By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
WHAT’S WORSE
(For Gottfried Benn)
Your quiet room
gutted by businessmen
because sledgehammers
are more profitable than literature
Brecht’s East Berlin residence
a shrine
to The Threepenny Opera
of Cold War communism
No mercy
just the workman’s knife
stripping paper from walls
of surgically refined verse
In the foyer
a bench where poetry
collapsed
silenced by summer’s spade
Note: Once upon a time, the two greatest German poets of the 20th Century lived on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall. Everyone remembers Bertolt Brecht, the author of “The Threepenny Opera” who lived in East Berlin. Few people outside of Germany, however, know Gottfried Benn who lived in the Western sector of the metropolis.
In 2007, I visited Benn’s apartment near Bayerischer Platz, only to find it was being completely remodeled by an owner who cared nothing for German literary history.
The poem is about my visit and contains photographs from inside Benn’s apartment and within his complex.
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