Canetti, Elias

Bulgarian-born writer. He was exiled from Austria in 1937 and settled in England in 1939. His books, written in German, include Die Blendung/Auto da Fé (1935). He was concerned with crowd behaviour and the psychology of power, and wrote the anthropological study Masse und Macht/Crowds and Power (1960). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

Memoirs
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.