Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn (1886 to 1956) was a German poet, essayist and physician. The son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, he studied theology and then military medicine before working as a pathologist and later as a dermatologist and specialist in venereal disease in Berlin. His first booklet, Morgue and Other Poems (1912), brought expressionist verse about physical decay, blood, cancer and death to readers who received it with shock, and his early poetry often borrowed the vocabulary of medicine to portray humanity as one more disease-ridden animal. He briefly sympathized with the Nazi regime, turned away from it after the Night of the Long Knives, and was banned from further writing in 1938. After the war he published Static Poems (1948) and the autobiography Double Life (1950), received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951, and was submitted for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. His work shaped German poetry both before the First World War and after the Second.