Elias Canetti’s unpublished diaries: blocking period ends. First insights

A first reading gives an insight into the diaries that Elias Canetti blocked for the public for three decades after his death. To protect his contemporaries from his pointed tongue – or to increase the tension?

Elias Canetti came to England as an exile from Vienna in 1938. Well, in the early 1950s, he records his encounter with conservative interior minister David Maxwell Fyfe. He had refused to pardon a young man who was executed for a policeman murder that he had not committed himself. Fyfe appears Canetti as a compatible man, a believer Christian, not a typical ruler, but that only makes it all the worse. As a person who could and had to prevent the death of another person, he becomes a doppelganger of himself. “I was outraged to the deepest,” Canetti notes about his own reaction to the execution in his diary.