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Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose
An extraordinary collection of poetry and prose from the master of German expressionism
The first poem in Gottfried Benn’s first book, Morgue (1912)—written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after—with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn’s subsequent work.
Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often unkind fate—the death of his mother from cancer; the death of his first wife, Edith; his brief attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife, Herta—the harsh voice of the poems relented and mellowed. The later Benn—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in the low unupholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.
With this collection of poems and essays, curated and translated by Michael Hofmann—whose Benn translations won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for best poetry in translation published in Poetry magazine in 2007—Benn, at long last, promises to attain the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.
The first poem in Gottfried Benn’s first book, Morgue (1912)—written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after—with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn’s subsequent work.
Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often unkind fate—the death of his mother from cancer; the death of his first wife, Edith; his brief attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife, Herta—the harsh voice of the poems relented and mellowed. The later Benn—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in the low unupholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.
With this collection of poems and essays, curated and translated by Michael Hofmann—whose Benn translations won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for best poetry in translation published in Poetry magazine in 2007—Benn, at long last, promises to attain the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 2013
6 people are currently reading
217 people want to read
About the author
Gottfried Benn
194 books88 followersGottfried Benn was a German essayist, novelist and expressionist poet. A doctor of medicine, he became an early admirer, and later a critic, of the National Socialist revolution. Benn had a literary influence on German verse immediately before and after the NS regime.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 12, 2017
4.5 stars. There is a strange, dark beauty to the poetry of Gottfried Benn, a brilliant Expressionist whose embrace of the Third Reich has caused him to be rarely translated and under-studied in the United States. The early poems here are morbid examinations of disease, death, and dead bodies (his early collection centered on the morgue) based on his time as a medical student. They are stark evocations of the alienation of those who came of age during the Great War. His poetry between the wars focuses more on loneliness and death, while his poetry during the Third Reich becomes more inward, reflecting his own isolation.
After realizing regret for embracing the Reich and being banned from writing and publishing, he enters his “statische gedichte” phrase (static poetry) in the late-30s. These are works that celebrate those who are isolated, disillusioned, and lonely. One gets the feeling that this was his way of coping after so many years of railing against the individualism of left-wing intellectuals had brought him, ironically, alone and unable to publish. There are moments when you almost feel sorry for Benn (almost) as he was unable to publish under the NAZIs whom he initially supported and then unable to publish directly after the war as persona non grata in the post-war German literary world.
The final stage of his career includes many poems about growing old and death (no surprise there!). It’s unfortunate that Benn’s political ideology was so abhorrent, as his poetry in all phases of his career is compelling and infinitely readable: a haunting testament of personal and social paralysis and decay. Perhaps it’s only fitting that his politics placed him in a unique position to examine that social disintegration from within (while, again ironically, thinking that he was supporting a cause that would re-construct a certain social order).
His poetry is a must-read, and his life is well-worth studying, if only as a warning of the dangers of placing art at the behest of the state, especially when that state becomes antithetical to both art and intellectualism.
After realizing regret for embracing the Reich and being banned from writing and publishing, he enters his “statische gedichte” phrase (static poetry) in the late-30s. These are works that celebrate those who are isolated, disillusioned, and lonely. One gets the feeling that this was his way of coping after so many years of railing against the individualism of left-wing intellectuals had brought him, ironically, alone and unable to publish. There are moments when you almost feel sorry for Benn (almost) as he was unable to publish under the NAZIs whom he initially supported and then unable to publish directly after the war as persona non grata in the post-war German literary world.
The final stage of his career includes many poems about growing old and death (no surprise there!). It’s unfortunate that Benn’s political ideology was so abhorrent, as his poetry in all phases of his career is compelling and infinitely readable: a haunting testament of personal and social paralysis and decay. Perhaps it’s only fitting that his politics placed him in a unique position to examine that social disintegration from within (while, again ironically, thinking that he was supporting a cause that would re-construct a certain social order).
His poetry is a must-read, and his life is well-worth studying, if only as a warning of the dangers of placing art at the behest of the state, especially when that state becomes antithetical to both art and intellectualism.
January 5, 2025
If you’re onboard with Michael Hofmann’s translation philosophy it’s a fantastic collection. But as with most German poetry - or any poetry really - translated into English shortcuts and compromises and bad judgements will be made and these will combine to yield a new poem. And what new poems. Hofmann captures the despair, the dying hours of middle and late age, and how a breaking modernity might feel in a room, in a pub, on an autobahn, somewhere in the Germany of the middle of the last century, as experienced by the bad judgement calls of an early twentieth century German poet. ‘You’re not so alone / in your mess, your restlessness, your shakes [.]’ and ‘[e]pochs are slow to change [.]’. A sense of premonition too, some early grumpy shade thrown at podcasters: ‘nothing but these opinionated pedagogues / it seems that everything the West thinks of as its / higher product is produced by the seated male [.]’ There is a lot of fun and sadness and invention and surprising turns in these poems that I’m sure to revisit them again and again.
