(1905-1994) Bulgarian-born writer. He was exiled from Austria as a Jew 1937 and settled in England 1939. His books, written in German, include Die Blendung/Auto da Fé 1935. Nobel Prize for Literature 1981.
He was concerned with crowd behavior and the psychology of power, and wrote the anthropological study Masse und Macht/Crowds and Power 1960. His three volumes of memoirs are Die gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend/The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a Childhood 1977, in which he writes of his earliest years; Die Fackel im Ohr: Lebensgeschichte 1921–31/The Torch in My Ear 1980, set mainly in Vienna and covering the period when Canetti came under the spell of satirist Karl Kraus; and Das Augenspeil/The Play of the Eyes 1985, which covers the years 1931–37, and is rich in satirical insights into the artistic Viennese society of the time.
Canetti was born in the Bulgarian town of Ruse on the Danube. Multilingualism was part of his family heritage; his parents, Sephardic Jews, still spoke an ancient form of Spanish, as well as German, a language his mother forced him to learn at the age of eight. In the town itself, he heard people speaking Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Turkish, Spanish, Rumanian, and Russian, and his grandfather spoke Hebrew. As he grew up, he learned English, Latin, Greek, and French, and became expert in the peculiar forms of German spoken in Switzerland and Austria. Between 1913 and 1937, when Canetti departed for Britain, he moved in the societies of Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna. + prikaži više