Editing Gottfried Benn (section)

===During the Third Reich===

Hostile to the [[Weimar Republic]], and rejecting [[Marxism]] and [[Americanization|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 Revolution]]ary force. He hoped that [[Nazism|National Socialism]] would exalt his aesthetics and that expressionism would become the official art of Germany, as [[Futurism]] had become in Italy. Benn was elected to the poetry section of the [[Prussian Academy of Arts|Prussian Academy]] in 1932 and appointed head of that section in February 1933. In May, he defended the new regime in a radio broadcast, saying "the German workers are better off than ever before."<ref name=letters>[https://books.google.com/books?id=7iC7BGIcvTQC&pg=PA367 88 "writers", from ''Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, Volume 12 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism'', University of California Press 1998] {{ISBN|978-0-520-07278-7}}, p.&nbsp;367-8</ref> He later signed the ''[[Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft]]'', that is, the "vow of most faithful allegiance" to [[Adolf Hitler]].<ref name="letters"/>

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. Appalled by the [[Night of the Long Knives]], Benn turned away from the Nazis. 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".<ref>Cf. Gottfried-Benn-Gesellschaft e.V. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: http://www.gottfriedbenn.de/lebenslauf.php {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170418081832/http://www.gottfriedbenn.de/lebenslauf.php |date=2017-04-18 }}</ref> 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|date=September 2021}} In May 1936 the [[SS]] magazine ''[[Das Schwarze Korps]]'' attacked his expressionist and experimental poetry as [[degenerate art|degenerate]], Jewish, and homosexual. In the summer of 1937, [[Wolfgang Willrich]], a member of the SS, lampooned Benn in his book ''[[Säuberung des Kunsttempels]]''; [[Heinrich Himmler]], however, stepped in to reprimand Willrich and defended Benn on the grounds of his good record since 1933 (his earlier artistic output being irrelevant). In 1938 the [[Reichsschrifttumskammer]] (the National Socialist authors' association) [[censorship in Nazi Germany|banned]] Benn from further writing.