encourage healthier relationships between humanity and with the world
around them. In only ten lines I was able to connect to a time period that
was completely foreign to me and gain a complicated understanding of
an experience people rarely try to relate to.
If Benn was to ignore the calamity he experienced throughout his life
in order to create art which did not startle those who engaged with it, I
would regard it as insensitive and even cowardly. Art that is created for
merely a physical aesthetic enjoyment would have been a mockery to
Germans living through the rise of Nazism. By reading Benn’s poems
I can enter the mindset of people experiencing an incredibly violent
time in history where the spirits of most individuals were probably
defeated. Benn acknowledges the need for this perspective and
realizes that “The subversive force of the advanced work of art violates
conventional aesthetic norms by foregrounding the ugly and rejects the
false reconciliation of the beautiful” (Hohendahl 2005: 186). The “false
reconciliation” of artworks which disregarded the zeitgeist of this time
could have had intentions to redirect peoples’ attentions to something
less serious and easily enjoyable, but this only provides a momentary
and surface-level escape. Benn recognized that the time he was living in
featured much of the “ugly”, and his art reflected this accordingly.
The poem Beautiful Youth showcases the same scientific perspective that
is Benn’s staple. It follows a very similar format to Little Aster, describing
the habitation of a nest of rats inside a dead girl’s body. The death of the
girl enabled the continuation of life for the rats, but these animals were
killed by the end of the poem. In twelve lines Benn illustrated a cycle of
death feeding life and life ending in death, a cycle he must have observed
many times. In this poem and his others, “Benn begins to treat words as
resonating material that instead of being neutral carriers of assigned
meaning, approach the poet aesthetically on a somatic level and reveal
the abysmal depth that opens up between their meaning and substance”
(Höcker 2013: 463). Benn’s grotesque images evoke a physical response
as readers would be revolted by the image of a nest of rats devouring a
body. This unsettling scene accesses human fears about decomposition
and the deterioration of the body and also refers to the savagery of life
and the selfishness of animalistic preservation. But, rats and dead body
parts are not striking on their own- these images are commonly used in
scary stories and in the cycle of life, so how does Benn employ them to
his use? By utilizing their “substance” or connotative implication rather
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