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In den Märchen der Nationen kehrt die Verwandlung von Menschen in Tier als Strafe wieder. In einen Tierleib gebannt zu sein, gilt als Verdammnis. Kindern und Völkern ist die Vorstellung solcher Metamorphosen unmittelbar verständlich und vertraut.
-Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung
I.
On 10 December 1981, the polyglot Bulgarian-born Austrian-Jewish writer Elias Canetti had the rare honor to give a speech at the Nobel Banquet. Having been awarded the eminent prize in literature, he used this special occasion to reflect on his indebtedness to Europe despite its "grosse Schuld" ("Elias Canetti-Banquet Speech"). Even after the two World Wars, he said, he stood on the shoulders of four Austrian literary giants-Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil-whose oeuvres had taught him to resist war, oppression, and death. At a particularly vexed time for Europe, their works had shown him the arts of survival. Perhaps this encomium was not unexpected from a writer who had remained loyal to the German language through more than forty years of living abroad. In addition to German, Canetti spoke Ladino, English, Bulgarian, and French, but it was those German-speaking modernists from the bygone Habsburg Empire who had helped him understand how to escape from violent death on a profoundly troubled continent. According to Canetti, Kraus had immunized him "gegen Krieg," while Kafka was opening his eyes to the imaginative possibility of "sich ins Kleine zu verwandeln und sich so der Macht zu entziehen." Broch was a close friend of his who had illustrated the value of "Atmen," while Musil's "Waghalsigkeit" to dwell on a single work without knowing whether it would ever be completed had impressed him greatly. For Canetti, these writers had sustained his life through the Great Wars.
At first glance, this homage seems perfectly sensible, but upon closer examination it raises questions that cultural and literary scholars have not addressed thus far: why doesn't Canetti consider any of their works to be "das wichtigste Buch" in his life (Nachträge 32)? How is it possible that Die Verwandlung or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften does not claim this distinction? Canetti admits that it actually goes to an ethnographic work, a large reservoir of exotic Bushmen myths in English translation. It is called Specimens of Bushman...