The Politics of Orpheus between Women, Hades, Political Power and the Media: SomeThoughts on the Configuration of the European Artist, Starting with the Figure ofGottfried Benn or: What Happens to Eurydice?

The Politics of Orpheus between Women, Hades, Political Power and the Media: Some
Thoughts on the Configuration of the European Artist, Starting with the Figure of
Gottfried Benn or: What Happens to Eurydice?
Author(s): Klaus Theweleit
Source: New German Critique, No. 36, Special Issue on Heimat (Autumn, 1985), pp. 133-156
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488306
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The Politics of Orpheus Between Women, Hades,
Political Power and the Media: Some Thoughts on
the Configuration ofthe European Artist, Starting
with the Figure of Gottfried Benn
Or: What Happens to Eurydice?*
by Klaus Theweleit
The starting point: July, 1944. Gottfried Benn - we see him sta-
tioned in Landsberg on the Warthe, waiting for the end of the war
which has been lost. He has just finished Roman des Ph inotyp (Novel of
the Phenotype) - about 100 pages of publishable manuscript if and
when it would ever go to press. At the moment he is not allowed to
publish anything; the publication ban against him dates from 1936 -
he was fifty years old then, now he is 58. About 100 pages: that's an
incredible number for Benn, primarily an essayist and poet. One of the
reasons he is waiting impatiently for the end of the war is that he hopes
to publish again. About three manuscripts are lying in his desk drawer,
ready-to-go. He is writing to Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze, a Bremen
businessman and his closest friend for the past ten years - notjust his
friend, but the guardian and keeper of the "Benn Archives" as well, the
person he trusts most besides his wife. What is going on between these
three is what I am going to discuss in the first part of the story I will tell.
So: Benn writes to Oelze concerning the finished manuscript of the
Phenotype: "I'm finished, as far as I can tell .... This is both the most
relaxed and the most concentrated piece of writing that a writer could
put together in Europe at this point in time. However, I'm not yet sure
of a good place to keep it."'
*This text was written for lectures given at American and Canadian Universities in
the fall of 1984, during a tour organized by the Goethe House. Special thanks go to
Jiirgen Freund who helped me in writing this text in English and to Amy Kepple who
edited the text.
1. Gottfried Benn, Briefe an F. W. Oelze, 3 vol., ed. Harald Steinhagen and Jiirgen
Schr6der (Wiesbaden/Munich, 1977). The letters are numbered, dated, and edited
chronologically; thus, as the time frame I am dealing with makes it clear, I am not
133
134 The Politics of Orpheus
A few letters earlier Benn expresses a certain satisfaction that this

work is going to emerge from the swamps of the Warthe River where he
is hiding out. Oelze was still in Paris at this point. Benn likes to stress
the fact that, when everyone else is focusing on the war, the artist is sit-
ting somewhere at the periphery, knowing perfectly well what is going
on anyhow. He is sending his works to places like Paris where they will
be published and read - eventually.
Benn feels completely sure of himself and his work, very much
unlike his attitude some years later towards his Static Poems, which he
considers unnecessary and irrelevant - superfluous stuff in his eyes,
of no interest to anybody.
But this is quite different: the perfect thing - the most relaxed and
most concentrated piece of writing in Europe, the baby that will come
to be known as "absolute prose."
A month later we are astonished to read: Phenotype? "I've com-
pletely forgotten the Phenotype. Don't even remember what it was sup-
posed to mean." - A sentence which is by no means naive, but written
to prove how much Benn resembles this "Phenotype" himself, be-
cause he is not exactly famous for what we call Memory. At least not the
type that remembers things in chronological or any such order.
At the end of the letter we read the statement: "The artist is the type
who brings things to an end." P.S. to this letter: "My wife is still ill in
Oeynhausen, sitting in a wheelchair." She suffers from rheumatism.
Eleven days later, at the end of August, 1944, the Russians are com-
ing closer. Benn is thinking about ways of getting the Phenotype to
Oelze, who is now stationed at Nienburg. The safest way would be to
send it under the guise of the personal belongings of a soldier killed in
battle, belongings which are being sent to relatives. So Benn chooses to
send it as the last will and testament of a certain Dr. R6nne, M.D., killed
at Stalingrad. He must have been quite sure that none of the postal cen-
sors would know his books: Dr. Ronne is Benn himself as the main
figure of his early prose writings.
He was a medical doctor himself at that earlier time, and at the
moment he is a medical doctor doing office work in a military camp
Thus, sending the manuscript as the last testament of Dr. R6nne
means that this is the last act of a part of his body that is now dead -
and we will see that he actually feels that way, it is not just a joke. He
really is thinking that all this may actually result in his own death. "The
end being near, life is beautiful, Clemenceau said" - with this he
finishes the letter.
going to document every sentence out of the letters here. They can be found easi
enough.
Klaus Theweleit 135
At Nienburg, Oelze is stationed on the left side of the River Oder.

This is the proper place, Benn comments to Oelze.This location fits the
demands of his sentence, "Be aware of it all." That means: Benn
already knows where the borders will probably run after the war, and
thus says to Oelze: The Russians will not make it to Nienburg; make
sure they don't send you farther east. Then, on account of Oelze's wed-
ding anniversary, thoughts of dying again: a quotation from the French
which says: Life is short - a little dreaming, a little hope, and then
good night!
ByJanuary, 1945, the Russian Army actually has come within a few
miles of Landsberg. Benn still has the manuscript in his office and is
now thinking about sending it through a personal messenger to Oelze.
But it is already too late. He sends it by mail. He seems to have made
the decision - the manuscript will get out, while I stay behind. And as
for someone else, he thinks that she will be able to escape: she, that is,
his wife. He had managed to live with her in that military camp because
she was a typistwhen he married her and, as his personal typist, she was
hired by the military administration to do work in Benn's office. For
fear of dying and somehow feeling sure that he must die, but that his
wife and his manuscript may escape from the Russians, he only makes
plans for those two. The Phenotype to the West, to Oelze - his wife to the
West - and he himself dead, his body torn to pieces by the Russians in
the East.
This is the moment at which Orpheus enters. Orpheus was torn to
pieces, beheaded by raging women, but his head drifted down the
river, still singing and endowing the world with his wisdom. We shall
see that, within the year to come, Benn begins to see his own life as a
true double of Orpheus' fate.
The letter ends with the remark: "Welcome fathers! Be greeted by
Orestes" - a quote from Goethe's Iphigenie, easy for Oelze to decode.
It reflects the moment at which Orestes, falsely assuming himself to be
dead, awakens and addresses the people around him as inhabitants of
Hades, his forefathers. In this way Benn shows that he considers this
letter to be possibly the last message in his lifetime.
For his wife, he managed to get a place on a truck going to the West.
He is forced to stay behind, but things take an unexpected turn. The
whole front line dissolves, including Benn's outfit, and they both flee
to his flat in Berlin.
But that still is not far enough. He knows the Red Army will come
there too, so he thinks of ways to evacuate his wife in order that she
escape the feared rape by the Russians, something he does not feel able
to protect her against. He finds somebody going to Neuhaus, a little
village on the River Elbe, who is willing to take his wife along. Benn
assumes that Hertha will be on American-occupied territory by the

