Gottfried Benn’s letters to the Bremen merchant and Goethe expert Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze have been described as his “real autobiography” (Joachim Dyck). In the author’s work they are definitely unrivalled, since Benn provides a lot of essential notices about life in the despised Nazi state, giving at the same time an indispensable commentary for a large part of his work. That now there is a new, thoroughly revised edition, containing for the first time the counterpart of Oelze’s letters, sheds light on numerous details of this singular correspondence.