The Hour That Breaks: Gottfried Benn: A Biography

ISBN-13: 9783034310987 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 516 str.

Martin Travers

Opis

The Hour That Breaks is the first biography of Gottfried Benn to appear in English. The author of this study charts in impressive detail the complex paths of Benn s life, through the demands of his medical practice and military involvement in two world wars, his brief political advocacy of Hitler and Nazism in 1933, to his final -comeback- in post Second World War Germany. The author also engages with Benn s extensive body of poetry which, inventive, challenging and formally wrought, was the product of mind that was both radical and conservative. The same propensity to invention and transformation also informed Benn s personal and professional life, giving rise to a practice of role-playing and dissimulation that the poet termed a -double life-. As Travers shows in this well-written and informative biography, this was a strategy of survival of which Benn, ultimately, was as much the victim as the master. This biography also offers fresh translations of many of Benn s poems, a number of which appear here in English for the first time."

Spis treści

Contents: Life: A Provocation to Transcendence - A Garden East of the Oder: 1886-1912 - «A Troop of Vagabond Sons did Cry»: Gottfried Benn and Expressionism: 1912-1914 - Art by other Means: Benn at War: 1914-1917 - «Moi haïssable»: The Late Self: 1917-1930 - A Public Voice: 1930-1933 - The Crisis of the Spirit: 1933-1934 - Into the Night: Inner Emigration: 1935-1945 - Selah, the Psalm is Ended: 1945-1956 - Gottfried Benn: Chronology, 1886-1956.

O autorze

Martin Travers was eduated at the universities of East Anglia, Tübingen, and Cambridge. He has published widely in the area of German and European literature. He is the author of Text and Selfhood: The Poetry of Gottfried Benn (Peter Lang, 2007).