Elias Canetti: Nobel laureate's legacy of mass psychology and 'Auto da fé'

Elias Canetti, born in Ruse in 1905 to a Sephardic Jewish family, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981 for works marked by broad perspective, wealth of ideas, and artistic power. He published only one novel, 'Auto da fé' (original German 'Die Blendung'), and the seminal essay 'Massa e potere' (Crowds and Power) in 1960. The novel was inspired by three events: a man distributing leaflets claiming they were burning, the psychiatric hospital Steinhof near his Vienna home housing 6,000 patients, and a 1927 riot where 90 protesters were killed by police after workers were acquitted for killing strikers. Canetti described his characters as a 'human comedy of fools,' each trapped in their own reality. 'Crowds and Power' analyzes mass behavior through concepts of discharge, concentration, and direction. Canetti learned Ladino, German, Bulgarian, and English, and earned a chemistry doctorate in 1930. The article, published on Artspecialday, reflects on the contemporary relevance of Canetti's mass theory in the age of social media and globalizing platforms.