Utente:Pinkflag/sandbox: differenze tra le versioni
Contenuto cancellato Contenuto aggiunto
Nessun oggetto della modifica |
|||
Riga 12:
La tappa seguente fu [[Francoforte_sul_Meno|Francoforte]], nella cui università Canetti si laureò in [[chimica]] nel [[1921]], e dove ebbe modo di assistere alle manifestazioni popolari a seguito dell'assassinio del ministro [[Walther Rathenau]], prima esperienza di massa che gli lasciò un'impressione indelebile. Nel [[1924]] Canetti fece ritorno con il fratello Georges a Vienna, dove rimase quasi ininterrottamente fino al [[1938]].
<!--He sought the company of Vienna’s intellectual élite and studied the works of the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1913), Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler. Soon he came under the spell of Karl Kraus, the legendary editor of <I>Die Fackel </I>(The Torch, 1899-1936), and met his future wife, the twenty-seven-year-old Venetiana (Veza) Taubner-Calderon (1897-1963) at a Kraus reading. Canetti’s mother disapproved of the evolving relationship.-->
Canetti si integrò velocemente nell'élite culturale viennese, studiando con avidità le opere di [[Otto Weininger]], [[Sigmund Freud]] (che gli suscitò diffidenza sin dall'inizio) e [[Arthur Schnitzler]], e assistendo alle conferenze di [[Karl Kraus]], polemista e moralista. In uno di questi incontri culturali, conobbe la scrittrice sefardita [[Veza_Canetti|Venetiana (Veza) Taubner-Calderòn]], che sposò poi nel [[1934]], nonostante l'avversione della madre. Sotto l'influenza del ricordo delle manifestazioni viste a Francoforte, nel [[1925]] cominciò a prendere forma il progetto di un libro sulla massa, che si definì completamente con l'impressione dell'incendio del palazzo di giustizia di Vienna nel luglio [[1927]]: la rivolta culminò poi il [[15 luglio]], con l'uccisione di 85 manifestanti da parte della polizia.
Nel [[1937]], Canetti si recò a [[Parigi]] per la morte della madre, evento che lo segnò profondamente, e che chiude
<P>In 1927 Mathilde Canetti relocated to Paris. Elias stayed in Vienna, living in close vicinity of the psychiatric hospital Steinhof whose patients became a source of inspiration for his writing. The riots in the wake of the so-called “Schattendorf” murders deepened Canetti’s understanding of the destructive potential of the masses. In the second part of his autobiography, <I>Die Fackel im Ohr</I> [<I>The Torch in My Ear</I>, 1980], he describes his impressions of the street fighting between Social Democrats and reactionary forces on 15 July 1927, the day that changed the interwar republic and set the stage for Austrian fascism. Contrary to Veza’s pro-socialist and feminist fiction, Elias Canetti’s writings emphasize subjective impressions. Thus he describes the sensation of being taken up into the protesting masses during the demonstrations, their forging ahead without consideration for material losses, and, much worse, for human life. Canetti’s discussion of the rioting masses reveals his empirical method of shaping theoretical concepts. </P>
===Londra===
Riga 31 ⟶ 34:
Similar to his first role model, Karl Kraus, Canetti’s ideals derived from classical German and avant-garde culture. His prewar novel <I>Die Blendung</I> [<I>Auto-da-Fé</I>, 1935] uses dialect and Yiddish-accented German to characterize members of the lower classes and grotesque figures. This cosmopolitan elitism sets Canetti apart from the nostalgic attachment to Eastern Europe expressed by Ashkenazic authors such as Manès Sperber (1905-1984), Joseph Roth (1894-1939), or Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991). </P> <P>Because of the beginning of the First World War plans to attend a college preparatory school did not materialize. After visiting Bulgaria with Elias in 1915, Mathilde Canetti again sought treatment for depression. In 1916 the family went to Switzerland. From there Mathilde Canetti moved to Frankfurt. While staying at a Zurich boarding house Canetti began writing. In 1921 he joined his mother and in 1924 graduated from the Frankfurt Wöhler Realgymnasium. The crisis situation in the defeated Germany - postwar trauma, unemployment, and inflation - made a profound impression on him. In 1924 Canetti and his brother Georges moved to Vienna. Canetti studied chemistry at the University of Vienna, but his primary interests were literature and cultural criticism. He sought the company of Vienna’s intellectual élite and studied the works of the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1913), Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Schnitzler. Soon he came under the spell of Karl Kraus, the legendary editor of <I>Die Fackel </I>(The Torch, 1899-1936), and met his future wife, the twenty-seven-year-old Venetiana (Veza) Taubner-Calderon (1897-1963) at a Kraus reading. Canetti’s mother disapproved of the evolving relationship. In 1924 he traveled to Bulgaria one last time. </P>