end of the war. But to avoid any risk (maybe without his knowledge, but
more likely with his knowledge) she takes along her part of the dosage
of morphine which had always been within reach for both of them, just
in case the "Red Riders" appear on the scene. "Red Riders" is Benn's
phrase: "The Red Riders water their horses at the River Warthe," he
wrote to Oelze; he also wrote about how the radio was playing the tune,
"Who knows where our horses will graze tomorrow." (Orpheus does
not lose his sense of humor.)
The point that struck me most about these events is that Benn does
not give the slightest hint about why he did notjoin his wife on her way
to Neuhaus. We hear she was rather ill, suffering from rheumatism, a
rather frail person anyway; left alone with morphine in her pocket,
shaking with fear of the above-mentioned rape, not really knowing for
sure which way her journey would ultimately take her. She arrived in
Neuhaus, but there were no postal connections there. The Russians
entered Berlin: Benn could not leave the city then. Neuhaus was
occupied by American troops, as Benn had anticipated; but it was then
handed over to the Russian Army. Hertha Benn, probably in a panic,
took her dose of morphine and died there.
Panic - that' s the word he often uses later when he writes about the
death of his wife. There certainly was reason enough for panicked re-
actions. The Russian soldiers had open permission from their officers
to rape, at least during the first week after the occupation of any region,
village or town. But the circumstances of Hertha Benn's solitary condi-
tion in Neuhaus - lying in a cold little cottage on sheets made of
potato sacks, without any contact with her husband for more than two
months - make it more likely that she had made up her mind to put an
end to this at the very moment the Russians should appear. "She prob-
ably thought I was dead," Benn said later, and so she decided to die
too. So, it was actually not a panicked reaction. And it seems that she
had lived on the brink of death for weeks and months anyway. There is
a remark in one of Benn's letters to Oelze from the time Hertha was still
with him in Berlin. Benn writes that he used to go into the cellar of the
house during air raids. He writes: "I go ..." He does not mention her.
I felt strange reading this, asking myself: And where did she go? Did he,
as many men do, say "I," intending to speak for his wife too? But no, he
did not speak for her. In a letter years later we find the remark that
Hertha was not able to descend the stairs fast enough because of her
rheumatism, so she stayed in the apartment during the bombings. But
he did go down to the cellar. H e would not have done that out of fear;
most likely she told him to go down and leave her up there alone. But
the decision to actually leave her alone was his, so there must have been
Klaus Theweleit 137
a feeling between them about her closer affinity with death. In a later
letter, he confesses to Oelze that he had known ever since they were
married that Hertha would die before him.2
In the last letter for months to Oelze, written on the 4th of April,
1945, Benn tells him that hewill try to follow his wife to Neuhaus - but
then there is never a word about why he did not or why he could
not.
The River Elbe, he told Oelze, would be the line where the pr
land would begin. So why could he not make up his mind to rea
for the promised land, too, instead of sending only his wi
border?
Or, given the case that he did not dare leave Berlin for fear of
possibly being shot by some Volkssturm members in their eager search
for "deserters," why then could he not send Hertha 150 km farther west
to Bremen, to the home of his friend and admirer Oelze, where she
really would have been safe?
But that is neither his entire nor main concern. The greater part of
the letters deal with the fate of the manuscripts he sent to Oelze. He
once even sent a telegram asking whether they had arrived - for a per-
son like Benn, who tried to keep his distance from nearly everybody
and to play everything as cool as possible, this is a highly dramatic
action. And he has literary plans in his head for Neuhaus, should he
arrive there. He will write another answer to the emigrants from Nazi
Germany, who are now to come back in the guise ofvictors; it wrenches
his heart to anticipate their claims having been on the right side and so
on. "I think it will be your wish, too, to declare once again that only for
those who stayed here will it be possible to say anything about what
really happened in and with Germany" - he is very proud, thinking of
his desk drawer, where the typewritten manuscripts of three books lie
waiting for publication. And he will never change his conviction that
none of the works by emigrants who may have been on the correct side
politically can compare in any way on the level of artistic production to
his own work. And he is right on that point; there is no German writing
during the 1940s and 1950s, in my opinion, which can compare with
his. It is as outstanding as he assumes - I would not doubt the truth of
the impression that he is the one and only Orpheus at that moment.
And Orpheus is not one to flee. He is torn to pieces in the place
where he belongs, the regions east of Berlin, where Benn was born -
his land of Thrace - and he stays close to or in the center of the events
to come, and that center is Berlin. If there is any rational reason for him
2. March 27, 1949.
to stay in Berlin and to let Hertha travel alone to the border of the
promised land, it may be this: the knowledge that the production of art
is connected to the place where you are located, and this place has to be
one where Benn's guiding sentence is capable of being fulfilled: "Be
aware of it all" ("Erkenne die Lage").3
Perhaps it is time to raise the question: is this all ill fate, caused by the
chaos of the end of World War II? Or does it result from a more or less
conscious action on the part of both Gottfried and Hertha Benn under
the spell of the idea that the artist - Orpheus - may sacrifice his
beloved Eurydice in order to guarantee the further production of
works of art, and that she, Eurydice, to a certain extent knows this, and
somewhat willingly submits to her fate? I say this with the knowledge
that some women would not have gone to Neuhaus or any such place
in a similar situation, women who instead would have decided to stay
with their husbands; who would have rejected the thought of "safety
for my wife first." Thus we might see this wife on the way to the
cemetery, and the man who seemed to be more ready to die goes on liv-
ing and enters the hall of fame in the course of the next ten years.
I want to stress the point that I still have not presented any inter-
pretation. It is all there to be read in Benn's letters. He was not a liar; he
tells it all very frankly. You only have to be patient enough to read the
different sources and he will tell you.
To call Hertha "Eurydice" in this way is not my invention. Benn
does it himself. He calls himself "Orpheus" too, as we shall see - and
he feels very ashamed about the way things turned out; so ashamed
that he waits three months after he hears about the death of his wife
before he dares to tell Oelze, the only person who is aware of the
development of the tragedy.
He informs other people of Hertha's death; with Oelze he waits. In
his first message to Oelze he uses a fictitious writer, who - in the name
of Dr. Gottfried Benn, an old acquaintance - has the bitter task of
informing Mr. Oelze of Hertha Benn's tragic death. But the postcard is
clearly written by Benn himself' - he obviously wants to test Oelze's
reaction somehow. The last sentence of the message reads: "I have now
visited her grave." Thus he waited for this moment to inform Oelze.
Everything has actually happened. He has visited the grave; that is a
break in the development. From his private papers we know there was
another break immediately upon his visiting her grave, when he star-
3. The term is used for the first time in a letter to Oelze of October 2, 1936.
4. This will be proven in the extended version of this text, the "Orpheus" book;
but by doing some detective work on letter #293 to Oelze, whoever wants to find out
for themselves should be able to.
Klaus Theweleit 139
ted to write the poem "Orpheus' Death." For more than a year it will be
the only piece of writing he works on.5 It also marks his decision to con-
cern himself with the manuscripts again and to think about the pos-
sibility of getting them published. Oelze is in possession of all his
papers. Contacting Oelze means getting in touch with his plans to
publish again. That must have been painful for a man who said the last
good-bye half a year ago; who was ready and willing to enter the
regions of Hades - to vanish into the great plains of the East, torn to
bits by a barbarous Asiatic invasion; he - the last one of the truly
civilized Europeans - and now his wife is where he was supposed to
be and he has to knock at Oelze's door, piously asking: What about my
papers - did they survive? Of course they had survived. He knows it
and feels very ashamed and, when Oelze's reaction is one of relief at
seeing his old friend still among the living, Benn starts to tell him how
much he hates being a survivor and how his wife (so he writes to Oelze)
is calling him to follow her and how much he wants to follow her and
how his grief is growing. And he assures Oelze that he does not have
the slightest interest in being published again and how much more apt
it is for the real Orpheus to continue grieving and remain silent.
The letters to Oelze from the following year are dominated by three
complexes. The first one is: the singer will never sing again. Orpheus
refuses to move the stones, the trees, the wild beasts with his lyre, and
he refuses to look at any women because of the death of his beloved
Eurydice. "The harp is hanging in the willow tree" - thus one of his
statements. The second complex is his feeling of guilt, and the third
one is a new tenor in his relationship to Oelze. It changes only slightly
but unmistakeably from an intellectual friendship to a real love affair
between two men. Orpheus, in the loss of his "one and only" woman,
becomes devoted to a kind of "homosexual" love, this special male
love between two similar "minds."6
All three of these are classical attitudes, ascribed to the Orpheus
figure in mythology/history. Albrecht Diirer, for example, called Or-
pheus the first boy-loving man (der erstpueran) in an engraving called
"Orpheus' Death," which he made around 1500. But Benn is notjust
playing a mythological game. The three traits within the figure of
Orpheus after the loss of Eurydice are perfectly appropriate to his
actual situation.
5. With the single exception of the poem "Rosen," written on May 30, 1946, for
Mrs. Oelze and her garden in Oberneuland and enclosed in a letter; not as occasional a
poem as it first appears, rather one with a purpose: to create a certain distance between
Oelze and his wife.
6. That is the context in which the poem, "Rosen," dedicated to Mrs. Oelze, plays
its role.
The first of these: Orpheus is silent; Orpheus will never sing again.
That is not only his decision; it has been forced upon him because
Gottfried Benn is still to be found on the black lists of the allied forces as
a result of his cooperation with the Nazis in 1933. The publication ban
against him, which the Nazis instated in 1936, is not lifted by the allied
forces, and three years will pass before his first new volume, Static
Poems, is published in Switzerland in 1948. So Orpheus is not allowed to
sing and is in a rage about it (which is primarily rage over the fact that all
the returning emigrants are allowed to sing; and that they sing so badly,
purely politically and without any art in their song). He transforms his
rage over this into a heroic pose: that the most beautiful voice will never
be heard again because the world does not deserve any better. "Living
in Berlin at this time," he writes to Oelze in December, 1945, "is not
much different than sleeping in one's own coffin." The future of men
will show a division between the two rows of criminals and monks; he
pleads for the very first place in the second row, positioning himself at
the head as the supreme monk. But the path leads down into the earth,
"down where the roots are silently moving," as he says. And not even
art, the only cure for mankind in the eyes of Benn, will be able to help:
"Art is the reality of the gods," he writes, "and we were never fit to hold
a candle to them; it didn't suffice and no individual or group can nor
shall add anything to that."7
The second point is Orpheus' shame at outliving his beloved, whom
he was not able to keep among the living. It is the perfect figure for
allowing Benn to work through his own shame at not having been able
to keep Hertha alive, although - the parallel goes that far - she was
given back to him once; that was the moment at which he was to put her
on the truck at Landsberg to send her west and then, surprisingly, the
next day was able to escape with her to Berlin, where they had a place to
stay. The gods of Hades gave her back, and they gave her back while she
was sitting alone in the apartment during the bombings. But he lost her
by letting her go a third time, and now he sits alone in his Berlin apart-
ment writing to Oelze: "I find it so humiliating to still be among the liv-
ing." - Yes. It is not so difficult to believe him. He knows well that every
survivor is necessarily in part a killer, and that the sensation of having
survived contains the joy of still being there while so many others are
lying dead. So Orpheus' refusal to sing again is not only grief over his
loss. It is the shame of still being in possession of this beautiful voice,
while the most beautiful creature, to -whom he was singing, is now
dead.
7. February 19, 1946.
Klaus Theweleit 141
And, as always with the feeling of guilt in societies where men and
women are not living on equal terms, it is used to widen the gende
gap. When Orpheus, the mythological figure, starts talking and singing
again after a while, he only does it for men. The presence of wome
would remind him of the dead body of Eurydice; and so he "despises
every woman now and blames each one for being less than the on
he lost.
So does Benn. He stays away from lust, from every thought of start-
ing a new existence, of having another wife, of publishing again. There
is only one connection left and that is to Oelze, his only confidant, and
Benn does not hesitate to speak to him as to a lover. The first step is to
promote Oelze to the position of a partner, a partner in his produc
tion;s it is a step of confidence, quite unique for Benn's behavior
throughout his life. After that, nearly every letter has a sentence o
paragraph about both of them as the only two remaining people of any
importance. He "shall not send him anything for his birthday," Ben
tells Oelze, their "unbroken and unbreakable inner relationship is
more than anything [he] could send by mail." There is more like this, a
if taken from the love letters ofyoung sentimental couples. In one letter
Benn takes the pose of a young medieval lady of the castle, talking to
her favorite nobleman; "my stern knight," he writes, "my Gothi
figure," and he hardly dares to raise his eyes to him.9 And to Oelz
alone he sings and goes on singing; only with Oelze does Benn share
his Orphic program the Germans are now said to need. Benn's re-
education program or education program, the one he always favored
can be found in this love letter to Oelze: ". .. if one wanted to re-
educate the German people, one would have to shape their tast
anew. Their feeling for form and quality. But if one continues to prais
some trash as a masterpiece only because it's anti-fascist or if on
praises some shit as a high-class product only because it sounds social-
istic, one will not raise standards, they will remain dynamic, faustian
and rude. But that doesn't worry me anymore, just as little as it do
you, I suppose.. ."10
I assume it is now apparent how much he really worries. For the pro
duction of poems this proves to be better than any other program. Bu
far more is said and meant here. It is a program for producing an entir
people anew, the human beings of this era. And so it belongs within th
context of giving people an artificial birth, a rebirth in the sense of th
8. December 25, 1945.

