The Power of the Mother Tongue
THE POWER OF THE MOTHER - TONGUE
Elias Canetti's Path to Intellectual Independence
"The Power of the Mother Tongue" follows the difficult path of the Bulgarian-born writer and Nobel laureate Elias Canetti towards intellectual independence. Many languages played an important part along the way.
The leading role, however, fell to German, into which Canetti, as he put it, was "violated" by his mother. In the family, Spanish was spoken first, then English. Between father and mother, German was a kind of secret language, a language of love that the children were not supposed to understand. After his father's early death, Elias, just old enough for school, took over this language and with it, in a certain sense, his father's role. The passion that seized young Elias in equal measure for his mother and for the German language was decisive for the rest of his life and for his development as a writer.
But it was only his separation from his mother that finally brought about his intellectual independence. His mother disapproved, until her death, of Canetti's unbreakable love for Veza, who later became his wife. The phenomenon of power, which he had experienced often enough at first hand, fascinated and troubled Canetti from an early age. Obedience as a child, dependence on orders, indeed the whole compulsive mechanism of command and obedience to which society as a whole is subject: by the age of twenty he had already made the study of this his life's task. Only 35 years later was the result of this long work ready for publication. "Crowds and Power", Elias Canetti's main work, appeared in 1960.
| VOICES | Birgitta Assheuer, Renate Jett, Bodo Primus, Helmut Vogel, Helmut Wöstmann |
| MUSIC | Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Ferruccio Busoni, Kurt Weil |
| DIRECTOR | Harald Koerner |
| SOUND ENGINEER | Andra Mammitzsch, Regine Schneider |
| EDITOR | Gerhard Adler |
| DURATION | 85 minutes |
| FIRST BROADCAST | 1.10.2000 SWR, RadioART: Feature am Sonntag |
| REPEAT BROADCAST | 18.8.2002 SWR, RadioART: Feature am Sonntag |
Photo: unknown, Nationaal Archief, The Hague (ANEFO), Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 3.0 NL – cropped, border added.