunken propel itself into a further glowing of life, and nothing wants to remain in itself.
Hoar Frost Something from the mist-drenched air detached itself and grew overnight into a white shadow that clung around silver fir, tree and bush. And it shone like the soft whiteness that falls from the clouds, and silently released a dark world into pale beauty. Benn wrote the poems while he was working as a pathologist in Berlin hospitals, carrying out autopsies. Benn draws on his medical experience in his poems, but transforms it through a perspective that is both analytical and surreal.
His disconcerting subject matter had never been seen before in German poetry: a drowned girl is opened up to reveal a nest of rats within her body; a dead prostitute has her gold fillings stolen by a mortuary attendant; the corpses of a dead negro and a white woman are aligned in an erotic pose; the visceral remains of dissected corpses are described in detail, which strangely brings them back to life; an autopsy is sketched in comic macabre tones; and a man and women walk take a stroll even through a cancer ward.
Kleine Aster Ein ersoffener Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt. Someone or other had stuck a dark-lilac aster between his teeth. As I was cutting through his chest from under his skin with a long knife, to extract his tongue and palate, I must have nudged the flower, for it slid into the brain beside it. As it was being sewn up, I packed the flower back into the stomach cavity, between the padding.
Drink to the full in your new vase! Rest in peace, little aster! When her chest was opened up, the gullet was found to be full of holes. And then, in the cavity below the diaphragm a nest of young rats was discovered.