<P>Canetti’s first drama <I>Hochzeit </I>[<I>The Wedding</I>, 1932] shows a society propelled by unacknowledged self-destructive tendencies and progressing towards its apocalyptic conclusion. In the course of the play it becomes apparent that the union of the two protagonists is based on hate, betrayal, and aggression. The wedding celebration culminates in an orgy reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah. The following play, <I>Komödie der Eitelkeit</I> [<I>Comedy of Vanity</I>, 1934] introduces a grotesque instance of exploitation: human beings are used as pack animals. The extreme circumstances lend themselves to an examination of class and gender issues and of collective and individual identity. Canetti’s next project involved a cycle of novels à la Balzac entitled “Comédie Humaine an Irren” (“Human Comedy by Way of Insanity”). He completed only one novel, <I>Die Blendung</I>, which addresses the problems of isolation, fanaticism, destruction, and self-destruction. In 1928, frustrated by his studies and troubled by the impressions of 1927, Canetti went to Berlin. He stayed with the publisher of the Malik Verlag, Wieland Herzfelde, and met George Grosz (1893-1953), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Isaac Babel (1894-1941). He was both attracted and repulsed by Berlin’s gaudy bohemian scene. Some of the leading intellectuals, including Brecht, he intensely disliked. In 1929 Canetti completed his doctorate in chemistry in Vienna and then returned to Berlin, where he supported himself by translating novels by the best-selling author Upton Sinclair, <I>Leidweg der Liebe</I> [1930, <I>Love’s Pilgrimage</I>, 1911], <I>Das Geld schreibt </I>[1930, <I>Money Writes</I>, 1927], and <I>Alkohol</I> [1932, <I>The Wet Parade</I>, 1931]. </P> <P>In 1932 Canetti met the novelist and mass-psychologist Hermann Broch whose novel trilogy <I>Die Schlafwandler </I>[<I>The Sleepwalkers</I>, 1931-2] he admired. He also became acquainted with Franz Werfel (1890-1945), his wife Alma Mahler (1879-1964), and her daughters Manon Gropius (1916-1935) and the sculptress Anna Mahler (1904-1988). Canetti’s ties with Anna Mahler and the sculptor Fritz Wotruba (1907-75) were especially close.
An extremely important friend during the years of 1933-4, when the National Socialists came to power in Germany, and Austria introduced a fascist regime, was Abraham Sonne (1883-1950), who, like Canetti himself, patronized the Café Museum. Under the name of “Abraham ben Yitzchak”, Sonne had published Hebrew poetry. Canetti admired his friend’s encyclopedic knowledge and his well-reasoned opinions. In <I>Das Augenspiel </I>[<I>The Play of the Eyes</I>, 1985], Canetti reveals that his fascination with Sonne was based on the fundamental difference between Sonne’s rational disposition and his own. In 1934 Canetti and Veza Taubner-Calderon married. She continued to do charitable work and published under different pen names until anti-Semitism made it impossible for her to continue her career. Except for the dedications in Elias Canetti’s books, the author Veza Canetti remained forgotten until Elias Canetti began to edit and publish her works in the late 1980s. </P> <P>Canetti enjoyed the life of a scholar of independent means. Before the fascist <I>coup d’état</I> of 1934 and the 1938 Nazi annexation, Vienna had been a melting pot of diverse forms of cultural expression and attracted many accomplished artists and thinkers. Since 1933, German exiles, including Brecht, had sought refuge in Vienna. In 1935 Canetti and his wife moved to the suburb of Grinzing. They lived next door to Ernst Benedikt, son of Moritz Benedikt, the prominent editor of the <I>Neue Freie Presse</I>, who in 1934 lost his position as editor due to the anti-Jewish climate. It is obvious from Veza Canetti’s posthumous novel <I>Die Schildkröten</I> [<I>The Tortoises</I>, 1999] that idyllic Grinzing served as a temporary refuge from the attacks on Jews and intellectuals in the city. In 1935 <I>Die Blendung </I>appeared and was translated into Czech by the prominent author H. G. Adler (1910-88), who survived the Shoah. In 1937 Canetti went on a reading tour to Prague. Soon thereafter he was called to Paris to his mother’s deathbed. After the Nazi invasion the Canettis went to Paris and then to London, where they took up residence in a modest place in the suburb of Hampstead. Canetti devoted the following decades to his life’s work on crowds and power. In 1952 he became a British citizen. </P> <P>In Canetti’s thought, tradition and modernity, occidental and oriental influences represent equally strong