9. May 22, 1946.
10. March 20, 1946.
right human society; and the couple creating this birth is a male cou-
ple; and that is the ultimate secret of every Orphic production. Benn is
very much aware of this when he stresses the infertility of the artist to
Oelze: infertility in the sense that it is women who give birth to babies."
That is the way of creation, it is the wrong way. With that you only get
some raw material, stubborn babies, able to grow up into ordinary
people like soldiers or workers who do not count from the point of view
of those who are connected with the world by the use of their minds
and the production of art. Real birth, a birth enabling you to see the true
realities, can only be gotten by the work of the artist. So, the artist acts
on the same level as do politicians or priests. They are also busy
redefining human beings by the new birth they give to them when they
enter the right church, the right party or the right army and so on. They
really are united in the conviction that the usual birth by a mother only
leaves the baby in a state of irreality and that a second or third birth
process has to occur by means of some institution, something like a
birth-machine. And in the case of Orpheus this birth-machine is the
male couple consisting of the two most advanced artistic minds of their
time; the couple consisting of the most perfect singer and his most per-
fect listener.
This correspondence covers the span of a year; September is near
again and Benn prepares for a second trip to his wife's grave. Immedi-
ately after that visit he finishes the "Orpheus" poem and sends it to
Oelze with an enclosed letter in which he openly reveals his feeling of
identity with the Orpheus figure. It reads: "I spent two days in Neu-
haus that week to look after my wife's grave. A true journey across the
River Styx. An adventure of life and death: Of starving, of being kid-
napped, of being knocked down in a crowded train compartment - it
was all of that. Fortunately I escaped an arrest and liquidation by the
Russian Military Police or perhaps just a group of private gangsters.
Neuhaus is located twelve kilometers from the nearest railroad station,
you arrive at night and when you leave it's night again. My impressions
of the trip are horrid with regard to the future of the individual as well
as the entire East."
Benn crossing the River Styx; Charon, guardian of Hades, is there in
the shape of some Russian MP's. When he arrives it is dark, when he
leaves it is dark - it works; did he see her? Don't know; but what he did
do was to buy the plot closest to her grave to be buried there, too, for
when he feels that his time has come. That is what he tells Oelze. And
11. Large sections of the "Phenotype" deal with that subject and especially "Pal-
las," also written in 1943 at Landsberg.
Klaus Theweleit 143
he asks him: "Do you have a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses? The second
part of the 'Orpheus and Eurydice' story has always impressed me
more than the more well-known first part. Enclosed you will find a
study on this theme - for the archives!"
The second part of the story interests Benn more - that is the part
where Orpheus is torn to pieces by the Bacchantes and his head drifts
down the river, still singing. The first, no-so-interesting, well-known
part, is the one of Eurydice's death by the snake and Orpheus' journey
to Hades to bring her back. Within this context the story says: his own
death as a singer - condemned to be silent and not to appear in public;
the death of the artist, who has sent his head (his works) down the river
to Bremen, the place from which they will someday be disseminated
and read - this death is of much greater interest to the poem-producer
than the death of his wife Hertha. So the poem that has its origin at the
grave of his wife starts with the truly incredible line: "Wie du mich
zuriickliisst, Liebste -" ("How you leave me behind, my Lovely -")
- a distortion following in the footsteps of the law, right out of the cen-
ter of "Orphic" art production:
How you leave me behind, my Lovely -,

