Editor’s note: Elias Canetti was twenty-three years old when he came to Berlin to spend the summer of 1928. In Vienna, where he was studying chemistry and writing poetry, he had fallen under the spell of Karl Kraus. This formidable moralist was a radical pacifist whose fiercely irreverent journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), written entirely by himself, was then at the zenith of its influence on young and rebellious spirits. In Vienna, the young Canetti had also formed a close attachment to two young women—identified here as Veza and Ibby—whom he admired for their personal independence as well as their advanced literary interests. It was at the urging of the latter—a Hungarian poet whose work Canetti had helped to translate into German—that he decided to spend his summer holiday in Berlin, when she had gone to live.
“My curiosity grew with each of her letters,” Canetti has written of this episode. “She never mentioned anyone who wasn’t famous for something. I had read little by the writers she named, but, like everyone else, I knew who they were. However, the man who meant more to me than any writer was George Grosz. The thought of seeing him made up my mind.”
“On July 15, 1928, right at the end of the semester, I went to Berlin for the summer.”
Wieland Hertzfelde had a garret apartment at 76 Kurfürstendamm. The building stood right in the middle of the hubbub, but things seemed quiet way up there; you
