Gottfried Benn openly linked high culture to slave-owning states and never retracted this view

Evidence

In 1933 Benn welcomed the totalitarian state as being the type of state that corresponded to the autonomous poem, and in a speech broadcast on 24 April 1933 he stated, moreover, that everything that has made the West famous, which has marked out its development, which is at work within it even today, was createdlet us be perfectly clear about itin slave-owning states . . . History is rich in examples of the pharaonic exercise of power being linked with culture; and the song of this revolves like the starry vault.' In 1948-9 Benn achieved a comeback with two volumes of poetry, Statische Gedichte and Trunkene Flut. His dazzling lectures and essays on the theory of literature, and above all his lecture on The Problems of Poetry’ at the University of Marburg in 1951, were willingly accepted by many young people and seen as stimulating and novel. In October 1951 Benn was awarded the Georg Büchner prize in Darmstadt, only a year after he had made it perfectly clear, through the publication of his Early Prose and Speeches, that he still considered a slave-owning state to be the appropriate basis for his poetry. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2233

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s modernist aesthetics and the Frankfurt School’s problem of fascism’s affinity with modernist art — a theme built through this whole book. — connects to: The poet Benn linked autonomous poetry to slave-owning states in 1933 — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2233; Adorno ranked conservative anti-modernists as worse enemies than fascist modernists like Benn — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2235
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — Benn’s celebration of slave-owning, pharaonic states as the basis of culture echoes the sacrificial foundations of stratified societies discussed there.
• SHARE: For someone interested in the German literary right: Benn’s career as a fascist modernist who never renounced his slave-state views yet returned to laurels in the FRG.

Broader Connections

• Adorno ranked conservative anti-modernists as worse enemies than fascist modernists like Benn #responds-to (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2235