driven by Erebus,
making the woods grow
in Rhodope, the barren land.
Bicolored berries,
red glowing fruit -
creating leaves galore,
beating the lyre
the thumb on the string.
Three years already in the Northern winds!

Thinking of the dead is sweet,
woman so far away,
one hears the voice more clearly,
feels the kisses,
the passing and the deep
yet you wandering around among the shadows.
How you leave me behind -,

the river nymphs rushing near
the waving of the beauties on the boulders,
cooing: "in the naked woods
only fawns and ugly goblins, yet you,
singer, bugler
of bronzen light, swallow skies -,

away with sounds -
Forgetting - !"
- threaten !
And one of them stares so strangely.

And a big one, spots all over
on speckled skin ("yellow poppy")
luring humbly, hints of chastity
while spilling boundless lust - (purple
in the goblet of love - !) in vain!
threaten -
No, you shall not elapse,

you shall not blend into
Jole, Dryope, Prokne,
not mix your traits with those of Atalanta,
that I may stammer Eurydice
when I'm with Lais -,
yet: Threaten - !
and now the stones

no longer following the voice,
the singer,
no longer mantling themselves with moss,
the branches without foilage now,
the hoes no longer calmed down by corn -
naked hoes - !
now defenseless before the throwing of the bitches,

the wild ones -
now the eyelashes wet,

the gums are bleeding -,
and now the lyre

down the river
the banks are sounding -
Klaus Theweleit 145
This poem" has always attracted me, especially the final lines "and
now the lyre/down the river -/the banks are sounding -." It is one of
those poems I never understood as a whole. I always thought this was
only because I did not know enough about Greek mythology. What is
Erebus, what is Rhodope? Who isJole, Dryope, Prokne or Lais? Naked
hoes? And so on.
But that was not really the problem. Looking into Ovid a little
whom Benn mentions in his letter to Oelze, we find all the names
there, names of the river nymphs, of a landscape, of a certain win
etc., and they are not in the least as mysterious as it first seems.
The reason I liked to read this poem from time to time, again an
again, was because of certain single lines and words: bicolored berri
red glowing fruit; the thumb on the string; singer; bugler of bronzen
light; swallow skies; And a big one, spots all over on speckled ski
"yellow poppy"; now eyelashes wet; the gums are bleeding; - and t
ending lines.
Okay, it was the singer and his sexuality; the impossible desire to be
one with river nymphs and swallow skies, eyelashes wet and gums
bleeding, to glow with red glowing berries, thumbs on the strings and
tumbling down into yellow poppy in bronzen light - "and now the
lyre, down the river - the banks are sounding" - lines I did not hear
or find anywhere else and which I now think are closer to some lyrics of
rock music than they are to the lines of George, Trakl, Heym or Rilke;
poets whose lines I also liked somehow, but who could never match
these sounds of Benn.
What I did not see at all - and what startled me most when I re-read
this poem after not having looked at it for about ten years - was that all
this seemingly hard-to-be-understood mythology is a simple mask for
the real story he tells in the poem. I did not see that the death of his wife,
as a sort of murder in this poem, is used as a new basis for the on-going
aesthetic production and that this aesthetic production is used as a
stepping stone to new relations with livingwomen. And another thing I
did not see was that this poem, which seems so labyrinthine and
obscure at first glance, gives us a tale of Benn's biographical situation
around September, 1946, in quite clear terms, if one is willing to read
them in this way.'2
*Translation of"Orpheus' Tod" byJiirgen Freund and Klaus Theweleit.