April 2, 2025
Poems on body, isolation, and death in modernity’s ruins. The tone blends nihilistic cynicism and aesthetic stoicism. Top tips: Unsatisfied Ones, Restaurant, Late, Listen.
November 22, 2025
Very high chance that the poetry in here was absolutely mutilated by translation (not slighting the translator, but things like this are such a bark to do, practically impossible) but still enjoyable, especially when trying to read the German out loud. Lot of solemnity and ennui in the verse; and yet, philistine, I found myself slightly erring towards the prose, slagging off academics and the anemic atmosphere of everyday life is always a pleasure. Here’s a passage I liked as a dogshit writer which will keep me trucking along for a little while at least.
Followers, successors, I don't mind if you're provoked by me, I hope it makes you tough. Toughness is the best gift for the artist, toughness against yourself and your work. What did Thomas Mann say? "Sooner spoil a work than not go as far as you can at every point of it." Or as I tried to put it earlier, one thing is for certain: if something is finished, it must be complete. Don't for one moment forget the dubiousness and eccentricity of your enterprise, the dangers and hatreds that attend your activity. Keep in mind that coldness and egoism are part of your task. Your work has left behind the temples and the sacrificial vessels and the painting of pillars, the painting of chapels is no longer part of it either. You are wallpapering with yourself, and you have no alternative. Don't allow yourself to be seduced by comfort; a book is 312 pages, and retails at 13.80 deutsche marks in hardback. There is no restoration. Intellectual things are irreversible, you must pursue your path to the end, to the end of the night. With your back to the wall, in the wretchedness of fatigue, in the gray of emptiness, you will read your Job and your Jeremiah, and you will stick it out. Draft your propositions as harshly as you can, because when the epoch draws to a close and kills your song, you will be measured by your sentences. What you don't write will not exist. You will make enemies, be alone, a nutshell on the sea, a walnut shell emitting odd clanking noises, rattling with cold, trembling with your own revulsion at yourself, but don't put out an SOS - in the first place, no one will and in the second, your ending will be peaceful after you, so much travail.
Followers, successors, I don't mind if you're provoked by me, I hope it makes you tough. Toughness is the best gift for the artist, toughness against yourself and your work. What did Thomas Mann say? "Sooner spoil a work than not go as far as you can at every point of it." Or as I tried to put it earlier, one thing is for certain: if something is finished, it must be complete. Don't for one moment forget the dubiousness and eccentricity of your enterprise, the dangers and hatreds that attend your activity. Keep in mind that coldness and egoism are part of your task. Your work has left behind the temples and the sacrificial vessels and the painting of pillars, the painting of chapels is no longer part of it either. You are wallpapering with yourself, and you have no alternative. Don't allow yourself to be seduced by comfort; a book is 312 pages, and retails at 13.80 deutsche marks in hardback. There is no restoration. Intellectual things are irreversible, you must pursue your path to the end, to the end of the night. With your back to the wall, in the wretchedness of fatigue, in the gray of emptiness, you will read your Job and your Jeremiah, and you will stick it out. Draft your propositions as harshly as you can, because when the epoch draws to a close and kills your song, you will be measured by your sentences. What you don't write will not exist. You will make enemies, be alone, a nutshell on the sea, a walnut shell emitting odd clanking noises, rattling with cold, trembling with your own revulsion at yourself, but don't put out an SOS - in the first place, no one will and in the second, your ending will be peaceful after you, so much travail.
June 1, 2018
"Toughness is the best gift for the artist, toughness against yourself and your work. What did Thomas Mann say? 'Sooner spoil a work than not go as far as you can at every point of it.' [...] Don't allow yourself to be seduced by comfort—a book is 312 pages, and retails at 13.80 deutsche marks in hardback. There is no restoration. Intellectual things are irreversible, you must pursue your path to the end, to the end of the night."
June 23, 2025
What an underrated and under read poet. Some beautiful but dark poems of death, loneliness and decay.
January 11, 2020
I really really really wanted to love Impromptus, but sadly I didn't. The German expressionist painters have always been my favourite, so I was excited to read some of the German expressionist writing from that era. Gottfried Benn is many things I admire: a poet, a man of culture, an intellectual, and a nihilist. However, I didn't really enjoy his writing for the most part.