forces. At home in several cultures and languages, Canetti steered clear of ideologies and political causes. German was his literary medium, and he emphasized his indebtedness to German culture even after World War II and the Holocaust. Notwithstanding his fate as a refugee, he emphatically rejected the war, as his notebooks <I>Die Provinz des Menschen</I> [<I>The Human Province,</I> 1973] reveal. In <I>Masse und Macht</I> he characterizes war as the senseless atavistic business of killing the largest possible number of human beings. He had begun his <I>Aufzeichnungen</I>, (notes or aphorisms), in 1942 to counterbalance his all-consuming anthropological studies. The <I>Aufzeichnungen</I> express his distress because of the war as well as the double bind he faced because he owed a double loyalty, both to England and to Germany. Canetti considered himself a protector of the German language unspoiled by Nazi influences. Thus he refrained from publishing during the war years and from getting involved in Allied propaganda efforts. </P> <P>After 1945, fully aware of the Holocaust, he explored the issues of death, paranoia, and the pathological mass leader, but rarely mentioned Nazi perpetrators. He did, however, express his compassion for all those who had suffered, including Germans and Japanese, e.g. his review of a Japanese survivor’s account, "Dr. Hachiyas Tagebuch aus Hiroshima" ["Dr. Hachiya's Diary of Hiroshima”, 1975].<I> </I>In 1946-49 translations of <I>Die Blendung</I> appeared as <I>Auto-da-Fé</I> (1946) in England, as<I>The Tower of Babel</I> (1947) in the United States, and as <I>La Tour de Babel</I> (1949) in France. Canetti was awarded the <I>Prix International</I>. In 1948 the Munich publisher Weismann undertook a new German edition of <I>Die Blendung</I>. Later, Canetti published with more prominent West German publishing houses such as Hanser and Fischer. As his reputation grew, international scholars and journalists including Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Idris Parry, John Patillo-Hess visited him in Hampstead. Moreover, an alleged affair with the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), later wife of Oxford professor and writer John Bayley (1925-) drew much attention. </P> <P>In 1952 Canetti traveled to Morocco in the company of a film team. The experience of North African Arab society and a prosperous Sephardic community resulted in the travel narrative <I>Die Stimmen von Marrakesch: Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise </I>[<I>The Voices of Marrakesh</I>, 1967]. In 1955 Canetti published <I>Fritz Wotruba</I>, a biography of his friend of the interwar period. The same year <I>Die Befristeten</I> [<I>The Numbered,</I> 1964], thematizing Canetti’s radical rejection of death, was produced at the Oxford Playhouse in English translation. After Canetti’s travels to France (1957) and Italy (1959), the monumental study <I>Masse und Macht</I> appeared with Claassen publishers, Hamburg, in 1960. In 1961 Canetti went on a tour to Greece and published selections of his works with the Viennese Stiasny Verlag. In 1963, during his perhaps most productive period, Veza Canetti died and this affected Canetti deeply. </P> <P>The debates following <I>Masse und Macht</I> increased Canetti's international profile. So did his contract with Hanser, who published his works in quick succession. In 1964 a volume of Canetti’s dramas appeared, followed by <I>Aufzeichnungen 1942-1948</I>. The performance of <I>Hochzeit</I> the same year created a scandal, as did that of <I>Komödie der Eitelkeit</I>. German audiences prior to the 1968 student movement were not ready for Canetti’s explicit dramas and took exception to his provocative themes and caustic satire. Nonetheless, in 1966 Canetti received the <I>Literaturpreis der Stadt Wien</I> and the German<I> Kritikerpreis</I>. In 1967 Canetti released recordings of his readings through Deutsche Grammophongesellschaft including the disturbing chapter about domestic violence and child abuse, “Der gute Vater” (“The Good Father”) from <I>Die Blendung,</I> and excerpts from <I>Die Stimmen von Marrakesch</I>. Canetti’s travels to Vienna often included reading engagements, which drew enthusiastic audiences. In 1968 <I>Die Befristeten</I> premiered in Bonn and provoked yet another scandal. The same year Canetti received the coveted <I>Grosser Österreichischer Staatspreis</I>. </P> <P>Canetti’s intriguing edition of Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, <I>Der andere Prozess</I> (1969), was awarded the <I>Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste</I>. In 1971, following the publication of <I>Aufzeichnungen 1949-1960</I>, Canetti began writing his autobiography. The death of his brother Georges and his own marriage to Hera Buschor were momentous events that called for a self-examination in the larger context of historical time. In 1972 Canetti’s daughter Johanna was born. In the same year, <I>Macht und Überleben </I>[<I>Power and Survival</I>], containing three major essays, and the essays and reviews in <I>Die gespaltene Zukunft </I>[<I>The Divided Future</I>] appeared, and Canetti received the Büchner Prize. Additional volumes of short prose, aphorisms, essays, and satires were published in rapid succession: <I>Die Provinz des Menschen. Aufzeichnungen 1942-1972</I> [<I>The Human Province</I>, 1973], <I>Der Ohrenzeuge </I>[<I>Earwitness: Fifty Characters</I>, 1974], <I>Das Gewissen der Worte</I> [<I>The Conscience of Words</I>, 1975], and <I>Der Beruf des Dichters</I> [<I>The Profession of the Poet</I>, 1975]. In 1975 Canetti received the prestigious Franz Nabl Prize and the Nelly Sachs Prize as well as honorary doctorates from the universities of Munich and Manchester. </P> <P>In 1977 <I>Die gerettete Zunge </I>was published, chronicling Canetti’s life until 1921. The work was awarded the Gottfried Keller Prize. From 1978 onwards productions of his plays took place in Basle, Vienna, and Stuttgart. In 1979 Canetti was invited to join the French order <I>Pour le Mérite</I>, one of the highest distinctions for an intellectual. The following year<I> Die Fackel im Ohr</I> [<I>The Torch in my Ear</I>] - his memoirs of the years 1921 to 1937 - was published, and he received the Italian Europa Prato Prize and the Johann Peter Hebel Prize, followed by the Kafka Prize in 1981. Also in 1981 Canetti’s lifetime achievements were honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Until this point, despite his numerous distinctions, Canetti had remained relatively unknown. His works were not part of the academic curricula, and he had influenced primarily alternative scholarship such as Klaus Theweleit’s <I>Männerphantasien </I>[<I>Male Fantasies</I>, 1977-8]. The surprise that an author from Bulgaria writing in German would receive the Nobel Prize calls to mind the reaction to Nelly Sachs’s and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s achieving the same distinction. In 1983 Canetti was honored with the <I>Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland</I>. In 1985 <I>Das Augenspiel </I>[<I>The Play of the Eyes</I>], his autobiography of 1931-1937 was published, dedicated to his second wife. In the same year followed <I>Das Geheimherz der Uhr </I>[<I>The Secret Heart of the Clock</I>, 1985], Canetti’s notebooks of 1973-1985, and in 1992 <I>Die Fliegenpein </I>[<I>The Agony of the Flies</I>], containing his most recent, most misanthropic and apocalyptic <I>Aufzeichnungen</I>, appeared. In 1988 his second wife, Hera Buschor, died. Elias Canetti died in Zurich in 1994, where he had maintained a second residence since the 1970s. He was buried near the grave of James Joyce, for whom he had felt a close affinity, and who had held a similarly exceptional position in the cultural life of his time. </P> <P>New publications by and about Canetti keep appearing, including the third part of the autobiography, <I>Party im Blitz</I> [<I>Party in the Blitz</I>, 2003] discussing Canetti’s life in England. Written in 1990, the work provides in the author’s partly sweeping, partly aphoristic style insights into his views on and encounters with British society and his reactions to global events, including his intellectual and personal aversions and predilections. Canetti bequeathed his extensive unpublished writings to the Zentralbibliothek Zürich from which it is possible further editions will emerge.</P> <P>In light of the seemingly never-ending conflicts involving nationality, ethnicity and religion, Canetti’s critical, if not misanthropic, view of the human species is of particular significance. From it derives an alternative anthropology that links human and non-human animal behavior in unexpected ways. At the centre of Canetti’s thinking is an often-misquoted and misinterpreted opposition to killing: Canetti calls for a rigorous non-violent ethics that rules out killing and suicide as an option under any circumstances, be it as a political tool (warfare), a means to discipline and punish (capital punishment) or a way of dealing with other species (hunt and slaughter). Indeed, Canetti’s ethics calls for the elimination of killing and murder even in the realm of imagination, including the arts and literature. It is the insistence that a fundamental reorientation and a monumental intellectual and educational effort are needed to delay the self-destruction of the human species that constitutes Canetti’s major contribution to the twentieth-century discourse on the human condition.</P> </P> --> ----
| |||