12. All the circumstances concerning the writing of "Orpheus' Death," from the
biographical events to the chronology of single lines of the poem, their "where and
when," are collected and described very well by Harald Steinhagen, in Die Statischen
Gedichte Gottfired Benns (1969). Steinhagen tries to reconstruct Benn's writing method,
wanting to show that the poems "letztlich" (ultimately) are something quite different
The story of the poem is short:

First stanza: there is the man left behind by his woman; we see him as
a creator, civilizer, single and secret singer in the deserts of post-war
Germany. A creator without woman, and she is blamed for his being
alone. (A rather well-known gimmick: the victim is the guilty one, not
he who caused it.)
Second stanza: Three years in the Northern wind! That is: the sur-
vivors bear the burden, running around in the cold woods, whereas
the dead ones are lying warm, peacefully resting. And the really typical
speech of men who have just left their women. They used to say: only
now do I truly feel how wonderful you were - now that you are gone I
really feel your kisses, and so on. "Thinking of the dead is sweet" -
what he is saying here is not very nice.
Third and fourth stanzas: the other women, as if they had just been
waiting for the death of Eurydice, the singer's wife, approach him, flirt-
ing. How about that? He, Benn, is 60 years old now, shivering with
cold, nearly starved to death, just half his normal weight, a touch of
bearded moss around heart and eye, as he describes himself - who
would come near him to start a love affair? - Some will. He is a medical
doctor treating venereal disease, and most of the patients who come to
visit him are - so he tells Oelze - female prostitutes suffering from
some type of VD. They often cannot pay, they pay with cigarettes or
their beautiful looks. He likes that, so he gives them treatment anyway.
Not difficult to imagine that some would offer payment by doing for
him what they do for others on the job. But he refuses; he is Orpheus,
the singer grieving for his Eurydice. They do not know who they are
within these rooms. "Bugler of bronzen light" - poems in the drawer.
(Like William Carlos Williams, Benn uses the intervals between one
patient leaving and the next one coming in to note down some lines on
paper.) There she goes - "a big one, spots all over on speckled skin;
purple in the goblet of love - in vain!" Under the premise that he is
Orpheus and the prostitutes visiting him are the river nymphs, stanzas
three and four are rather precise descriptions of what he feels to be the
highlights of his situation in his consulting room at Bozenerstrasse in
Berlin (while on the surface he just seems to be busy bringing a little of
Ovid's mythological stuff into obscure piece of poetry).
Stanza five: the only one where Orpheus calls his lost woman by name,
Eurydice, assuring her that he will not lose the memory of her by
from the biographical events of Benn's life: "eigenstdindige Kunstgebilde" (independent

works of art); whereas I found that the poems often seem to be those very texts in which
Benn really tells the stories of his life, in the only way he found possible: not as
narration.
Klaus Theweleit 147
touching the body of one of these other girls; that form of love is not the
one he will devote himself to. Staying "clean" reduces the guilt; the
actual lover is the one who gets this poem by mail: You knew him well,
Eurydice, friend Oelze in Bremen; that is all okay.
But then there is stanza six: the girls become angry at being refused
and attack him and start killing him as revenge for his being cool to
them. That is pure fantasy, but it solves his personal problem of that
moment. He - the singer, feeling guilty for the death of his wife and
for being a survivor - has to be punished in some way to get rid of this
feeling, and so he lets himself be torn to pieces in this poem, only in
order to create a resurrection out of it; by being killed in the shape of
Orpheus, the Thracian (by "furious Maenads"/ the "Red Riders" from
the East) is he able to go on living as Gottfried Benn and surviving as an
artist - the head drifting downstream is a birthing image: "the banks
are sounding!" - all the world becomes the resonant body of his song,
and even more: three months later we find him married to a new wife,
Ilse Kaul, a dentist, 27 years younger than he is - the first of his women
he felt sure would survive him (his feeling was right again).
He writes triumphantly to Oelze, who proves to be more than
shocked: "Hey, isn't that another trait of the old chameleon, one you
didn't imagine" - and it is at the same moment that his production
begins to flow again; his fear of the last year - that inspiration may
possibly never come back to him in the way he was used to it - is gone
now just the same. He has had a successful metamorphosis, and this
one will enable him to start the last ten years of his life as a publicly
acclaimed man of growing fame, the very thing he had been hoping for
all his life.
And this is the moment that the lover's tone disappears from the let-
ters to Oelze; the 'normal' tone of an intellectual friendship reappears
instead; the moment of fructification is over, the male couple steps
back. 1
The appearance of the chameleon here does not come out of no-
where. It is Benn's favorite animal for the expression of what he feels to
be the central need of an art-producing individual: the ability to
remain changeable, to be open for transmutation, while at the same
time remaining the same person. To remain changeable is the only way
of being true to oneself; those who do not change grow old and forget
who they are.
13. Benn uses the image of two trains, each of them going on its own railway track
in opposite directions in an up-speed tempo for the breaking up oftheir"male couple"
period in a letter from September 9, 1946.
Benn knows what he is talking about. It is not his first transmutation;

he is something of an old specialist at it. And that is one of the reasons I
chose him to tell a story about this Orpheus figure, because he tells it all
by himself and you are not left in the position of an interpreter who has
to drag in the results over his shoulder.
To put it briefly: this is the fourth or fifth chameleon-period in his
life, another metamorphosis - he knows that it will be the last one.
There is the same number of dead women he has left behind in his life.
Hertha Benn is the third woman he lived with whom he takes to the
cemetery. And he knows about the connection between these deaths
and his states of metamorphosis.
His great essays on the functioning of human beings, the human
race as a whole and especially the artist as its most outstanding figure,
follow in sequence, beginning in the early 1920's, at intervals of about
seven to ten years: "Das moderne Ich" (The Modern I), "Der Aufbau
der Persdnlichkeit" (The Composition of Personality), "Weinhaus
Wolf' (Wine-Tavern Wolf), "Pallas/Roman des PhaBnotyps" (Pallas/
Novel of the Phenotype) - it is almost the same pace that his women
die or are left behind by him.
His first wife, Eva Osterloh, died after a gall bladder operation in
1922. She had left Berlin for the operation and had it performed in
Leipzig, the town where her father lived. Their love had grown cold -
they had started living in separate apartments. He had not married the
second woman he lived with for a while. Lili Breda was an actress in
Berlin and jumped out of a window in 1929 after Benn had refused to
be as close to her as she had needed and wanted him to be. His letters to
friends at that time show that he was completely aware of his guilt in her
death.'" He buried her as he would have buried his spouse, announc-
ing her death in the Berlin papers, organizing a proper funeral.'" Benn
later has two of his women re-buried; he did not feel content with their
places in the graveyard. He really thinks about the way they are existing
there, lying there."16
14. The poem connected with her death: "Du musst Dir alles Geben" (You Must
Give Yourself Everything). In an attempt to get rid of guilt feelings ("Warst du der
grosse Verlasser,/Trdinen hingen dir an"; If you were the great deserter,/Tears were
devoted to you), it follows the same pattern as "Orpheus' Death": it replaces the death
of the woman by death and rebirth of the poet as well; so it's a true predecessor of the
later poem.
15. For the biographical dates and events of Benn's life, see (in addition to the let-
ters to Oelze) especially the Benn Chronik by Hanspeter Brode (Munich/Vienna, 1978);
Friedrich Wilhelm Wodtke, Gottfried Benn (Stuttgart, 1962/1970); Walter Lennig, Gott-
fried Benn in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek, 1962).
16. When Benn is asked to say a few words in remembrance of Else Lasker-Schfiler
Klaus Theweleit 149
When he leaves Berlin to spend about three years in Hannover in