In hindsight, I should've known from the introduction that I wouldn't enjoy the book. Yes, the intro gives the necessary autobiographical information, and yes, Benn's life sounds fascinating...but the translator is off-putting. His syntax, punctuation, and diction is just the slightest bit awkward, and he has a smugness to his tone. I would be interested to read different translations of Benn's poetry because I have a sneaking suspicion that Michael Hofmann didn't always do him justice. Maybe I expect too much; it's impossible to translate poetry without something getting lost.
The prose works fared a bit better in translation, although I admit that Benn is too intelligent for me—there's a denseness to his writing, and he references so many classic authors and composers that I have only a passing knowledge of. The prose also seems to be tied to a particular time, whether discussing Nazism or contemporary theatre. I found the prose to be somewhat slow-paced and, at times, dry, but it's also much more quotable than his poetry:
"...what did I care, life was bounded in a sphere of silence and lostness, I lived on the edge where existence ceases and self begins. I often think back on those weeks; they'll not come back, everything else was garbage." (282, "Epilogue")
"A poem is the unpaid labor of the intellect." (297 "Summa Summarum")
"...but if you have been called a swine by the Nazis, and idiot by the Communists, an intellectual prostitute by the Democrats, a renegade by the emigrants, and a pathological nihilist by the devout (as I have, and all in the last fifteen years), it does rather take the edge off a man's appetite for the public intellectual life." (328 "Letter from Berlin, July 1948")
"...things occur when you allow them, formulate them, paint them; if you don't admit them, they have no existence." (360, "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
"...when you look out of your window down at the ground, can you imagine a God who made something so mild as plants and trees? Rats, pestilence, noise, despair, yes, but flowers?" (362 "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
"Toughness is the best gift for the artists, toughness against yourself and your work." (366 "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
Poems that I liked:
"Little Aster," "Threat," "Never Lonelier," "A Shadow on the Wall," "Restaurant," "What's Bad," "Rowans," "Late" (parts two and six), "Clémenceau," "Little Sweet Face," "Listen:"
=11/73 (15.1%) poems that I liked.
Prose that I liked:
"Summa Summarum," " 'Do you write at a desk?'," "Aging as a Problem for Artists."
In hindsight, I should've known from the introduction that I wouldn't enjoy the book. Yes, the intro gives the necessary autobiographical information, and yes, Benn's life sounds fascinating...but the translator is off-putting. His syntax, punctuation, and diction is just the slightest bit awkward, and he has a smugness to his tone. I would be interested to read different translations of Benn's poetry because I have a sneaking suspicion that Michael Hofmann didn't always do him justice. Maybe I expect too much; it's impossible to translate poetry without something getting lost.
The prose works fared a bit better in translation, although I admit that Benn is too intelligent for me—there's a denseness to his writing, and he references so many classic authors and composers that I have only a passing knowledge of. The prose also seems to be tied to a particular time, whether discussing Nazism or contemporary theatre. I found the prose to be somewhat slow-paced and, at times, dry, but it's also much more quotable than his poetry:
"...what did I care, life was bounded in a sphere of silence and lostness, I lived on the edge where existence ceases and self begins. I often think back on those weeks; they'll not come back, everything else was garbage." (282, "Epilogue")
"A poem is the unpaid labor of the intellect." (297 "Summa Summarum")
"...but if you have been called a swine by the Nazis, and idiot by the Communists, an intellectual prostitute by the Democrats, a renegade by the emigrants, and a pathological nihilist by the devout (as I have, and all in the last fifteen years), it does rather take the edge off a man's appetite for the public intellectual life." (328 "Letter from Berlin, July 1948")
"...things occur when you allow them, formulate them, paint them; if you don't admit them, they have no existence." (360, "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
"...when you look out of your window down at the ground, can you imagine a God who made something so mild as plants and trees? Rats, pestilence, noise, despair, yes, but flowers?" (362 "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
"Toughness is the best gift for the artists, toughness against yourself and your work." (366 "Aging as a Problem for Artists")
Poems that I liked:
"Little Aster," "Threat," "Never Lonelier," "A Shadow on the Wall," "Restaurant," "What's Bad," "Rowans," "Late" (parts two and six), "Clémenceau," "Little Sweet Face," "Listen:"
=11/73 (15.1%) poems that I liked.
Prose that I liked:
"Summa Summarum," " 'Do you write at a desk?'," "Aging as a Problem for Artists."
May 14, 2017
I think I first discovered Benn in a massive anthology of German poetry that moved chronologically from the Minnesänger of the Middle Ages to the post-modern period. Benn was my least favorite of the expressionists, though I should say this is a matter of personal taste rather than some kind of objective assessment.
