SOURCE: “Treason of the Intellectuals?: Benda, Benn and Brecht,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier, St. Martin's Press, 1988, pp. 23-32.

In the following excerpt, Timms discusses Benn's controversial political orientation during the era of Nazi Germany, and the influence this had upon his poetry.

Treason of the Intellectuals defines the norms against which we may assess the polarisation of political sentiment in Germany. The test case is provided by Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). Benn was one of the most influential figures in the Expressionist movement and exemplifies its political volatility—its tendency to generate impulses towards both left-wing and right-wing extremes. Unlike his gifted contemporaries Georg Trakl and Ernst Stadler, Benn survived the First World War—after serving as an army doctor in German-occupied Brussels—to become a dominating presence in modern German poetry. His...