1935, he does it mainly to escape the public sphere of Nazi Berlin. His
connection to the Nazis had completely disintegrated and he chooses
what later became known as the "inner emigration" from public Nazi
Germany. But there are two women involved too, with whom he had
love affairs, Tilly Wedekind and Ellinor Biiller-Klinkowstr6m.'7 He
knows perfectly well that it is chameleon time again. He knows that he
has to leave these women if he is to succeed in finding a new start for his
writing and a new way of surviving. In his very first letter from Han-
nover, having just started his office work as a uniformed army doctor,
he describes his feelings about the new situation to Oelze: being there
all alone in his office, in his apartment, no women, nobody else who
knows him, anonymous in his uniform, strongly caught up in the rules
of command and obeying; and then he really tops it off with the sen-
tence: "If this is not going to become a moulting I'll no longer be called
a snake."
A rather rare moment: watching Orpheus slip from one skin to
another so openly. In "Weinhaus Wolf," the text he is working on at the
time following, we will find the remark that he sometimes retreated
from going shopping because he felt that the outline of his face below
the brim of a hat was too obscure a sight to be imagined. The changes
he is going through really include something like states of invisibility in
his personal skyline.
In the next two years he makes it clear to both women that there will
be no marriage or anything similar, and they both leave Berlin rather
panic-stricken when he announces his return in 1937. He also announ-
ces that he will bring a new wife with him, whom he is going to marry
because he needs a keeper for his household. That woman is Herthav.
Wedemeyer, later Hertha Benn.
After her death in 1945 Benn confesses in a letter to Oelze how much he
had loved her. He immediately apologizes for that, explaining to Oelze
that he had gotten his ration of alcohol for medical purposes, but that
in 1952 (she died in 1945 inJerusalem), he ends his speech with speculation about the
imagined shape of her grave (mound): whether there will be shadowy cypresses and
the smell ofJaffa oranges to make the glowing air of that landscape somewhat cooler
and more bearable. Benn's relationship with Else Lasker-Schiiler: a Eurydice who sang
as well as Orpheus, a woman who loved him and said it in public; but he fled from her
in Berlin in 1914, not able to have at his side a female voice on an equal level with him
- a story quite different from the one told here but surely one of its pre-conditions (it
will be included in the "Orpheus" book).
17. Benn's letters to Tilly Wedekind and Ellinor Bfiller-Klinkowstr6m can be
found in Gottfried Benn, Den Traum alleine tragen, Neue Texte, Briefe, Dokumente (Wies-
baden, 1966).
he had preferred to drink it and so had been gushing. I do not doubt

his love, but take a closer look at what the love of a writer is in the 20th
century. During the time of their courtship, he explained to everyone,
whether they wanted to hear it or not, that he was not involved in a love
affair, but that he chose to marry for practical reasons. What was the
reason to prefer this Hannover girl to the women in Berlin with whom
he had been involved for a rather long time? With one of them he had
an almost perfect sexual relationship and with the other he had some-
body who understood everything about him almost perfectly, es-
pecially his literary works."1 The second one, Ellinor Biiller-Klinkow-
str6m, was a woman he had occasionally described as "the only per-
son" with whom he felt involved in a "human relationship." But that
was obviously not what could make him fall in love or make him
marry her.
What was it that made Hertha different? Two things: she was a lot
younger that the other women were, and she was a typist. Benn points
out in many letters that she is able to type 200 syllables per minute. The
poetic texts that Oelze gets from Benn in the next few years "for the
archive" are mostly typewritten - typewritten by Hertha Benn. Benn
even manages, as I remarked in the beginning, to have her work for
him in the army. At the moment he married her, in 1938, he was very
sure that the Second World War would come. He knew he would be
separated from his wife, if he had one, except perhaps for a girl who
could type, whom he could possibly keep with him in war time. Th
turned out to be true, but it is not the only reason for my stressing th
fact that Hertha was a typist. The work of Friedrich Kittler shows th
the prototypical modern writer since about 1900 very often has so
strong connection with women who can type.'" Reading his text w
like watching the sorcerer pulling the incredible white rabbits out
his chapeau claque. I will mention only one of them here: Franz Kafka,
who decides to fall in love with Felice Bauer at the very moment
hears that she loves to type manuscripts. More than that, she has just
become something like a top manager for the most advanced Germ
producer of phonographs and dictation machines, Carl Lindstrdm
AG. She, Felice Bauer, becomes Kafka's agent in the center of the mos
modern recording and copying techniques. That is not merely of anec-
dotal value.
Kittler shows that around the year 1900 two types of women are in
18. Letter to Oelze, August 20, 1935.

19. Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, will be published next year by
Sch6ningh, Paderborn.
Klaus Theweleit 151
the front line of emancipation, spreading into fields which have been
male-dominated until that time: it is the female psychoanalyst and the
typist, for example Mrs. Minnie Tipp, as she is called in a movie script
from 1913 entitled "Lyre and Typewriter."20 Both of them break down
central male institutions. First, the girl who can type replaces the male
secretary, who not only wrote down texts but also was the confidant of
his master - as in the type of connection between Eckermann and
Goethe. The private male secretary had to be trained nearly the same
way as his master; he had to memorize what was dictated to him and
therefore was forced to think and feel on the same cultural level as his
master. That comes to an end with the female typist. She writes as
quickly as he speaks, and thus is not dependent on her memory. She need
not understand what she types and therefore needs no further training
than that of a sharp ear and quick fingers. The male institution called
"Bildung" is dealt a heavy blow by her.
And it is dealt another blow by those women who become psy-
choanalysts. Psycholanalysis is the first science which accepted women
into its ranks and allowed them to practice. Sigmund Freud is one of
the first professors - maybe the first - who addresses his audience
with "Meine Damen und Herren" (Ladies and Gentlemen) and he
states explicitly that he is not going to alter his way of speaking because
there are women in the room. Talking about sexuality openly before
an audience of both sexes was absolutely sensational. But, according to
Freud, the fact that women were present there shows that they were
able to participate...
Until now psychoanalysis has probally been the only science in
which women have taken the lead on a certain level, both in praxis and
in the theoretical work after Freud. One of the reasons for that can be
found in the different cultural training that men and women get in our
society. Where men are forced to act and speak and fill the public
sphere with their deeds and voices, women have traditionally been
bound to being observers and listeners. Women's superiority as ana-
lysts has one of its main bases in their far better developed capacity for
listening. A good analyst is primarily a good recorder of what the
patient tells her.
The important point here is that from about 1900 on, many poets/
philosophers have, as Friedrich Kittler shows, a love affair with a psy-
choanalyst or a typist; or one plays an important role in their writing -
just the two sorts of women who are most closely connected with the
most advanced techniques of recording.
20. See Kittler, who deals extensively with this script by R. Berman (the movie was
never made); the script was published in Kinobuch by Kurt Pinthus.
Nietzsche is the forerunner: the first European writer who orders a

