The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Limits of Technocracy
- 2 Rilke's Unnatural Things: From the End of Landscape to the Dinggedicht
- 3 Nature on Stage: Gottfried Benn — Beyond the Aesthetics of Shock?
- 4 The Limits of Violence: Döblin's Colonial Nature
- 5 Nature as Paradox: Brecht's Exile Lyric
- Appendix: Niklas Luhmann
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Nature on Stage: Gottfried Benn — Beyond the Aesthetics of Shock?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Limits of Technocracy
- 2 Rilke's Unnatural Things: From the End of Landscape to the Dinggedicht
- 3 Nature on Stage: Gottfried Benn — Beyond the Aesthetics of Shock?
- 4 The Limits of Violence: Döblin's Colonial Nature
- 5 Nature as Paradox: Brecht's Exile Lyric
- Appendix: Niklas Luhmann
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Information
- The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist LiteratureNature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin, pp. 97 - 133Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008