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{{Premio Nobel|letteratura}}
'''Elias Canetti''' ([[Rustschuk]], [[25 Luglio]] [[1905]] - [[Zurigo]], [[14 Agosto]] [[1994]]), scrittore ebreo di lingua tedesca, [[premio Nobel per la letteratura]] [[1981]]. E' considerato l'ultima grande figura della cultura mitteleuropea.
* '''passato remoto'''
==Biografia==
Canetti nacque a [[Rustschuk]] in [[Bulgaria]] da una ricca famiglia ebrea [[sefardita]], in cui si parlava il [[ladino (giudeo-spagnolo)|ladino o giudeospagnolo]]. Il piccolo Elias fece presto esperienza con la lingua tedesca usata in privato dai genitori, e con l'inglese, vivendo alcuni mesi a Manchester dal 1911 al 1913. Nel 1912, con la morte improvvisa del padre Jacques, cominciarono le peregrinazioni della famiglia, che si spostò prima a Vienna e poi a Zurigo, dove Canetti trascorse, tra il 1916 e il 1921, gli anni più felici.
Canetti si integrò velocemente nell'atmosfera culturale viennese, assistendo alle conferenze di Karl Kraus, e cominciò a frequentare Veza Taubner-Calderòn, che sposò poi nel 1934. Sotto l'influenza del ricordo delle manifestazioni viste a Francoforte, nel 1925 cominciò a prendere forma il progetto di un libro sulla massa. Nel 1928, andò a lavorare a Berlino, traducendo libri americani (soprattutto Upton Sinclair), dove conobbe Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel e Georg Grosz. Due anni dopo, conseguì il dottorato in chimica, professione che però non praticò mai, e verso la quale non mostrò comunque alcun interesse. Tra il 1930 e il 1931 cominciò a lavorare al lungo romanzo ''Die Blendung (L'accecamento)'', pubblicato nel 1935, e, tornato a Vienna, frequentò l'elite culturale cittadina: Robert Musil, Fritz Wotruba, Alban Berg, Anna Mahler. Nel 1932 uscì il suo primo lavoro teatrale, "Nozze".
Due anni dopo fu la volta di "La commedia della vanità".
Nel 1938, a seguito dell'annessione dell'Austria alla Germania nazista, Canetti emigrò prima a Parigi e poi a Londra. Nei vent'anni successivi, si dedicò esclusivamente al grandioso progetto sulla psicologia della massa, il cui primo e unico volume, "Massa e potere", fu pubblicato nel 1960. Nel 1952 prese la cittadinanza britannica.
La prima del suo dramma "Vite a scadenza" a Oxford (1956). Veza Canetti morì suicida nel 1963. Nel 1971 sposò la museologa Hera Buschor, dalla quale ebbe l'anno seguente una figlia, Johanna.
Nel 1975 le Università di Manchester e di Monaco gli conferirono due lauree honoris causa.
Nel 1981 ricevette il premio Nobel per la letteratura, "per opere contraddistinte dalla visione ampia, dalla ricchezza di idee e dalla potenza artistica"
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<P>Elias Canetti was born in Rustschuk, Bulgaria, on 25 July 1905, the oldest of the three sons of the Sephardic merchant Jacques Canetti and his wife, Mathilde, née Arditti, who descended from an established Bulgarian Sephardic family. His father’s relatives were immigrants from Adrianople, Turkey, and despite their success in business were considered parvenus. A member of a small European minority, Canetti grew up a polyglot with a fascination for world cultures. His identity as an author was shaped by classical world literatures, the German language, and his interest in the Jewish experience, brought to focus by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. One aspect of his <I>magnum opus</I> <I>Masse und Macht</I> [<I>Crowds and Power</I>, 1960] explores the perspective of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 CE–ca. 100 CE) who entered the service of the Roman commander Titus during the Judaean uprising and became a Roman citizen. Canetti’s travel narrative <I>Die Stimmen von Marrakesch</I> [<I>The Voices of Marrakesh</I>, 1968] includes extensive descriptions of life in the Jewish quarter. Finally, Canetti’s discussion of Kafka’s relationship with his fiancée Felice Bauer in <I>Der andere Prozess. Kafkas Briefe an Felice </I>[<I>Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice</I>, 1965] is both a commentary on the artist’s personality and on Central European Jewish culture.</P> <P>Canetti spent his childhood, described in <I>Die gerettete Zunge</I> [<I>The Tongue Set Free</I>, 1977], as a pampered child in the patriarchal home of his paternal grandparents, where Ladino was spoken, and Jewish laws and holidays were observed. Even after the birth of his brothers Nissim (1909) and Georges (1911-1971) he remained the son closest to his mother. In his autobiography he reveals his family’s bias against other Jews - marriage with an Ashkenazic Jew was out of the question. Canetti’s parents associated Viennese culture with their student years in the Austro-Hungarian capital and their dreams of becoming Burgtheater actors. They used German in private as their language of intimacy. From domestics Canetti learned Bulgarian, and outside the home he encountered Christian customs. His mother embraced cosmopolitan ideals and European high culture. She tried to minimize the influence of her religious in-laws on her son who, against her will, was enrolled by his grandfather in a Thora-Talmud school. </P> <P>In 1911, defying Grandfather Canetti’s wishes, the family moved to Manchester, England, where Jacques Canetti entered the business of his brothers-in-law. Mathilde Canetti, longing to be independent from her in-laws, welcomed the move. Elias soon attended English public school. In 1912 his mother went to the Bavarian resort of Bad Reichenhall because of a sudden illness. After her reluctant return Jacques Canetti, a heavy smoker, died of a heart attack. In <I>Die gerettete Zunge</I> Canetti speculates if perhaps an affair Mrs. Canetti had in Reichenhall and the news about the war in the Balkans had contributed to his father’s death. </P> <P>After her husband’s death Mathilde Canetti’s condition worsened. In 1913 she left England and took her sons first to Switzerland, where she gave Elias a humiliating crash-course in German. Then the family moved to Vienna, where they rented an apartment in the Leopoldstadt, near the Danube Canal and the Prater amusement park. In this modest immigrant neighborhood Canetti attended elementary school, where he had his first encounter with anti-Semitism. In his autobiography he recalls his mother’s categorical rejection of the insults - Mathilde Canetti was convinced that her son, a Sephardic Jew, was not the intended target, and she transmitted her sense of pride to her son. From the start she fueled the highest aspirations in Elias and encouraged him to believe that he was destined to become a foremost intellectual. 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>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> <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> -->
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