[2] Gottfried Benn was born in a Lutheran country parsonage, a few hours from Berlin, the son and grandson of pastors in Mansfeld, now part of Putlitz in the district of Prignitz, Brandenburg.

Gottfried Benn began his literary career as a poet when he published a booklet titled Morgue and Other Poems in 1912, containing expressionist poems dealing with physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer, and death — for example No III — Cycle: Der einsame Backzahn einer Dirne, / die unbekannt verstorben war, / trug eine Goldplombe.

/ Den schlug der Leichendiener sich heraus, / versetzte ihn und ging für tanzen.

[10] After the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in 1914, and spent a brief period on the Belgian front, then served as a military doctor in Brussels.

Hostile to the Weimar Republic, and rejecting Marxism and Americanism, Benn was upset with ongoing economic and political instability, and sympathized for a short period with the Nazis, whom he incorrectly saw as a Conservative Revolutionary force.

[12] The cultural policy of the new State didn't turn out the way he hoped, and in June Hans Friederich Blunck replaced Benn as head of the academy's poetry section.

He lived quietly, refraining from public criticism of the Nazi Party, but wrote that the bad conditions of the system "gave me the latter punch" and stated in a letter that the developments presented a "dreadful tragedy".

[13] He decided to perform "the aristocratic form of emigration" and joined the Wehrmacht in 1935, where he found many officers sympathetic to his disapproval of the régime.

[citation needed] In May 1936 the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps attacked his expressionist and experimental poetry as degenerate, Jewish, and homosexual.