Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author, resident in England and writing in German. Although ignored in his adopted country, England, for much of his life, Canetti became renowned for his explorations, in several different disciplines, of the relationship of the individual to society.

Canetti was born into a Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish family in Ruschuk, Bulgaria, on July 25, 1905. His family moved to England in 1911, but went to Vienna in 1913, Zurich in 1916, and Frankfurt in 1921; in 1924 Canetti returned to Vienna, completing a doctorate in chemistry in 1929. He settled in England in 1938. His first book was his only novel, Die Blendung (The Blinding, 1936), translated into English in 1946 as Auto-da-Fé, and in the United States as The Tower of Babel. Initially intended as the first of an eight-novel cycle, the book describes the descent into self-destructive madness of an ascetic, obsessively unworldly sinologist, Kien. It was more successful in continental Europe than Britain or the United States, and did not receive widespread recognition until an extended version was published in 1965.

Subsequently, Canetti turned to history, memoir, travel writing, plays, and literary criticism. His Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power, 1962) was a wide-ranging work, combining anthropology and history, which attempted to explain why the psychology of the mass is different from, and often in opposition to, the psychologies of the individuals who constitute it. The opening sentence, that “There is nothing man fears more than the touch of the unknown” catches both Canetti's aphoristic style and also one of his central concerns, that of the influence of the emotions on rational inclinations. His three volumes of memoirs, Die Gerette Zunge: Geschichte Einer Jugend (1977; The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, 1988), Die Fackel im Ohr (1980; The Torch in My Ear, 1982), and Das Augenspiel (1985; The Play of the Eyes, 1990), all covered his life before World War II, describing his peripatetic existence and a vanished Central European world. In 1981 Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.