Bücher von Martin Travers

The Hour That Breaks is the first biography of Gottfried Benn to appear in English. The author of this study charts in impressive detail the complex paths of Benn's life, through the demands of his medical practice and military involvement in two world wars, his brief political advocacy of Hitler and Nazism in 1933, to his final comeback in post Second World War Germany. The author also engages with Benn's extensive body of poetry which, inventive, challenging and formally wrought, was the product of mind that was both radical and conservative. The same propensity to invention and transformation also informed Benn's personal and professional life, giving rise to a practice of role-playing and dissimulation that the poet termed a double life. As Travers shows in this well-written and informative biography, this was a strategy of survival of which Benn, ultimately, was as much the victim as the master. This biography also offers fresh translations of many of Benn's poems, a number of which appear here in English for the first time.

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find new words for his radical form of philosophy. This book is the first study that provides a full account of Heidegger's language and writing style, revealing his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about his philosophical quest.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Gottfried Benn¿s poetry to appear in English. It covers the entirety of Benn¿s verse, from his early Morgue cycle (1912) and Expressionist poems through to the «anthropological» poetry of his middle period to the «postmodern» Phase II work after the Second World War. Against the background of the poet¿s theoretical writings, this study, drawing upon the classic texts of Benn scholarship, analyzes in detail the major themes of his verse and its distinctive idiom. In particular, this work focuses on Gottfried Benn¿s extended process of rhetorical self-fashioning, his use of classical iconography, color motifs and chiffres, his often confusing historical semantics, the seemingly self-constituting «absolute» poem, and the colloquial idiom of his late verse. The book also engages with the multiplicity of voices in Benn¿s work and their varied textual forms, the hermeneutically variable positions of speech that they articulate and the often contradictory notion of selfhood to which they give rise.