Canetti / The Last Cosmopolitan

Elias Canetti

The Last Cosmopolitan

Elias Canetti’s 20th century.

May 16, 2023

 

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lias Canetti belonged to Europe’s 20th century. It was a period of extreme horrors that gave way to a slow but determined effort to heal. The scale of the suffering that he and millions of others witnessed in the first half of the century led to the pledge—“Never again!”—that was supposed to define its second half. But history has a way of relapsing. While no conflict since then has matched the violence of World War II, and no catastrophe has found its equal in the more than 50 million people who died—including in extermination camps—Europe in the 21st century has seen a reawakening of the far-right nationalist and racist ideologies that engulfed the continent during that horrible era. Authoritarian governments, nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiments, the scapegoating of minorities, and the fight over territory have all gained a new intensity over the past decade.

Kafka’s Other Trial

 

Kafka’s Other Trial

Although much of Penguin Modern Classics time now seems to be spent publishing what they call ‘pure classic escapism’, every so often they release something interesting and unusual, a perfect example being Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial. Canetti was a restless Jewish intellectual, one among many who light up the literature of Europe during the twentieth century. Born in Bulgaria, educated in Vienna, he moved to London during the war, and then relocated to Zurich where he died in 1994 (having received the Nobel Prize in 1981). That he was restless intellectually can be seen from the fact that his best known works cover a number of genres: the novel Auto da Fe, a three volume autobiography, and a study of crowd behaviour, Crowds and Power.