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Riga 51:
Canetti's breakthrough work Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé) apperared in 1935. It was banned by the Nazis, but beside this acknowledgment Canetti did not gain much attention as a writer before the 1960s when the book was reprinted. The protagonist is Peter Klein, a forty-year-old philologist and sinologist. He knows much of ancient languages but is unable to decipher contemporary voices. "He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o'clock." Klein feels safe with his 40 000 characters of the Chinese alphabet and 25 000 books. He fears social and physical contacts, and his inhumane view of the world contradicts his learning. However, he allows himself to get into the clutches of his ignorant and grasping housekeeper Therese Krummholz, nearing 60, whom he marries, and who robs him of everything. In this she is helped by Benedikt Pfaff, the proto-fascist caretaker of the apartment block. Klein descends to the lower, surrealistic depths of society. His brother Georges, who is a psychiatrist, tries in vain to cure him. Doomed Klein dies in apocalyptic self-destruction amidst his books.
Nel monumentale saggio Canetti fece confluire materiale da diverse discipline, antropologia, psicologia, storia delle religioni, evitando programmaticamente nomi come [[Karl Marx|Marx]] o [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]] (menzionato solo una volta in una nota).
L'argomentazione prende le mosse dall'assunto che l'istinto della massa è basilare come l'istinto di sopravvivenza. "La forma più bassa della sopravvivenza è l'uccisione". La prima parte analizza la dinamica dei diversi tipi di massa e della "muta". La seconda parte si concentra sulla questione del come e del perché le masse obbediscono ai capi. [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]] viene presentato come il capo paranoico, affascinato dalle dimensioni della massa che egli stesso comanda. La persecuzione degli ebrei viene poi messa in relazione con l'enorme [[inflazione]] del primo dopoguerra.
Crowds and Power (1960), brought together material from many disciples, and avoided such names as Marx or Freud, who is mentioned once in a note. It started from the assumption that crowd instinct is as fundamental as the passion to survive. "The lowest form of survival is killing." The first half analyses the dynamics of different types of crowds and of 'packs'. The second part focuses on the question how and why crowds obey rulers. Canetti presented Hitler as the paranoiac ruler of crowds, fascinated by the size of the crowds he commands. The persecution of the Jews he connects with the German experience of inflation - they needed to pass this humiliation on to something else which would be reduced to worthlessness. "Our most pressing need, as Canetti very movingly and convincingly argues at the end, is to control the 'survivor mania' of our rulers, and the key to this is 'the humanisation of command'. But how is command to be humanised? Canetti has not given us a psychology with which to picture the humanisation of command." (Iris Murdoch in The Spectator, September 1962)
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