Barbara Burns talks to Professor Julian Preece (Swansea University, Co-Editor of The Complete Works of Elias Canetti), and Dr Mélissa Pires Da Silva, the project’s MHRA Research Fellow this year.

BB. You’re preparing an edition of works by Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian-born, German-language writer and philosopher who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. Can you give us a brief insight into Canetti’s life and intellectual focus?

Julian Preece

JP. Elias Canetti was a Jewish refugee who arrived in the UK in January 1939, travelling from Vienna via Paris where most of his family lived. He is the author of one novel, Die Blendung, which was published by a small press in 1935 with the support of a benefactor and translated into English by C. V. Wedgwood as Auto-da-fe in 1946. His travelogue Voices of Marrakesh (1967) and three volumes of autobiography (1977-85) are among his most lyrical books, but at the time of his death in 1994 aged 89, his diaries and notebooks which contain some of his most compelling writing were unpublished.

BB. Canetti also wrote an influential nonfiction book about crowd psychology and its relation to the nature of power. What can you tell us about this?

JP. He considered Masse und Macht / Crowds and Power (1960/62) to be his magnum opus, as he invented a new concept to survey all world culture to understand the inner workings of National Socialism and other mass movements and what made them so successful. He first had the idea in the early 1920s and worked intermittently on the project for thirty-five years. It is a hybrid work with elements of anthropology, philology, and history, and it has been described as a ‘flawed masterpiece’. Canetti spent a whole year working on the English translation with his friend Carol Stewart.

The robust face of Elias Canetti, in a photograph held by the Dutch National Archives (The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989). Canetti himself was not, of course, Dutch, but like many great émigrés, he can be claimed by any number of homelands. Born on the Danube, yet to a Sephardic Jewish family from Spain by way of the Ottoman Empire, he then lived in Manchester, Lausanne, Vienna, Zurich, Frankfurt, London and, ultimately, Zurich again.

BB. Canetti’s notebooks and diaries have quite recently been released to invited scholars. What types of information do these manuscripts reveal, and how is this impacting both the material you’re preparing and critical awareness of Canetti more broadly?

JP. Canetti wrote both notebooks and diaries, sometimes mixing the two. The notebooks were for literary or philosophical observations, aphorisms and character sketches, the diaries for recording events and encounters, but they served also as an outlet for emotions. He often appears to exaggerate and makes sometimes absurd accusations, even or especially of some of his closest friends and associates. He reflects a lot on himself and his past actions, seemingly needing to have a story to tell about himself and his past which he kept on revising. He was a writer of many contradictions, which is why memories of him, especially from his less happy British period, are polarised. All the material from the manuscripts has been transcribed, the diaries from shorthand, and are available to scholars on the cloud, but by invitation only. We are very privileged to have permission to read the documents. Correspondence and other material has to be consulted in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.

BB. Melissa, you began your work as an MHRA Research Fellow in October. Can you tell us a bit about your research background and how that led you to become involved in this project?

Mélissa Pires Da Silva

MPDS. After a BA in English at the University of Warwick and an MA in Classical Reception Studies at University College London, I found my research niche in twentieth-century French and German inter- and post-war literature. It felt natural to embark on a PhD at University College London’s Department of Greek and Latin, where I could further deploy my enthusiasm for both modern comparative literature and classical reception studies. My PhD was a comparative study on the ‘family’ as a topic of classical reception in Jean Giraudoux’s interwar play La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935) and Hermann Broch’s post-war novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945). The expertise I developed on French and German inter- and post-war literature, and also the specialist knowhow I gained during my archival work at Yale’s Beinecke, equipped me well for embarking on this exciting MHRA project on Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960).

BB. What does your work involve, and what are you enjoying most about it so far?

MPDS. My role is to assist in the preparation of The Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Elias Canetti (Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Elias Canetti), focusing specifically on Canetti’s Masse und Macht (1960). Under the leadership of Julian Preece at Swansea University, I support the general editors, Sven Hanuschek and Kristian Wachinger, as well as the volume editors, Erhard Schüttpelz and Ulrich van Loyen. My work focuses on investigating how Canetti’s unpublished papers illuminate Masse und Macht. I am grateful not only to have privileged access to this invaluable repository of diaries and notebooks, but also to collaborate with an expert, close-knit group of colleagues.

What I most enjoy about my collating and counter-referencing of Canetti’s paralipomena is the opportunity to uncover new data about the author’s life and work process. The most rewarding moment so far was when I unearthed an entry confirming that Canetti started to work on Masse und Macht as early as 1925. This finding enabled me to compose a tentative chronology of the intricate stages of research and composition that went into Canetti’s magnum opus.

The so-called Montagsdemonstration in Leipzig, 16 October 1989, as recorded by what is now the Bundesarchiv of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bild 183-1990-0922-002): the photographer was Friedrich Gahlbeck. A classic pushback of the masses against power, the rhythmic heaves of the "Monday protests" began with daring individuals in a single church and ended with rallies across the whole nation, watched — but not shot at — by the military. In 1988, this photograph would have been unthinkable.

BB. How have you settled into the research community at Swansea, and what activities have you benefitted from?

MPDS. Swansea University has been a vibrant research and teaching environment. Since I picked up my MHRA post in October, I have had multiple career-development opportunities. I have attended in-house seminars and also supported my project lead Julian Preece and colleague Jack Arscott in hosting our travelling exhibition, ‘Elias Canetti, A Jewish Emigré in Britain: People, Places, Impressions 1939-1988’, through the UK and Germany, with a final stop scheduled at Senate House in London in September 2026. The exhibition concludes with a conference at which I’ll present a paper highlighting how my MHRA fellowship has allowed me to break new ground on Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht for the new edition.

I am also working on a paper on comparative classical echoes in Canetti’s Masse und Macht and James Joyce’s Ulysses, to be published later this year. This paper brings together my new knowledge about Canetti and my expertise in comparative classical receptions in twentieth-century literature. Finally, I’ve gained some useful teaching experience. By convening a course on German for Professional Purposes and giving two lectures on French post-war receptions of ancient Greek tragedy at Swansea’s Classics Department, I have kept my enthusiasm for both German and French alive and enjoyed engaging with Swansea’s student community.

BB. Why Canetti? What is the most interesting aspect of this project for each of you?

JP. My own project is a collaboration with Sven Hanuschek at the University of Munich entitled ‘Elias Canetti and the British in a European Context: Exile, Reception, Appropriation’, and is funded jointly by the AHRC and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council). I am interested in the people Canetti knew and wrote about, what they wrote about him, and in particular how he strategized to get his work known and respected in English translation as a springboard for publication and recognition in Germany.

MPDS. This MHRA project marks an unprecedented opportunity for adding new relief to what Canetti considered to be his ‘life’s work’. Canetti’s papers contain a wealth of surprising, poignant, sometimes propitiously obscure records, which allow us to better contextualise Masse und Macht within his broader thought processes, life experiences, and literary inspirations. In fact, Canetti’s records on Masse und Macht make up a disproportionally high percentage of his unpublished papers, with over a hundred boxes filled with reflections on, research for and drafts about this particular work. My MHRA fellowship has thus been a crucial driving force for the new edition as I have helped create a better overview of the generally still unknown material that Canetti took care to preserve. Above all, this project has helped bring some of the most pertinent, dormant aspects of those records to light for readers to enjoy and assess for themselves in the new edition.

Canetti's grave is in the Fluntern cemetery, in leafy low hills just outside the centre of Zürich. James Joyce and his wife Nora are also buried there, as are many Swiss artists and thinkers. (Photo: Lars Haefner)

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