- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
Elias Canetti first felt the pull of a crowd as a schoolboy in Frankfurt in 1922, when he joined a march after the murder of the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau. The runaway inflation of the following year struck him as a crowd phenomenon too. The decisive experience came in Vienna on July 15, 1927. After a jury acquitted three right-wing paramilitaries of killing two people, furious demonstrators set fire to the Palace of Justice, and police fired into the crowd, killing 89 protesters.
Canetti, who had no part in organising the protest, was swept along by it. More than half a century later he wrote that he became part of the crowd and dissolved into it completely, without the slightest resistance to what it did. The question of what a crowd really is became the puzzle he resolved to solve.
After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 he fled to London and, by his own decision, set aside almost all other writing. He spent about ten years studying sources in anthropology, mythology, history, religion and psychiatry, began writing in 1948, and finished in 1959. Masse und Macht appeared in German in 1960, and Carol Stewart's English translation, Crowds and Power, followed in 1962. Canetti later said his wife, Veza, had thought through every syllable with him.
The book classifies crowds by what drives them, among them the baiting crowd bent on killing, the flight crowd, the feast crowd and the reversal crowd that turns on former rulers. It then examines power: how commands work, why rulers seek to outlive those around them, and how the paranoid fantasies of one psychiatric patient mirror the logic of tyranny. For Canetti, the threat of death stands behind every command, and survival becomes the core of power.
The Swedish Academy called it a magisterial work when it awarded him the 1981 Nobel Prize. Written in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, Crowds and Power remains his best-known book, studied by scholars of politics and social thought and cited in later discussions of mass movements, including the upheavals that swept Eastern Europe.
Why it matters
Crowds and Power gives readers a lasting way to understand mass movements and the psychology of those who seek power over others.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Crowds and Power Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti EBSCO Research Starters
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