Veza Canetti

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Veza Canetti (born Venetiana Taubner-Calderon November 21, 1897 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died May 1, 1963 in London ) was an Austrian writer and translator .

Life

Venetiana Taubner-Calderon was the daughter of a Sephardic mother and a Hungarian-Jewish father. She was born with no left forearm. After the First World War , the highly gifted literary connoisseur first worked as an English teacher. In 1924 she met Elias Canetti , whom she married in 1934.

Veza Canetti belonged to the inner circle around Karl Kraus , but at the same time was close to Austromarxism . Her story Der Kanal appeared in three installments in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung in November 1933 . Veza Canetti published in Malik-Verlag and in exile journals under the pseudonyms Veronika Knecht, Martha Murner, Martina Murner and Veza Magd. Her translations from English appeared under the latter pseudonym.

Her own novels did not find a publisher during her lifetime; She destroyed the manuscripts for a novel about Kaspar Hauser and on the subject of “Die Genießer”. The surviving novel The Tortoises is autobiographical and processes their flight to England.

For decades, Veza Canetti was her husband's literary advisor, whose works she edited in exile . To what extent this promoted her own literary activity is controversial. When German scholars became aware of Veza Canetti's narrowly published work in the 1980s, Elias Canetti claimed that he had inspired his wife (who was eight years older than him) to start writing in 1931, and from 1990 onwards she gave some manuscripts from her estate for publication free - in his three-volume autobiography, however, there is no mention of Veza's own writing. In his estate there are drafts for chapters of this work, in which he goes into detail about her literary activities. In the end, he thought he could not discuss her letter without portraying her as a failure, which he absolutely tried to avoid. Veza's relationship with her husband, who only became famous after her death, is considered difficult, not least because of his frequent and intense relationships with other women.

Veza Canetti died in London in 1963, where she and her husband had lived since 1938. Rumors that she committed suicide are not based on fact. She did not want to go back to Vienna after 1945, because there the Nazis would “soon all have Jewish passports”, she judged her compatriots.

Honors

Veza Canetti Park in Vienna

Works

  • New editions by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich
    • The yellow road. Roman, 1990.
    • The ogre. One piece, 1991.
    • Patience brings roses, 1992.
    • The turtles. Roman, 1999.
    • The discovery. Stories and plays, 2001.
  • with Elias Canetti: letters to Georges . Hanser, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-446-20760-0 .

literature

  • Ingrid Spörk, Alexandra Strohmaier (Eds.): Veza Canetti . Verlag Droschl, Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research at the University of Graz 2005, ISBN 3-85420-685-2 . (detailed bibliography, including: Beyond Education: Veza Canetti as a Jewish writer in Vienna )
  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Veza Canetti . Text and criticism , München 2002.
  • Angelika Schedel: Socialism and Psychoanalysis. Sources of Veza Canetti's literary utopias. In the appendix: An attempt at a biographical reconstruction. Epistemata Vol. 378 Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 978-3-8260-2166-4
  • Gaby Frank: Veza Canetti. In: Britta Jürgs (Ed.) "Unfortunately, I've completely forgotten how to fly." Portraits of artists and writers of the New Objectivity . Aviva, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-932338-09-X .
  • Edda Ziegler: Maid and Servant: Veza Canetti. In: Forbidden, ostracized, expelled. Women writers in the resistance against National Socialism. dtv, 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-34611-5 , pp. 153-157.
  • Julian Preece: The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband. Rochester NY 2007, ISBN 978-1-57113-353-3 .
  • Gerhild Rochus: Canetti, Veza. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , pp. 100-102.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Letters to Georges at Hanser's ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 71 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / files.hanser.de
personal data
SURNAME Canetti, Veza
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Taubner-Calderon, Venetiana (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1963
Place of death London