It looks like my mixed feelings about Benn remain pretty firmly fixed after reading this larger work dedicated solely to his poems and prose. The early poems in this collection, heavily influenced by Benn's work as a pathologist, create an uneasy-but-somehow-viscerally-exciting feeling, mimicking the kind of emotion that strikes anyone drawn to anatomy, horror and fascination closely intertwined. These were my favorite poems, although this period was the least represented in the collection. This is easily understood if one considers that translating Benn is a nigh-on impossible task in some instances, especially the earlier works (and Hoffman is to be commended for doing the literary translator's equivalent of breaking rocks with his hands, because this concise, enigmatic language is difficult to grapple with even in the original German).
Themes predominating in the rest of the poems include the conflict between intellect and soul, materialist philosophy (and science's) corrosive effect on the poetic instinct, and general woes regarding modernization and war. I enjoyed some of the later pieces, a few snatches of which were "atemberaubend" as the Germans would say, so much so that I went back with my highlighter to underline individual stanzas here and there, which I'll probably be revisiting and savoring for years to come.
That said, there is too much scattered miscellany and fragments that I just didn't enjoy enough to recommend. I still prefer Trakl, Heym, or Else Lasker-Schüler (other expressionist contemporaries of Benn, two of whom died young in tragic circumstances, the third of whom had a romantic relationship with Benn). It's a stretch to call some of the later bits in this collection "prose," though they do make for interesting insight into the mind of a man sanctioned by the Nazis, Communists, and finally by American occupying forces. A short piece on Knut Hamsun's "On Overgrown Paths" (another book about a man enduring denazification and public excoriation) was interesting. This was followed by a meandering piece on the nature of an artist's early work versus their later pieces. This last longish essay was not without merit, but it eventually acquired a droning quality and I felt like I was trapped in a graduate seminar with a speaker who went over his allotted time by quite a while.
All in all this was, for me, an uneven but certainly interesting read.
It looks like my mixed feelings about Benn remain pretty firmly fixed after reading this larger work dedicated solely to his poems and prose. The early poems in this collection, heavily influenced by Benn's work as a pathologist, create an uneasy-but-somehow-viscerally-exciting feeling, mimicking the kind of emotion that strikes anyone drawn to anatomy, horror and fascination closely intertwined. These were my favorite poems, although this period was the least represented in the collection. This is easily understood if one considers that translating Benn is a nigh-on impossible task in some instances, especially the earlier works (and Hoffman is to be commended for doing the literary translator's equivalent of breaking rocks with his hands, because this concise, enigmatic language is difficult to grapple with even in the original German).
Themes predominating in the rest of the poems include the conflict between intellect and soul, materialist philosophy (and science's) corrosive effect on the poetic instinct, and general woes regarding modernization and war. I enjoyed some of the later pieces, a few snatches of which were "atemberaubend" as the Germans would say, so much so that I went back with my highlighter to underline individual stanzas here and there, which I'll probably be revisiting and savoring for years to come.
That said, there is too much scattered miscellany and fragments that I just didn't enjoy enough to recommend. I still prefer Trakl, Heym, or Else Lasker-Schüler (other expressionist contemporaries of Benn, two of whom died young in tragic circumstances, the third of whom had a romantic relationship with Benn). It's a stretch to call some of the later bits in this collection "prose," though they do make for interesting insight into the mind of a man sanctioned by the Nazis, Communists, and finally by American occupying forces. A short piece on Knut Hamsun's "On Overgrown Paths" (another book about a man enduring denazification and public excoriation) was interesting. This was followed by a meandering piece on the nature of an artist's early work versus their later pieces. This last longish essay was not without merit, but it eventually acquired a droning quality and I felt like I was trapped in a graduate seminar with a speaker who went over his allotted time by quite a while.
All in all this was, for me, an uneven but certainly interesting read.
August 27, 2021
Listen, this is what the last evening will be like
when you’re still capable of going out: you’re smoking your Junos,
quaffing your three pints of Würzburger Hofbräu
and reading about the UN as reflected in the pages of the Spiegel,
you’re sitting alone at your little table, the least possible company
beside the radiator, because you crave warmth.
All round you mankind and its mewling,
the married couple and their loathsome hound.
That’s all you are, you’ve no house or hill
to call your own, to dream in a sunny landscape,
from your birth to this evening
the walls around you were always pretty tightly drawn.
That’s all you were, but Zeus and all the immortals,
the great souls, the cosmos and all the suns
were there for you too, spun and fed through you,
that’s all you were, finished as begun -
your last evening - good night.
