Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti (1905-1994) was a German-language novelist and playwright whose works explore the emotions of crowds, the psychopathology of power, and the position of the individual at odds with the society around him. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
Canetti was descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews. He wrote in German, his third language, his first two being Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and English. Educated in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Vienna, Canetti received a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1929.
Canetti’s interest in crowds crystallized after he witnessed street rioting over inflation in Frankfurt in the 1920s and the burning by an angry mob of the Vienna Palace of Justice in 1927. A planned eight-novel saga of the disorder he saw around him was reduced to Die Blendung (1935; Auto-da-Fé, or The Tower of Babel), the story of a scholar’s degradation and destruction in the grotesque underworld of a city.
In 1938 Canetti immigrated to England, devoting his time to research on mass psychology and the allure of fascism. His major work, Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power), is an outgrowth of that interest, which is also evident in Canetti’s three plays: Hochzeit (1932; The Wedding), Komödie der Eitelkeit (1950; Comedy of Vanity), and Die Befristeten (1964; The Numbered).
Canetti was descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews. He wrote in German, his third language, his first two being Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and English. Educated in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Vienna, Canetti received a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1929.
Canetti’s interest in crowds crystallized after he witnessed street rioting over inflation in Frankfurt in the 1920s and the burning by an angry mob of the Vienna Palace of Justice in 1927. A planned eight-novel saga of the disorder he saw around him was reduced to Die Blendung (1935; Auto-da-Fé, or The Tower of Babel), the story of a scholar’s degradation and destruction in the grotesque underworld of a city.
In 1938 Canetti immigrated to England, devoting his time to research on mass psychology and the allure of fascism. His major work, Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power), is an outgrowth of that interest, which is also evident in Canetti’s three plays: Hochzeit (1932; The Wedding), Komödie der Eitelkeit (1950; Comedy of Vanity), and Die Befristeten (1964; The Numbered).