SOURCE: “Gottfried Benn's ‘Palau,’” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4, November, 1986, pp. 312-23.

In the following essay, Holbeche discusses the importance of Benn's poem “Palau” in the development of his early poetry.

Of all Gottfried Benn's major poems ‘Palau,’¹ originally entitled ‘Rot’ and published as the second poem of the ‘Schutt’ cycle in Der Neue Merkur in April 1922, has probably fared worst at the hands of the critics. Although no longer neglected in favour of other twenties poems of considerably less artistic value and historical interest, it is consistently misinterpreted²—not just because of its rather formidable difficulty, but also because critics have tended on the whole to treat it simply as an example of Benn's interest in the exotic and primitive, thus overlooking the fact that it also reflects his preoccupation in the early twenties with certain aspects of the philosophy of Heraclitus, Hegel...