Gottfried Benns Süden als (post-)moderne Parodie

This paper explores the representation of the South (focusing the Mediterranean space) in Gottfried Bennʼs (post)expressionist poetry.The main thesis is that the South is not only a metaphor and a symbolic icon for an idealized place of refuge from the perverted European civilization, as scholarship has so far stressed.On the contrary, the examined corpus shows the ambivalent perception and literary representation of a culturally stereotyped region which becomes the subject of a parody.When analysing the intersection of cultural and poetic alterity, the study also aims to question the aesthetic substantiation of this critical challenge of both historical, political and literary discourses of the time, and comes to the conclusion that such parodic representations go hand in hand with the modern poetics of deconstruction and deformation, sometimes enriched by Benn with postmodern strategies.