That Gottfried Benn was able to remain so artistically productive during the "endless depression" and "petrification" of the Third Reich is largely due to his friendship with the cosmopolitan and well-traveled Bremen merchant Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze (1891-1978). For Benn, "old Europe" shrank down to this one person during the Nazi era, before whom he could express his personal and poetic positions, the "glittering peacock tail." The themes still revolve around the contradiction of money and spirit or a bourgeois canon of virtue, which he opposes with his cynicism. Until now, this portrayal could only be reconstructed from the poet's perspective. Hans Dieter Schäfer systematically evaluates Oelze's letters to his friend for the first time and takes into account numerous statements, mostly written after Benn's death, that are found in German literature.