Elias Canetti and the British in a European Context: Reception, Exile, Appropriation

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Elias Canetti (1905-1994), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, is the most influential émigré German-language writer to settle in the UK after fleeing Nazi persecution. His enduring intellectual stature has a pan-European reach, as indicated forcefully by the belated translations of Masse und Macht [Crowds and Power] after the fall of the dictatorships, whether in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s or in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989-91. Yet Canetti has not received the recognition in the UK afforded to comparably prominent refugee artists and intellectuals in other spheres, such as Ernst Gombrich (art history), Nikolaus Pevsner (history of architecture), Hersch Lauterpacht (law), or Karl Popper (philosophy), all of whom received knighthoods among other accolades. Perry Anderson does not mention Canetti in his seminal polemic on the conservative character of Jewish refugees who settled in the UK compared with those who fled to the USA (1968). Daniel Snowman’s cursory treatment of Canetti in his classic account The Hitler Émigrés (2002) is indicative of a wider neglect, which is only partly explained by Canetti’s continued adherence to the German language. Taking advantage of newly available archival materials in Canetti’s Nachlass (papers) at the Zurich Central Library and the Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University, this research project explores for the first time Canetti’s creative networks during his British period (from 1939 to c.1970), his presence either through his person or his work in literary culture, and, in turn, the impact of Britain and the British on his own thinking and writing. By means of a suite of public-facing and scholarly outputs, the project thus aims to establish Canetti as a hybrid writer and 'British European' among academic and wider audiences in both the German-speaking countries and the Anglo-Saxon world.