Trials

“I prefer any line of Kafka to my entire work.”

“He is,” Elias Canetti noted in 1947, “the only one who really gets to me.” And much later, just before his death: “I loved him.” This book shows for the first time Canetti’s attachment to Franz Kafka. Canetti’s essay The Other Trial. Kafka’s letters to Felice was written in 1968, a work of great historical and personal significance. These collected texts, some of which have already been published and others which have been made accessible by the Canetti estate, place Canetti’s notes on Kafka within the process of affirming himself as a writer. The main topics he explored through Kafka prove time and again to intrinsic to his own work. A literary-historical constellation of the 20th century becomes visible: Canetti’s Kafka.