Komödie der Eitelkeit

What would happen if we knew fom the start how long we were going to live? How would we structure and form our lives - and how would this change our relationships?
In his play Die Befristeten which was written in the early Fifties, Elias Canetti asks these questions. He shows us a society in which the names of the people are the number of years they will live. A central power called Kapselan controls und administers death. And the people are serene - because the certainty of death means the end of mourning to them. Only one man named Fifty starts doubting the system.

“It’s as if people talk to each other in foreign languages – without knowing them; only they believe they know them, which creates a new dimension of not understanding.” (Elias Canetti about Hochzeit)
Babylonian confusion not only dominates the language, but also the minds of the people who meet this day, connected socially or because of family ties, closely or loosely, in the home of old Gilz.
Downstairs someone is dying, upstairs a new-born is crying and in the middle every wedding guest reveals their true desires. Claims of ownership, of the material and physical kind, abound. Almost no one still deems it necessary to at least keep up the charade of bourgeois decency. The façade is no longer simply crumbling, huge chunks are falling off. The round dance of desire, suppression and hypocrisy doesn’t even spare the weakest members of the party. Au contraire. And the parrot of old Gilz comments on everything by screaming: “House. House. House.”

The house will really come down, and with it the foundations of a whole society. Written shortly before the Nazis’ rise to power, Hochzeit describes in absurd dialogues how egotism and the moral decay resulting from it can lead to a complete loss of control. What’s left is the catastrophe.