The Hour That Breaks
eBook - PDF

The Hour That Breaks

Gottfried Benn: A Biography

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  1. 516 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Hour That Breaks

Gottfried Benn: A Biography

,

About this book

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.

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Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. Introduction: Life: A Provocation to Transcendence
  5. Chapter 1: A Garden East of the Oder: 1886–1912
  6. Chapter 2: “A Troop of Vagabond Sons did Cry”: Gottfried Benn and Expressionism: 1912–1914
  7. Chapter 3: Art by other Means: Benn at War: 1914–1917
  8. Chapter 4: “Moi haïssable”: The Late Self: 1917–1930
  9. Chapter 5: A Public Voice: 1930–1933
  10. Chapter 6: The Crisis of the Spirit: 1933–1934
  11. Chapter 7: Into the Night: Inner Emigration: 1935–1945
  12. Chapter 8: Selah, the Psalm is Ended: 1945–1956
  13. Gottfried Benn: Chronology, 1886–1956
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index