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My earliest memory is dipped in red. I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the floor in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red. Across from us, at the same height, a door opens and a smiling man steps forth, walking toward me in a friendly way. He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: "Show me your tongue." I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens it and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says: "Now we'll cut off his tongue." I don't dare pull back my tongue, he comes closer and closer, the blade will touch me any second. In the last moment, he pulls back the knife, saying, "Not today, tomorrow." He snaps the knife shut again and puts it back in his pocket. Every morning, we step out of the door and into the red hallway, the door opens, and the smiling man appears. I know what he's going to say and I wait for the command to show my tongue. I know he's going to cut it off, and I get more and more scared each time. That's how the day starts, and it happens very often.
-Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free, translated by Joachim Neugroschl (1979)
The first volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography opens with this traumatic memory. For years, Canetti evidently kept the story to himself: only much later did he learn what had happened. In the summer of 1907, when he was two, his family was vacationing in Carlsbad in upper Bohemia. The guesthouse had red walls and red carpets. His nanny, a girl of fourteen, took him out early every morning; she had an assignation in town with her boyfriend, who evidently taunted the toddler with the knife trick. When Canetti's parents finally found out what was going on, they sent the girl back to Bulgaria.
The fear of having the tongue cut out gives Canetti his title: Die Gerettete Zunge literally means the rescued tongue. The terrifying memory points directly to the vexed relationship between author and what was his mothers tongue, German. As a child in the...