State Library (poem)

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State Library is a poem by Gottfried Benn from 1925.

The poem Staatsbibliothek is about the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and is significant for the development of Gottfried Benn's poetry. The subject of the poem is the epigonal starting point of his artistic work. The poem was published in 1925 in the volume of poems Spaltung . Benn is here looking for a new poetological position and is reflecting on himself. It is considered to be an example of Benn's middle creative phase. The poem focuses on the state library as a symbol of cultural tradition.

Staatsbibliothek, Kaschemme,
result
dungeon , sentence brothel, Maremme,

[...]

when times have passed,
when the hour comes to a standstill ,
because in the sentence of the pages
a syllable lures
the purpose,
pure pleasure
rushes
the sense like a lion in tumultuous forces -:

(Excerpt from: State Library )

The state library played a major role for Benn; it was like a place of pilgrimage for him. Here he followed his associations, here he got, as he wrote, “a slight intoxication” from “briefly surveying, skipping over” the various sources. He justified depression in the 1950s with the fact that there was no longer a library in what was then West Berlin.

“For example, if I want to find out when Walt Whitman was born, I have to wander into one of the primitive county public libraries for half an hour. Maybe I can find it there. The wonderful flickering from one book to the next, which was previously possible in the old Unter den Linden State Library, can no longer be experienced. "

- Gottfried Benn : Letter to Joachim Moras , 1953

In this phase of Benn's work in the 1920s, almost anything can lead to intoxication, depending on the time of day and moment. The State Library is often the starting point for finding the break into reality between the poles of the pain of consciousness and trance. The library table is a kind of birthplace for breaking into the real.

For Benn, encyclopaedic facts are of secondary importance, at least in connection with poems. What matters is their noise-inducing sound. The State Library is seen as an intoxicating “sentence brothel”. She is " Hades " and "Heaven" at the same time. Intoxication and ecstasy arise suddenly and instantaneously in the "dream-laden word". The Germanist Helmut Lethen spoke of the “sound of encyclopedias” in connection with the poem.

The state library is radically reinterpreted in the poem from a place of preservation of tradition to a mythical reason for making artistic productivity possible. Content and form are strongly contrasted, bold word creations and extravagant rhyming pairs appear. Here references to reality are negated, causal logic and spatiotemporal connections are denied. The dissolution of the modern structure of consciousness is staged in language. In the poem, Benn's poetological position from the 1920s is condensed as in a burning mirror. Transformations and changes in Benn's conception since the Staatsbibliothek become particularly clear when one compares the poem with Benn's lecture Problems of Poetry from 1951. At the beginning of the 1950s, Benn confidently polemicized against post-war poetry , against natural poetry , lettrism and concrete poetry , which he described as "a kind of recurrent Dadaism ".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Olaf Hildebrand (ed.): Poetological poetry from Klopstock to Grünbein . Poems and interpretations . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-8252-2383-3 .
  2. ↑ a b Ralf Simon (ed.): Basic themes of literary studies. Poetics and poeticity (= Klaus Stierstorfer [Hrsg.]: Basic themes of literary studies ). De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-040780-8 , pp. 239–241 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Joachim Dyck: Benn in Berlin . Transit, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-88747-250-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  4. ^ Joachim Dyck: Benn in Berlin . Transit, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-88747-250-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Joachim Dyck: Benn in Berlin . Transit, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-88747-250-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  6. ^ Klaus Theweleit : Art, autobiography of the body: "Artography" . In: Wolfgang H. Zangemeister , Will Müller-Jensen, Jürgen Zippel (eds.): Gottfried Benn's absolute prose and his interpretation of the “phenotype of this hour” . Notes on his 110th birthday. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1676-9 , p. 25–26 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich : Benn's Bacchic Epiphanien and their denials . In: Friederike Reents (Ed.): Gottfried Benns Modernität . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-8353-0151-9 , p. 100 ( limited preview in Google Book search).