typewriter (a Danish Malling-Hansen) and who falls in love with a
woman who is going to be a psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas Salome*.
If you imagine what the work of writers, poets or philosophers is (in
their own estimation), you will immediately see the importance these
women must have for them. Poets feel that they are themselves recor-
ders, the most sensitive individuals who realize what is actually going
on, even when sitting in the so-called ivory tower (with their noses close
to the wind in any event). What they seem to realize here is that certain
women begin to appear on the scene whose importance and charm
exist primarily in the fact that they are closely connected to new record-
ing techniques, to new recording media. As the writers must experi-
ence what this new trait is all about, it becomes the trait that they decide
to fall in love with.
Benn, in a letter to one of his women in Berlin, Ellinor Biiller-
Klinkowstr6m, calls the Hannover girl he is going to marry, later
Hertha Benn, his "Rosenfinger" (rose fingers), the fingers that are able
to put his rose poems on paper at the rate of about 200 syllables per
minute. The Berlin woman understands this immediately. She does
not answer Benn with any mention of the typist Hertha; she ignores
her, but she does not write her reply by hand as usual - she types it! As
if to say: Hey, if that's what you are looking for, look at me. I'm a rose
finger, too. And Benn, who also understands what the typewritten let-
ter means, replies indignantly and far from his usual wit: "Dear Elli-
nor, I'm able to read your handwriting very well; you must not type
letters to me." That is the moment at which she knows that the love is
gone from their affair.22
Now some rather loose-hanging threads of this story remain to be
connected in order to come to some kind of ending. All the things that
this "Orpheus" does are to be seen in the context of artificial birth; giv-
21. A third kind of woman in this special "media" function for writers could be
added: the women whom poets like Wedekind or Brecht preferred - women who
recorded and then performed their words on stage, as actresses. Three of the Benn
women were actresses too.
22. I owe the typist/psychoanalyst discovery to F. Kittler, ex

finger" variation, which I found myself. See letters from B
Klinkowstr6m from January 10 and 25, and February 2 and
alleine tragen. Poems dealing with the separation from Tilly
Biiller- Klinkowstr6m are: "Wer allein ist, ist auch im Geheimn
also in mystery, 7/24/36); "Drei" (Three, 7/28/36); and "Die Ge
sie") (The Companions, you abandoned them, 3/21/37), the poe
famous line, that he "den Traum alleine tragen muss" (has to b
all of them enclosed in letters to Oelze.
Klaus Theweleit 153
ing birth to things, works, institutions, art - the artist is lying with
labor pains, but the couple from whom the children originate is a cou-
ple consisting of two males. The prototype of this couple producing
artificial realities is that of Plato and Socrates, as Jacques Derrida tells
us in The Postcard: every philosopher up to now is busy adding another
child to the productions of these two.23
One of these products is the artist himself; the artist not as that state
of being that psychoanalysis would call an "I," but the artist as the
figure in flux; the person who remains changeable, the one who keeps
changing as reality does.
Otherwise he would be in danger of just creating monsters - the
monsters which his productions always border on anyway: the ho-
munculi, the Frankensteins, and Draculas and all the other lunatics he
fears he will produce if he loses contact with the main developments of
life in his time.24
He is always afraid of not being in touch with the most advanced
technical media of his time, a fact inherent in the conditions of his pro-
duction. One of the reasons that Benn takes the opportunity to coop-
erate with the heads of the Nazi culture in 1933 surely is that they allow
him access to radio - it is over the radio that he sends his invectives
against Klaus Mann and others who decided they had to emigrate and
are "without use of the media" now. Orpheus never manages to keep
his fingers off a newly-constructed lyre.
But there has been another side to the media ever since the earliest
periods of their invention that intensifies the relations of human
beings with each other and with the gods. It is through the media that
we we maintain connections to the dead. We shall not forget this side of
Orpheus' productions: returning as a living body from the regions of
23. Jacques Derrida, Die Postkarte - von Sokrates bis an Freud undjenseits, 1. Lieferung
(Berlin, 1982).
24. I read the "Frankenstein" novel by Mary Shelley as a great description of that
process: the narration of the excluded woman watching the male couple Byron/
Shelley producing "the monster": their "wicked" poetry, by which they will be de-
voured within the following years, and also producing her: the writing woman as part
of that monster too: the woman who wanted to be a lover and producer of art on equal
terms, but was kept at a distance like a child by her men, condemned to peep through a
hole in the wall at the secret productions of those two, slightly transforming her
feelings of desparation into plans of revenge (like Frankenstein's monster does in her
novel). Half of it is a woman! A good description of the biographical situation of the
Shelleys and Byron around Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, where the novel was
born, can be found in the essay, "A Forced Solitude!: Mary Shelley and the Creation of
Frankenstein's Monster" by Marcia Tillotson, in : The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E.
Fleenor (Montreal/London: Eden Press, 1983). (There will be a chapter on Mary
Shelley and the male couple in the "Orpheus" book.)
Hades, he holds all the knowledge and wisdom of the human race.
Friedrich Nietzsche liked to stress the point in his 1872 lectures in Basel
by relating what the Delphic oracle had told the historian Xeno.
"Copulate with the dead" was the advice which Xeno translated into
the command: Start studying the old, the ancient literature. George
Bataille suggested that the origins of human culture are to be found in
the realization by some human beings that something dies within this
race and something is able to remain, to live on, and that art began as
an attempt to maintain communication with those who have died.
Bataille defines humanity this way: human beings are the race that
starts burying its dead and still tries to keep communication going.25
We do not think about it when we read - but as a matter of fact, we do
not only listen to those who are absent while reading, in many cases we
are listening to the dead; we listen and we answer. And they answer
back. So, looking at it from the point of view of media development,
written words are the birds that are able to cross the River Styx in both
directions. The poetic word probably was invented as the medium for
speaking with the dead. And, by the way, the media have never lost this
characteristic in their technical development; in the movies we can see
those who are now dead moving across the screen. The cinema is the
medium that reaches far into Hades.26
Benn had a very close relationship with that region of the living
shadows throughout his life. The circumstances of his mother's death
are well-known. She died of cancer when Gottfried was already a medical
doctor, but his father, a parson, refused to allow Gottfried to give her
any pain-killing injections. For the parson father, pain was sent by
God, and she had to suffer it. It is not so well known that Gottfried
Benn, working at the Charit( hospital in Berlin during the following
year, stepped down into the cellar, evening after evening, to cut open
more than three hundred corpses with his dissecting knife. The poems
of his first volume of poetry, called "Morgue," had come to him injust
one night after a course in dissection. It seems as if, rather than from
25. George Bataille, Die HUhlenbilder von Lascaux oder die Geburt der Kunst (Stutt-
gart, 1983).
26. A Hades into which you are allowed to have a long look in Hitchcock's "Ver-
tigo" by following the eye movements ofJames Stewart, constructing a woman, "Kim
Novak," out of his views and out of a dead woman ... falling in love and letting her die,
"losing her," reconstructing her and letting her die again ... Eurydice tumbling down
from "the tower" ... Orpheus, a San Francisco cop, cured: now he can stand the look
from above down into that grave: his "acrophobia," a male form of the fear of dying, is
gone. For more on "Vertigo," see Filmkritik, 282 (June 1980), especially the article, "Die
Basis des Make-up," by Jiirgen Ebert.
Klaus Theweleit 155
himself as the writer, he had received a profound answer from Hades

