Tanz auf dem Pulverfass

"Raging man is he, and very strong." Else Lasker-Schüler Else Lasker-Schüler, Tilly Wedekind, Mopsa and Thea Sternheim - Gottfried Benn's amorous adventures are legendary, although at first sight he did not seem very attractive. Wolfgang Martynkewicz describes Benn as a poet and lover in a time when fixed points of reference fluctuated. A masterfully told life and love story against the background of the looming conflicts of the 20th century. In February 1917 the young military doctor and poet Gottfried Benn visited the Sternheim family in La Hulpe near Brussels. "Strong. Important. But terrible at the same time", writes Thea Sternheim in her diary. This mixture of admiration and revulsion is typical of the way women saw Gottfried Benn. Benn questioned what was sacred to the bourgeois world: the aesthetic sense, the good.