Canetti, Elias (1905–1994)

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CANETTI, ELIAS (1905–1994)

Bulgarian-born British philosopher and writer in German.

A sizable portion of Canetti's work is autobiographical. His writing derives its energy from its status as a grammar of Europe at the crossroads—north and south, east and west, in both halves of the tragic twentieth century. He was born on 25 July 1905 in Bulgaria, the eldest of three brothers in a family of Sephardic Jews. His first languages were Bulgarian and Spanish, which he spoke especially with his mother, with whom he maintained a close and conflictual relationship that was heightened by his father's death in 1912 at the age of thirty-one. It was from his mother that he inherited his love and mastery of the German language. As a child he learned English and French while his family was staying in Manchester on business in 1911–1912. After her husband's death, Mathilde Canetti and her children moved to Vienna following a long stay in Switzerland. Always an excellent student, Elias enrolled in five schools in four different countries, following his family's migrations from Manchester to Vienna, Zurich, and finally Frankfurt. The crowds that filled the streets of Vienna in 1914 left a deep impression on him as a child, and the crowd question would later become a central theme in his work.

In 1924 he left his family in Frankfurt and enrolled in the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1929. He frequented the Viennese intellectual circles of the day, in particular that surrounding the Austrian satirist, critic, and poet Karl Kraus (1874–1936). It was there that he met his wife, Veza Taubner-Calderon (d. 1963). In 1927 he saw the burning of the Vienna courthouse by an angry mob and the police repression that ensued. This encounter further reinforced his interest in the problem of crowds.

In 1928, during his first visit to Berlin, he met many important figures in the literary and art worlds including the Russian writer Isaac Babel (1894–1941), the American artist George Grosz (1893–1959), and the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Canetti published his first text, a biographical essay on the American writer and social reformer Upton Sinclair (1876–1956) for the journal Der Querschnitt. Following this he translated some of Sinclair's novels, which were published by Wieland Herzfelde's avant-garde press Malik Verlag. The next year he finished a draft of his sole, monumental, highly experimental and bizarre novel Die Blendung (The glare; completed in 1931 and published in 1935), a grotesque work about the divorce between mind and reality. At the end of the book its antihero Kien is burned alive along with his library of twenty-five thousand volumes, gripped by an enormous fit of laughter. In 1932 Canetti published the play Hochzeit (The marriage), a sarcastic social satire that also ends in collapse—this time of a house. That same year he met the Austrian writer Hermann Broch (1886–1951), with whom he formed a lasting bond of friendship.

After being forced into exile by the 1938 Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Germany, Canetti moved to London and established his new residence there. In 1942 he began writing his internationally acclaimed memoirs, published in three volumes from 1971 to 1985, as a way to relax from the back-breaking work of researching his essay Masse und Macht (Crowds and power). This essay, published in 1960, as well as his plays Komödie der Eitelkeit (Comedy of vanity; written during the Nazi rise to power in 1933–1934) andDie Befristeten (1956; Their days are numbered), are testaments to the anxiety of a thinker and intellectual confronted by the power of the masses, at once both alienated and alienating. Through a series of juxtapositions between mythological, symbolic, and ethnological material and the present day, Canetti simultaneously unveiled the blindness, power, and potential for self-alienation possessed by crowds and deplored the powerlessness and voluntary resignation of intellectuals when faced by them.

During this period he also produced travel writing, including Stimmen von Marrakesch (1967; The Voices of Marrakesh), published a monograph dedicated to his friend the Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975), and was able to attend the premiers of several of his plays. He received literary awards (Prix International, 1948; Award of the City of Vienna, 1966; etc.), before being handed the most important of them all, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

After the publication of Masse und Macht he collected and published a number of essays and aphorisms that in essence dealt with the theme of language in its relation to the crowd phenomenon. In the view of his biographer Sven Hanuschek, these short texts or aphoristic notes—Die Provinz des Menschen: Aufzeichnungen, 1942–1972 (The human province)—constitute Canetti's "major work." Canetti remained active until the end of his life. He died on the night of 13 August 1994 in his sleep.

See alsoBrecht, Bertolt; Vienna.