after having dived down there again and again. Hades remains one o
his favorite words and regions - "to think of the dead is sweet" - a
we heard in the poem on "Orpheus," death is a rather common them
for Benn. But for Benn alone?
"The Politics of Orpheus" does not only concern Gottfried Benn.
Orpheus, in the sense of the story I have told, is the one who, in the
guise of a lover, allows his woman, Eurydice, to be sacrificed in order to
gain a more promising position in the hard struggle to keep poetic pro-
duction as close to changing realities as possible and to maintain him-
self as a person in the state of rhythmic changes and transmutations.
He seems to use Eurydice in that construction as something like his
link to Hades. Women, erotic women, are part of Hades anyway in the
patriarchal fantasy. Ancient societies openly demonstrated this when
they isolated women during the time of their menstruation in dark
rooms and did not let anybody look at them or allow anything to be
seen by them, especially not the crops in the fields, which they thought
would be ruined by a single look of a woman in her earthly monthly
Hades period. She dives down to where no man is allowed or, rather,
able to go. But it is essential for him to get some strong connection to
that place. My suspicion is that it is not a sign of pure love that Orpheus
turns round on the steps leading out of Hades to gaze fully into the eyes
of his wife.27 Eventually he does so to keep her down there to perform a
function that could be compared with what a figure like "our man in
Havana" is for the Secret Service. Could it be that she does function as
"his girl in Hades," a very important link to one of the main sources of
his inspiration?
I am not able to answer that question with a clear yes or no, but there
is enough material, beginning with Dante and his construction of Beatrice
- who is not just a woman he invented, but who lived next door to him
when he was a boy and who died at the age of 24. Two years later Dante's
"Vita Nuova" appears, the book in which he explicitly bases his writings
on the body of the dead Beatrice, who dies twice in this book: first, in
Dante's imagination, then in real life, with fountains of tears and
27. Returning from the USA I find a new book, mailed to me by its authors Eva
Hesse, Michael Knight, Manfred Pfister: Der Aufstand der Musen, and in it the hint that
Hilda Doolittle and D.H. Lawrence wrote about their liaison around 1917 in terms of
Eurydice and Orpheus. Running to the library for a copy of D.H.'s Collected Poems, I
find in the preface the words spoken for her husband Richard Aldington and her lover
D.H. Lawrence: "But you are right. He is not Dionysus, you are not Orpheus. You are
human people, Englishmen, madmen." And her poem "Eurydice" opens with the
lines: "So you have swept me back,/I who could have walked with the live souls."
poetry as the result. And there are so many equally strange things in the
relationships between artists and theirwomen that I feel it is possible to
phrase the question like this - and it leads to another question, with
which I want to end: the deep ambivalence everybody feels in the
enjoyment of poetry -: where does this beauty come from, the abun-
dance of warmth and beauty in those words; words that are so closely
connected with the dead? My question and suspicion is: could it be the
transformed beauty of the bodies of the dead women we enjoy when
reading poetry that has its roots in the Orphic mode of production -
the absence of the sacrificed body of the beloved woman which the
poet manages to transform into the beauty of the poem; to reshape it
there; to make loving words of great intensity out of the flesh of the
vanished ...
In brief, the outcome of the story I have tried to tell is the ques
of whether the sacrifice of women, which is one of the bases of artistic p
duction in patriarchal societies, is notjust a symbolic one, but one t
goes on in the lives of real couples, is one that concerns living men
especially living women directly.
LEFT CURVE No. 10

ErmannoOlmi on the film "The Blue Planet"; INTER-
VIEW WITH FRANCO PIAVOLI by Silvano Agosti; THE
BLUE PLANET, a review with reflections on nature/
art/politics, by Csaba Polony; "HONEYBEES AGAINST
DINOSAURS" by Akinyele Sadiq (article and poetry on
the Grenadian revolution, invasion, aftermath); re-
view of Allen Ginsberg's "Collected Works" and re-
cent poems by Jack Hirschman; Poems by Sarah
Menefee; TRANSLATIONS OF ROQUE DALTON by Ses-
shu Foster and Dolores Bravo; Fiction by Victor Haw-
kins and Jeff Goldthorpe; "GETTING PHYSICAL" by
R.G. Davis; MISC. WORKS, ETC.: Update: 'The Other
America: History, Art, And Culture of the American
Labor Movement" by Reinhard Schultz; GRAPHICS of
Doug Minkler; POETRY by Todd Jailer, P.J. Laska, Mila
D. Aguilar, Fritz Hamilton, Elsen Lubetsky; ARTWORK
by Elliot Ross, Susan Schwartzenberg, C. Polony; THE
CAPTIVE MINDS GROUP, etc.; plus CRITIQUE, DEBATE,
& DIALOGUE: letters by Bob Buckeye, Sesshu Foster,
Carole Conde, Karl Beveridge, lan Burn, & editor's re-
sponse.
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The Politics of Orpheus between Women, Hades, Political Power and the Media: SomeThoughts on the Configuration of the European Artist, Starting with the Figure ofGottfried Benn or: What Happens to Eurydice?

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The Politics of Orpheus between Women, Hades, Political Power and the Media: Some

A few letters earlier Benn expresses a certain satisfaction that this

At Nienburg, Oelze is stationed on the left side of the River Oder.

assumes that Hertha will be on American-occupied territory by the

2. March 27, 1949.

7. February 19, 1946.

8. December 25, 1945.

How you leave me behind, my Lovely -,

Three years already in the Northern winds!

How you leave me behind -,

of bronzen light, swallow skies -,

And one of them stares so strangely.

No, you shall not elapse,

and now the stones

now defenseless before the throwing of the bitches,

now the eyelashes wet,

and now the lyre

the banks are sounding -

*Translation of"Orpheus' Tod" byJiirgen Freund and Klaus Theweleit.

The story of the poem is short:

from the biographical events of Benn's life: "eigenstdindige Kunstgebilde" (independent

Benn knows what he is talking about. It is not his first transmutation;

When he leaves Berlin to spend about three years in Hannover in

he had preferred to drink it and so had been gushing. I do not doubt

18. Letter to Oelze, August 20, 1935.

Nietzsche is the forerunner: the first European writer who orders a

22. I owe the typist/psychoanalyst discovery to F. Kittler, ex

himself as the writer, he had received a profound answer from Hades

LEFT CURVE No. 10

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