H. Auden in formal invention and use of the vernacular, and of Wallace Stevens in ideas on the value of poetry and expression. Benn epitomized the avant-garde that challenged German literary tradition in the first decades of the twentieth century; for many critics he remained the "unreconstructed expressionist." Both within Germany and abroad, Benn has been interpreted as an exemplary figure of the most recent intellectual and political history of his country. Indeed, he has remained a significant phenomenon within twentieth-century German literature because he embodies in his person and his work nearly all of the contradictions inherent in literary modernism.
The second of eight children, Benn was born on 2 May 1886 in the small village of Mansfeld, about halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Benn loved these eastern plains, which have belonged to Poland since 1945, and for the rest of his life he referred to them as his true home. His father, Gustav Benn, was a Lutheran minister; Prussia's lower nobility stood under his pastoral care. As Benn reflected later, his father exercised a strong influence in these aristocratic circles. His mother came from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and all of her life had problems with the pronunciation of German.
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