The Torch in My Ear

The Torch in My Ear is the second volume of the autobiography trilogy of Elias Canetti, the German-language writer and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature. The original German title is Die Fackel im Ohr, alluding to Die Fackel (The Torch), the journal edited by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus; it continues the thread of The Tongue Set Free and covers the decade from 1921 to 1931, set mainly in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin. Canetti's mother takes the adolescent Canetti from Zurich to Frankfurt, forcing him to confront the inflation, hunger, strikes, and social turmoil of post-World War I Germany; in a Charlotte boarding house he encounters all sorts of people and experiences a violent shock to the self for the first time. After graduating from secondary school, he enters the University of Vienna to study chemistry according to his family's arrangements and receives his doctorate in 1929, yet always regards literature and the observation of people as his true vocation. In Vienna he moves between cafes and private gatherings, befriends writers such as Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, and through listening and recording forms the starting point for his later works Auto-da-Fé and Crowds and Power; in Berlin he visits Brecht's apartment and meets Babel, Hart, and others. The book also records how he meets, falls in love with, and marries Veza. With a precision that is almost cruel, Canetti recalls the people around him and reconstructs the atmosphere of intellectual life in Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is regarded as one of the important German-language autobiographies of the twentieth century.