ABSTRACT
Discovering Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), especially outside of Germany, has long had its obstacles. At the origin of all of them is that the expressionist poet, who was a medical doctor by profession, is associated with Nazism. As the British poet Michael Hofmann explains in Impromptus, his generous bilingual selection of Benn's verse— and twelve significant prose texts are included as well, the poet initially thought that 'his Nietzschean and Spenglerian gloom had somewhere to dock' in 1933. As a doctor, Benn nonetheless managed to join the German army, an act that he described as 'the aristocratic form of emigration'. Having worked as a doctor in a whorehouse in Brussels during the First World War, he now found himself assigned to study suicide among the military in the second. In contrast to Brecht, Hofmann's selection, the first major one in English because E. B. Ashton mostly translates prose in Primal Vision (1958)— amply shows how different a poet Benn is.
