- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
After the success of The Tongue Set Free in 1977, Elias Canetti continued his life story in two further volumes, each richly peopled with the figures who shaped him.
Die Fackel im Ohr (1980), The Torch in My Ear, covers the years 1921 to 1931. It opens in a Frankfurt boarding house during the inflation of the early 1920s and moves to Vienna, where Canetti studied chemistry from 1924, earning a doctorate in 1929 that he never used. The title refers to Karl Kraus, editor of the journal Die Fackel, whose lectures the young Canetti followed with near-fanatical devotion for years before breaking free of his influence. The book also describes his growing bond with Veza Taubner-Calderon, his future wife, his tense relationship with his mother, and a summer in Berlin in 1928 among artists and writers such as George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht and Isaac Babel. Critics received it with almost unanimous admiration, and the next year Canetti won the Nobel Prize.
Das Augenspiel (1985), The Play of the Eyes, covers 1931 to 1937, the years in which he saw his novel published and found his place in Viennese cultural life on the eve of the Nazi annexation of Austria. Its portraits include the sculptor Fritz Wotruba, who became one of his closest friends, and the circle around Hermann Broch, Alban Berg and Robert Musil, alongside sharp, sometimes merciless sketches of figures such as Alma Mahler-Werfel.
The Swedish Academy wrote that the memoirs reflect much of the political and cultural life of Central Europe in the early 1900s, especially in Vienna, with a power of description that has few equals among German-language memoirs of the century. The three volumes appeared together in English in 1999 as The Memoirs of Elias Canetti. A fourth, unfinished part about his years in England was published after his death as Party in the Blitz.
Together the books preserve a world of lecture halls, publishing houses and artists' studios that was scattered or destroyed after 1938.
Why it matters
Canetti's memoirs keep a vivid record of the Jewish and intellectual life of Central Europe in the years before it was torn apart.
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.
- 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 spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- 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 Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Fritz Wotruba Wikipedia
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