Published in his first collection Morgue and Other Poems, “Happy Youth” (“Schöne Jugend,” also translated as “Beautiful Youth”) lyrically captures the world of disease and death that the young doctor Benn confronted daily while treating the poor and suffering in Berlin’s city hospitals. Considered an exemplary expressionist poem, “Happy Youth” co-opts a literary form traditionally invested in describing the beautiful to render the ugliness and ephemeral quality of life. Its matter-of-fact tone and clinical language belie the author’s deep cynicism about the prospects for humanity while offering to poetry a radically new conception of the poet’s task.

A brilliant image begins this poem: “The mouth of a girl who had lain a long time in / the rushes looked so nibbled away.” A body part once active is now, ironically, passive and being consumed, a victim of its former purpose, subject to the creatures that sustain their own lives by this mouth’s death. As the next stanzas reveal, the poetic subject’s position with respect to this corpse is not that of an unsuspecting person, having chanced upon a corpse outdoors. “The breasts broken open, the feed-pipe so full of / holes.” Instead, the subject is a part of the action, hunting through the victim’s chest, noting internal organs by name. As the circumstances become clearer, the poem begins to read like a doctor’s notations—brief, detached, detailed, and without embellishment. Moreover, in an uncanny way, the doctor’s task becomes one with that of the critic: he dissects the body as the reader deconstructs the text.

After the discovery of the rats’ nest below the victim’s diaphragm, one would expect the poem’s second half to suggest the circularity of life presaged in the first verse, underscoring the natural process of death and regeneration. Yet the first rat—notably a young female, too—is also found dead. Her remaining siblings, feeding off of flesh and blood as if enjoying a Eucharistic feast, are as good as dead as well. Notably, it is in reaction to these creatures—and not to the girl—that the poem’s speaker indulges in a momentary speculation: they “spent a happy youth here. / And short and sweet their death was too.” And yet any suggestion of sentimentality is erased by the callous gesture of the rats’ drowning and the gruesomely festive depiction of the suffering beasts, who will no doubt meet the same fate as their host.

Though offering a shocking irreverence reminiscent of French poet Charles Baudelaire’s “Carrion,” Benn conveys little of the latter’s eroticism in rendering the young woman’s corpse. Rather than emphasizing the seductive beauty found in even the most ravaged of bodies, Benn rejects this redeeming position. Instead he shows youth and beauty to be quickly expendable in the natural order of things.

Bibliography
Benn, Gottfried. “Happy Youth.” In Modern German Authors, Vol. 6, Gottfried Benn: The Unreconstructed Expressionist, text and translation by J. M. Ritchie, 106. London: Wolff, 1972.

Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature, World Literature

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