ELIAS CANETTI A SPANISH POET OF GERMAN LANGUAGE A Celebration of the Nobel Laureate On His Centennial Anniversary presented at the Center for Jewish History Behind the accessible smoothness of his autobiography, there is a reserve which, twisting and taking on disguise, conceals an unsuspected otherness, an ungraspable and unconceivable identity. (…) Both of them are teaching us, day in and day out, how to unmask the mad delusion of power and of death, and both remind us of a statement in “The Human Province:” “Everyone is the center of the world. Everyone.” Claudio Magris, author of the “Danube,” winner of the 2001 Erasmus Prize October 10, 2005, New York City -- On Sunday, October 30, 2005, the American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, and Centro Primo Levi at the Center for Jewish History will present day-long festivities to mark the centennial year of writer, intellectual, and Nobel Laureate, Elias Canetti. With special events dedicated in several European cities to honor Canetti’s 100th anniversary this past year, the Center for Jewish History represents the only venue in the US to pay homage to one of the great revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. The Center for Jewish History is located at 15 West 16 Street, New York City. Elias Canetti’s considerable reputation, and one that is especially revered by his peers, is based largely on his articulation – outside of ephemeral ideologies and short-lived battles – of the way in which totalitarian rulers come to power through the mythical culture of historical heroes. Through films, readings, and talks by preeminent scholars at the Center, audiences will be given a rare opportunity to participate in a dialogue exploring the link between Canetti’s Sephardic roots and his Mittlel European identity that formed the basis for his ideas. Of all his contemporaries, Canetti is the one who by the very nature of his persona and his writings, most drastically defies general expectation and eludes specific explanation. The internationally acclaimed Italian author, Claudio Magris, will lead the talks in exploring the man and his work. Speakers from the academic community will examine Canetti’s life-long reticence to be public, his eclectic; quasi-Renaissance interest for the human experience as a whole; his annoyance at ethnic labels; the almost disorienting absence in his writing of any obvious rhetoric and any ready-made morale; the unemotional way in which he analyzes the ability of humans to commit horrors; all of which contributed to alienating Canetti from the wider readership he so richly deserved. Yet, writers and intellectuals with an international perspective, e.g. the late Susan Sontag or Salman Rushdie have been able to treasure these traits and have written beautifully of the importance of Canetti’s thought, placing his work into an immediate relation to American culture. Following is the program schedule: Sunday, October 30, 2005 BRUNCH TIME FILM SCREENING 12 noon - ELIAS CANETTI by Thomas Honickel, Germany, 2005 (60 min., German w/English subtitles. U.S. premiere). TALKS AND DEBATES 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Gloria Ascher, Tufts University Michael Taussig, Columbia University Dagmar Barnouw, University of Southern California Robert Elbaz, University of Haifa READINGS, LECTURE, AND PUBLIC DIALOGUE 7:30 pm - An evening salon on Elias Canetti with Claudio Magris and other guests. Introduced and moderated by Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania. For reservations, please call the Center for Jewish History Box Office at 917-606-8200. Film & talks: $20 and $10 students /faculty, and members of LBI and ASF. Evening lecture: $20 and $10 students/faculty, and members of LBI and ASF. The Date Palm Café will remain open all day. All-day Pass: $35 (includes 10% discount at the bookstore and café). This event is presented by the Primo Levi Center, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the American Sephardi Federation and is made possible through the generous contributions of The Cahnman Foundation, the Italian Cultural Institute, and the New York Council for the Humanities, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The following organizations have contributed to the outreach for this symposium: Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, Institute for the Humanities at New York University, the Goethe Institute New York, the Deutsches Haus at NYU, and the National Book Foundation. The Canetti Centennial Celebration is being presented as part of the Gisella Levi Cahnman Open Seminar Series at the Center for Jewish History, which brings together international scholars and public audiences. It is made possible through the support of the Cahnman Foundation, the Italian Cultural Institute and the New York Council for the Humanities, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For further information and a complete press packet, including biographical information on Elias Canetti, Cluadio Magris and speakers, visit www.cjh.org. You may also contact Natalia Indrimi, Program Curator for the Center for Jewish History at 212-294-8314, nindrimi@cjh.org. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ON ELIAS CANETTI AND HIS WORK Novelist, essayist, sociologist, and playwright, Elias Canetti, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Canetti was born in Roustschouk, a small port in Bulgaria on the river Danube, into a well-to-do Jewish family of Sephardic descent. His parents Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Canetti run an amateur theater. One of his brothers became a famed producer who launched among others, Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourg, and Boris Vian. At age six, his family moved to Manchester, England. After the death of his father, his mother took the family to Vienna. From 1916 to 1921 Canetti studied in Zürich, and produced his first literary work. During a visit to Berlin in 1928 he met Bertolt Brecht, Isaak Babel, and George Grosz, and started to plan a series of novels on the subject of human madness. He graduated in 1929 with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Vienna, where he became exposed to the salon of Karl Kraus and met his lifelong companion Venethiana Taubner-Calderon. In 1938 he fled to Paris and a year later to England, where he lived for the rest of his life. Canetti has defined himself by defining his languages: “A Spanish poet of German language;” “The only literary person in whom the languages of the two great expulsions are found in close proximity." The dialogue between his Sephardic roots and his Mittel-European identity is essential to his self-perception, and at the same time is what makes his experience completely foreign to many, Jews and non-Jews. His place in the history of ideas is twice removed from the current “center:” The entire historical memory he represents is rooted in the exile from Spain and the successful resettlement all across Europe and the Ottoman Empire of a highly sophisticated, integrated, and multifaceted strand of the people of the book. Canetti’s mental map lies on the European-Ottoman axle, which, by the end of World War I, had been supplanted by the Soviet-American axle. Secondly, even in the face of what he defines as “Hitler’s most monstrous undertaking,” Canetti chooses to continue his battle against “the culture of the survivor,” which his people, the Jews of Spain, had always, even as conversos, refused to accept as a possible way of life. To understand Canetti, his fierce rejection of death, and the adoring exploration of life in all its forms, colors, inventive as well as destructive manifestations, his non-normative, ever-open approach to the queries of the mind, we must understand the Sephardic perspective on history and the way in which Inquisition changed the face of Europe. Furthermore, from the Sephardic tradition of sages, healers, thinkers, and practitioners of all trades of life, Canetti draws a form of humility that has long been won over by the “culture of the survivor.” It’s a humility that at the same time regards one’ self as a respected given, valuable part of the creation, but not as a primary object of one’s own inquiry. A humility thanks to which one’s ego does not need to be harnessed, because it is simply understood as one of the many points of view co-existing in the universe. It is precisely in this perspective that his three autobiographical works can be better understood, not as a way to conceal his “true” (and possibly mystifying) self, as most critics lament, but as a way to use facts from one’s relatively (un)important life, to disclose a broader human reality. This background is equally relevant to fully appreciate Canetti’s masterpiece, Auto-da-Fé. Auto-da-fé is a puzzling work. It is a modern epic on the folly brought about by the separation of the book from the world. Unlike Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, however, Auto-da-Fé does not entrust to the book per se any saving power. While composing some of the most heartbreaking paragraphs on book burning, Canetti clearly sees that the book is an instrument, a means of expression and communication, but is not the primary source of life. Nor can be called upon as a justification for isolation or death. For Canetti the ultimate responsibility to communicate and renew life rests with no other but man. THE SPEAKERS Gloria Joyce Ascher was born in the Bronx, New York of parents from Izmir, Turkey. Descended from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, she grew up in the Sephardic (Judeo-Spanish) tradition. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, Hunter College (B.A., summa cum laude), the University of Bonn, Germany (Fulbright Grant), and Yale University (M.A., Ph.D., Germanic Languages and Literatures). She is the co-director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Tufts University. Her Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Language and Culture course is the only one offered by a US college. Gloria Ascher also teaches German and Scandinavian literature. She is a writer and composer. Her poems are included in the trilingual (Judeo-Spanish, German, and Turkish) anthology of Sephardic poetry published in Austria in 2002 as part of the series “Lyrik der Wenigerheiten” (poetry of minority peoples). Ascher’s translation of Matilde Koén-Sarano’s two-volume Ladino grammar text (2002, 2003) is the only Ladino grammar available in English. Dagmar Barnouw is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has taught at Brown University, University of Texas and as a guest professor at numerous German universities, notably a semester at Rostock