Veza Canetti zwischen Leben und Werk: Netzwerk-Biografie by Vreni AmslerVeza Canetti: Eine Biographie by Sophie ReyerVezas Wege: Ein biographischer Roman by Sophie Reyer

Abstract

Reviews 175 Veza Canetti zwischen Leben und Werk: Netzwerk-Biografie. By Vreni Amsler. Innsbruck/Vienna: Studien Verlag, 2020. 552 pp. €39.90. ISBN 978–3-7065– 6054–2. Veza Canetti: Eine Biographie. By Sophie Reyer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019. 168 pp. €17.80. ISBN 978–3-8260–6675–7. Vezas Wege: Ein biographischer Roman. By Sophie Reyer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2020. 318 pp. €28. ISBN 978–3-8260–7156–0. Walt Disney’s Donald Duck und das doppelte Gespenst (1974), translated by Veronika Knecht, is still available on Amazon and Ebay. As Veronika Knecht is one of several pseudonyms used by Veza Canetti (1897–1963), others being Veza Magd and Martha or Martina Murner, Vreni Amsler speculates that it is one of a potentially high number of hidden translations by her. If it is, it remains a mystery why Disney waited so long after her death to publish it, however. Amsler is sure that Veza Canetti was responsible for the German version of John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1930): the named translator Richard Hoffmann ran a translation agency which employed the then Veza TaubnerCalderon . Elias Canetti (1905–94) admitted that the trio of books by Upton Sinclair translated in his name and published by Malik between 1930 and 1932 (Alkohol; Das Geld schreibt; and Leidweg der Liebe) were more her work than his. Veza Canetti’s own writing was published in newspapers or journals, with the exception of a contribution to the anthology Dreissig neue Erzähler des neuen Deutschland, edited by Wieland Herzfelde and published also by Malik in late 1932. Reading astutely between the lines of scattered correspondence and other surviving fragments, Amsler deduces that Canetti worked for Malik as an editor and possibly had a guiding hand in that same volume, which landed on the Nazis’ book bonfire six months after publication. Amsler argues too that when Veza Taubner-Calderon signed herself Veza Magd-Canetti before her marriage to Elias in 1934, it was in recognition of their writing partnership. Amsler is to be thanked for assembling copious information on Veza’s family, her thrice-married mother, her father, two stepfathers and two half-brothers, as well as her mother’s parents and siblings and Viennese friends and neighbours, some of whom make appearances in Elias’s autobiography. Her relatives in England lived in the same Burton Road that Elias describes in Die gerettete Zunge; the two writers’ lives crossed well before they met in person at a Karl Kraus performance in April 1924. Veza emerges as a typical cosmopolitan subject of the Habsburgs, with family connections in Belgrade and its environs on her mother’s side and in neighbouring Hungarian territory on her father’s. She may have learnt Hungarian from her father or his family and later translated from it, though this is far from certain and he died when she was only six years old. Amsler establishes some fascinating networks of family connections, tracing biographical trajectories which more than justify her book’s subtitle and provide not just context but points of reference and comparison. Reviews 176 Any biographer of Veza Canetti will be obliged to fill in large gaps because the documentary evidence in the shape of letters and diaries, manuscripts and book reviews and other contemporary testimony on which literary biography traditionally draws is mostly lacking. Both Veza and Elias destroyed material which scholars today would love to be able to read. According to Amsler, there may be connections between Veza and Kurt Tucholsky, who published as Theobald Tiger (‘Der Tiger’ being the title both of a posthumously published play and a chapter of Die gelbe Strasse) and Kaspar Hauser, a name which Veza claimed as the title of a novel she had written. What is also telling is that Veza’s husband only writes critically of Tucholsky. Amsler identifies a pattern whereby Elias Canetti criticizes other male authors who could have worked with his wife and chief emotional and creative supporter. Amsler proceeds from the fairly straightforward premise that Veza Canetti’s contributions to German literature as editor, translator and author have been obscured by male agents in the world of publishing. A striking example of...