graduated with honors from the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for Military Doctors.

The near cynical irony of Benn's early poetry was a reaction against the morbid aspects of hospital life and bourgeois complacency, the creation of Werff Rönne in his Novellen the product of war. Unable to bear reality, Rönne, Benn's alter ego, attempts to resolve his existential conflict by regressing into the world of myth and its mystic images, into primeval states of Being and of Nature (to which the Ligurian, Mediterranean, complex is central), a world of vision, dream, and trance belonging to the unconscious, the ‘deep self’ of poetic production. Greatly influenced by Nietzsche and convinced of the meaninglessness of the historical and metaphysical world, he rejected forms of literature centred on this world,