*
When reading this you can tell that collection that was translated with a lot of love by Michael Hoffman. The first few poems definitely had me saying wtf bro, I mean there’s a poem about the post-mortem of a girl where they discover a nest of rats living in her guts and eating her. That being said, I completely understand how Hoffaman describes Benn as being incredibly hard but also soft at the same time, with a lavender aster packed back in a thorax vase.
your little experiment with destiny will end
gloriously and forever, but quite alone.
I really think you should take some time out to read this!
when you’re still capable of going out: you’re smoking your Junos,
quaffing your three pints of Würzburger Hofbräu
and reading about the UN as reflected in the pages of the Spiegel,
you’re sitting alone at your little table, the least possible company
beside the radiator, because you crave warmth.
All round you mankind and its mewling,
the married couple and their loathsome hound.
That’s all you are, you’ve no house or hill
to call your own, to dream in a sunny landscape,
from your birth to this evening
the walls around you were always pretty tightly drawn.
That’s all you were, but Zeus and all the immortals,
the great souls, the cosmos and all the suns
were there for you too, spun and fed through you,
that’s all you were, finished as begun -
your last evening - good night.
*
When reading this you can tell that collection that was translated with a lot of love by Michael Hoffman. The first few poems definitely had me saying wtf bro, I mean there’s a poem about the post-mortem of a girl where they discover a nest of rats living in her guts and eating her. That being said, I completely understand how Hoffaman describes Benn as being incredibly hard but also soft at the same time, with a lavender aster packed back in a thorax vase.
your little experiment with destiny will end
gloriously and forever, but quite alone.
I really think you should take some time out to read this!
October 16, 2017
Book was ok not as good as i thought! I liked the beginning poems that explained the gruesome visuals of World War l!! After it was mediocre was a bit boring!
November 11, 2019
I skipped almost all of the prose and focused on the poetry. A distinctive voice, quite “modern” and usually interesting even if not “poetic” in any ordinary sense.
January 1, 2014
I was perplexed to read of the impression that Benn is considered by some to be the best German poet since Rilke. Putting him in the same sentence as Rilke is an affront to critical taste. I was extremely frustrated by both the translated poems and the prose. I have little to recommend of the translations by Hofmann as they are clunky and devoid of poetry. Hofmann alludes to the difficulty of translating Benn but is dismissive to earlier translations of Benn's work. As a novice to the German language I take his word that he is difficult, however, some of the translations are cliche-ridden and just plain bizarre. In "Summa Summarum. written in 1926, he uses the term "arty-farty." In "The Season," written in 1930, he uses the term "ballsy" to describe a woman, and my personal favorite in the same piece, "butt bandits." Were any of these terms or idioms in common usage in the 1930's? It is also strikes me as lazy to translate "er ist nicht so klar unrissen" into "not an open-and-shut-case" where the translation that most closely approximates the original is "he is not outlined as clearly" (Restaurant) and in the same poem he uses the cliched idiom "bag of bones." In "Nocturne" a translated phrase is "the nausea that exercised/ your medulla oblongata all day." Bobby Boucher from the Waterboy would enjoy that one, but it makes no sense. A serious reading of these poems can not consider Benn a great poet, unless Hofmann is such an incompetent translator that he reduces Benn's poetry into a mockery. Why not one star then ? There are some poems that are radiant, particularly "Can Be No Sorrow," where Benn/Hofmann write, " We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,/the gene of death and the gene of love--/ who separated them, the words and the things,/who blended them, the torments and the place where they/come to an end,/ and the poem "Never Lonelier," where the concluding couplet is "In wine-breath, in the intoxication of things;/You serve the counter-happiness, the intellect."
August 3, 2016
This book is great in that it has the original German on one page and the English opposite; that way, if you know German well (I, sadly, do not) you can get a feel for what Mr. Benn is saying through his prose and letters/stories. I gave it 3 stars because while I like poetry, I'm not really a fan of the "free form" style; it is too..."meandering" for me, and it's hard to figure out exactly what he's trying to say (by his use of imagery and metaphors? I could be wrong). His writing is disjointed to me; like he was trying to fit every emotion into his letters and stories and not succeeding. If you're a fan of free form poetry, this might be for you; it's not my cup of tea (but I'm sure it's good otherwise).
May 2, 2016
very nice presentation with the original german poems and their english translations on facing pages. i hadn't known anything of benn before reading this collection. i really enjoyed the translated poems--i don't speak german--and the introduction to poetic "impressionism" they provided for me.
September 25, 2020
Strange but haunting Expressionist poetry. Blog to follow.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews