SOURCE: “Gottfried Benn,” in German Men of Letters, Volume III, edited by Alex Natan, Oswald Wolf, 1968, pp. 129-50.

In the following essay, Hilton traces the development of Benn's poetic style in relation to other modern German poets.

Gottfried Benn was born on May 2, 1886, in Mansfield, Westprignitz, the son of a Lutheran pastor and a Swiss-French mother. His early upbringing was in this Lutheran environment. Relations with his father, whom he greatly respected, later became strained over the agonising death from cancer of his mother. He had been sent to the University of Marburg to study theology and philology, but his heart was more in medicine and soon he went to a Berlin academy to train as a military doctor. In 1912 Benn left the army and went into private practice in Berlin, and very shortly there appeared his first collection of verse (Morgue), quickly followed by other collections of...