‘Notturn final’ Friedrich Nietzsche’s Turin in ‘Turin’ by Gottfried Benn

Abstract

Analysed in the context of the German Italian myth and the author’s own understanding of the Ligurian complex is the poem ‘Turin’ (1936) by Gottfried Benn, devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche’s private disaster (loss of sanity) in Turin in early January of 1889, at the end of what had been the happiest and most productive period in the philosopher’s life. With reliance on H. Fröhlich’s interpretation of the poem, the author demonstrates that, along with the semantic layer directly pointing to Nietzsche’s life events, ‘Turin’ features a different and hidden layer projecting a growing feeling of anxiety onto the poet and his time. The latter is made possible by a transformation of the ‘two sorry old nags’ whom the philosopher embraces in the last stanza of Benn’s ‘Turin’ into the poem’s central image — both in reference to the key metaphor in Benn’s worldview (Doppelleben) and the doomed finale of the Ligurian dream. For this reason, what was inspired by sympathy with Nietzsche’s private tragedy reads as one of Benn’s most personal poems. The author goes on to show that, on account of an extra pair of quotes at the beginning of the second stanza, the semantic level related to doubling is completely lost in the Russian translation.