University. Her research and teaching has been interdisciplinary, extending into the fields of historiography, anthropology, sociology, political science, the history and theory of documentary photography, and more recently also clinical and cognitive psychology. She is the author of 11 books, including studies of Eduard Moerikes poetry, the cultural politics of Thomas Mann, of Elias Canetti's poetic anthropology and sociology of death (1979 and 1996), on utopian discourse from Thomas More to feminist science fiction (1985); her books published in the US include Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (1988); Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (1990); Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer (1994); Germany 1945 Views of War and Violence (1997); Naipaul’s Strangers (2003). Her current book project is The Uses of Remorse: Memory and Politics in Postwar Germany which begins with a critical comparative discussion of fundamentalisms in political Zionism and Islam. Born in Morocco under French colonization, Robert Elbaz is professor and chairman of French studies at the University of Haifa. He received his PhD. in comparative literature from McGill University. A literary critic and a fascinating reader of Maghrebian, Mediterranean, and Sephardic literature of the 20th century, Elbaz wrote on extensively on authors such as Tahar Ben-Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Mouloud Feraoun, Rachid Mimouni, Albert Cohen, Elias Canetti. Robart Elbaz’ interests span from semiotics to 19th century political theory and many of his studies wrestle with the notion of marginality in the narrative of the contemporary global world. The shifting of cultural paradigms and power centers from Europe and the former Ottoman Empire to the United States and former Soviet Union provides the backdrop for some of his work on the theory of autobiography and the changing nature of the self. His new book, Literature and Society in Elias Canetti will be published in January. An internationally acclaimed writer, scholar and public figure, Claudio Magris began his literary career in 1963 when, at the age of 24, he published his first book, Il mito absburgo nella letteratura austriaca moderna (The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature). One of the last commentators of Central European intellectual history. Magris has significantly contributed to contextualize for a broad readership the works of such writers as Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmansthal, Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, and Joseph Roth. Their books, collectively and individually, document the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire and reveal the existential predicament of individuals faced with the cultural crisis of a once monolithic social order. Magris's most critically acclaimed works are Danube, published in Italy in 1986 and in the United States in 1989, and Microcosms, which was published in Italy in 1997 where it won the Strega Prize, Italy's top literary award; it was published in English by Harvill Press. Michael Taussig is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University and is considered one of the most eminent cultural anthropologists and public intellectuals working in the United States today. With an international reputation for scholarly work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, addresses contemporary issues and is innovatively engaged with the process of writing and performance, Professor Taussig speaks to and writes for a broad audience within and outside the academy. An Australian by birth and originally trained in medicine at the University of Sydney, Professor Taussig's internationally renowned major works have been stimulated by continuing fieldwork in South America, principally Colombia, over more than thirty years. His writing has addressed areas of theoretical interest in the social sciences and humanities apart from anthropology, including geography, history, political science, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, international studies and creative writing. Taussig has talked about Elias Canetti in relation to ethnological concepts expressed in Crowds and Power. Liliane Weissberg is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at University of Pennsylvania. She is an extensively published scholar and frequent lecturer both in the U.S. and abroad. After completing her M.A. at the Freie Universität Berlin, she earned her A.M. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard. She arrived at Penn from Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and was named the Joseph B. Glossberg Term Professor in the Humanities (Almanac October 21, 2003). She has had visiting appointments at universities throughout Germany. Before her current term as graduate chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Liliane Weissberg served for seven years as chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. She teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses and is a member of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, the graduate group in art history, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Women's Studies Program. Her commitment to teaching was recognized in 2003 with a Lindback Award (Almanac April 22, 2003). ###