"To Oelze": On Gottfried Benn's Farewell Lines to His Friend

When confronted with his own death, Gottfried Benn, the poet-physician who became famous for his shockingly pitiless texts on dying and death, sought refuge in formulas from the Platonic-Christian tradition intended to endow life with metaphysical meaning. Or so it appears, at least, if one reduces Benn's farewell lines to his friend F. W. Oelze to the sequence of statements they express. Such an apophantic reduction, however, is hermeneutically indefensible: it ignores the text as it has been handed down to us--specifically, its form, which expressively undercuts the expression of metaphysical confidence. The present essay--an attempt at procedural interpretation--describes the interferences between what Benn said and the way the line breaks impose themselves on what he said.