More than 75,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 as I write this. New York City experienced a tsunami of death: people dying while being removed from ambulances, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks, bodies rotting in apartments where people couldn't or wouldn't find help, crematories breaking down from overuse, unclaimed bodies piled into mass graves in potter's field. Americans are good at hiding, or at least sanitizing death, but that is proving impossible as the nation confronts thousands of deaths each day from the pandemic.
Gottfried Benn achieved a succès de scandale with his 1912 poetry collection Morgue und andere Gedichte. In these poems the young medical doctor describes scenes that are capable of shocking even today: a drowned girl is opened up to reveal a nest of rats within her body; a dead prostitute has her gold fillings stolen by a mortuary attendant; the corpses of a dead black man and a white woman appear to be aligned in an erotic pose; the visceral remains of dissected corpses are described in detail, a gruesome autopsy procedure is recounted with dark humor. Even when the patients are living - as in the description of the cancer ward in the poem Mann und Frau gehn durch die Krebsbaracke - death is omnipresent:
Hier schwillt der Acker schon um jedes Bett.
Fleisch ebnet sich zu Land. Glut gibt sich fort.
Saft schickt sich an zu rinnen. Erde ruft.
("around each bed soil already begins to soften. Flesh is getting ready for the ground. The glow of life recedes. Sap prepares for its final flow. The earth is calling.")
My favorite poem in the cycle is Kleine Aster ("Little Aster") where Benn negates the exquisite corpse/Ophelia trope with a graphic description of an autopsy of a beer truck driver. Here the "lyrisches Ich" is unmoved by the inert body, lying mute on the slab - he has cut out the tongue - but has compassion for the little flower, inserting it into the chest cavity next to the heart: "Ruhe sanft, kleine Aster!"
Kleine Aster
Ein ersoffener Bierfahrer wurde auf den Tisch gestemmt.
lrgendeiner hatte ihm eine dunkelhellila Aster
zwischen die Zähne geklemmt.
Als ich von der Brust aus
unter der Haut
mit einem langen Messer
Zunge und Gaumen herausschnitt,
muß ich sie angestoßen haben, denn sie glitt
in das nebenliegende Gehirn.
Ich packte sie ihm in die Brusthöhle
zwischen die Holzwolle,
als man zunähte.
Trinke dich satt in deiner Vase!
Ruhe sanft,
kleine Aster!
("A drowned driver of a beer truck was dumped onto the table
Someone had stuck a dark-pale lilac-colored aster
Between his teeth
I cut out the tongue and gums
With a long knife
Working from the chest outwards
Under the skin,
I must have touched it, because it slid
Into the brain right next to it.I packed it into the chest cavity,
Between the wood shavings,
As it was being stitched up.
Drink up in your vase!
Rest sweetly,
Little Aster!)
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