“Goethe über alles!” This phrase, with its thinly veiled allusion to the German national anthem, means that Goethe was more important than Germany. The emphatic slogan is to be found in Gottfried Benn's letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze from 8 November 1950. The correspondence between the two men had already been going on for eighteen years by this time. It began in 1932, the Year of Goethe, in connection with which Benn contributed an essay, “Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften” (Goethe and the natural sciences). It was first published in a special edition of Die neue Rundschau on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death, titled “Sonderheft zum hundertsten Todestag Goethes,” which included contributions from Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Ortega y Gasset. seeing his essay in the company of such illustrious authors was an enduring source of pride for Benn.

This essay, which we now know hovers on the edge of being an act of “montage” plagiarism, so much impressed the highly educated merchant and expert Goethe aficionado Oelze that he dashed off a letter to the author. On 21 December 1932, Oelze received his first scant response from Benn. The initial contact through the medium of Goethe proved to be foundational and marked their entire correspondence of 749 letters written between 1932 and 1956, the year Benn died.