Canetti, Roustchouk, and Bulgaria: the Impact of Origin on His Works

Canetti, Roustchouk, and Bulgaria: The Impact of Origin on His Works Svoboda Alexandra Dimitrova and Penka Angelova HE CONNECTION BETWEEN Elias Canetti’s perception of places and events Tand their representation in his works has prompted us to investigate the geographical and historical reality beyond the text in Canetti’s autobiographical account Die gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend (1977).1 We shall trace the history of Canetti’s birthplace, Roustchouk, Bulgaria,2 where he spent his childhood years from 1905 until 1911, and explore how the memory of Roustchouk is represented in his autobiographical, fictional, and philosophical writings in an effort to outline the way these early experiences in his native city inspired major themes in his work. We will also examine the story behind the Canetti’s (his father’s family’s) and the Arditti’s (his mother’s family’s) arrival in Roustchouk more than half a century before Elias’s birth, and the way the city’s history is intertwined with these family histories. Indeed, the history of Sephardic families like the Canettis is an integral part of Roustchouk’s history, and Canetti’s autobiography calls for an assessment of Bulgarian-Jewish relations as they evolved over time.3 Of particular im- portance for Canetti’s work is the fate of the Jews in Bulgaria during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Canetti’s thoughts and ideas revolve around mass movements, mass destruction, the paranoid leader, and power, and although he did not identify specific events, his worldview was shaped by the trauma inflicted on Eastern European Jewry by the National Social- ists. Even though he had taken exile in England, the fate of his family and friends in Central and Eastern Europe concerned him deeply. This essay seeks to shed light on the situation in Bulgaria during these difficult times. Despite German authors’ longstanding fascination with travel and ad- venture, Bulgaria played only a minor role in German novels and travel writings. The first known representation of Bulgaria in German literature is Heinrich von Neustadt’s Apollonius (1314),4 a work written prior to the 1364 Turkish invasion of Bulgaria, when Bulgaria was a powerful and influ- ential country. Heinrich describes the courageous and powerful Bulgarian king, Abacuck, who threatens a northeastern European country named Armenia.5 The first mention of Roustchouk occurs in the context of a con- flict. Apollonius makes reference to different ethnicities in the Balkans: the 260 E SVOBODA ALEXANDRA DIMITROVA & PENKA ANGELOVA Bulgarian king is associated with both Bulgaria and “grosse Romaney,” but we also find mention of another king of Romania,6 and the lines of distinc- tion between Bulgarians and Romanians are thus blurred. Historically, this confusion may arise from the frequent change of rule in this Danube region before the 1364 Turkish occupation, when these territories stood alternately under the control of Bulgarian and Romanian kings — a pattern we will see repeated in the Middle Ages. To the best of our knowledge, Canetti was the first notable German- language writer who was not only native to Bulgaria, but also claimed it as his homeland. Unlike others born and raised outside Bulgaria, he never considered Bulgaria an exotic country or a foreign territory to be discovered and explored. Rather, in his autobiographical texts Bulgaria is an integral component of his life and character; it is “the divine aspect of his existence,” as he confirmed in an unpublished interview with his Bulgarian translator Wenzeslav Konstantinov.7 The history of Roustchouk, then, inasmuch as it is central to Canetti’s own personal history and informs his writing, is of particular interest here. The first settlements in this area occurred during the first century A.D. It was marked on a Roman military map as the castle Pristis (also Sexaginta Pristis).8 In the Middle Ages Roustchouk was destroyed and rebuilt several times. It was mentioned by name in a pilgrim’s travelogue in 1380 as a fort located between two cities, “the Bulgarian Russy and the Romanian Jorgo” (Gjugrevo in Romanian).9 A military map from 1388 records it as one of the twenty-four Bulgarian fortresses on the Danube, and it was the last Bulgarian city to be occupied by the Turks in that year,10 while the rest of Bulgaria had already been conquered in 1364. In 1445, a Bur- gundian knight passed the city and described it as a fortress with four towers. During the following centuries, the city was ruled mainly by the Turks, but because of its central location on the Balkan Peninsula it also attracted Wal- lachians and Russians, who destroyed it several times. The fortress was conquered and destroyed in 1461 by the Wallachian voivode Vladislav Zepesh (ruled 1456–62, known also as Tepes).11 In the sixteenth century Roustchouk became a trade center on par with Dubrovnik, Venice, and Genoa; a traveler reported that a huge bazaar took place weekly and that all the townspeople spoke Wallachian, Moldavian, and Bulgarian.12 The city was mentioned by Dubrovnik merchants as a crossroads of trade as well as in sources describing the victories of the Wallachian voivode Michail Viteazul (1558–1601, also known as Michael the Brave).13 Viteazul liberated the city from the Turks in 1594 and ruled over it for two years, proclaiming it a part of Wallachia.14 In the following centuries Russia engaged in numerous wars against the Turks. The Russian army liberated the city once in 1773, again in 1810, and finally in 1878. During the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries the city was re-named several times: it was called Roussig, Roussico, Rotchig, and Ruzchuck;15 travelers described it as CANETTI, ROUSTCHOUK, AND BULGARIA E 261 a city with six thousand houses, a fortress, a customs-house, a fountain, baths, two chans (hotels), three hundred stores, and a port.16 During the nineteenth century the Balkans became a subject of debate among European politicians. After 1872 Otto von Bismarck attempted to strike an alliance with Austro-Hungary and Russia. Several years later, in 1878, Bulgaria was liberated from Turkish occupation by the Russian Army, and the Bismarck Alliance, represented in the Congress of Berlin, placed a German Prince, Alexander von Battenberg, in power. In general, however, the Balkan region remained Europe’s backyard, and a threat and “gunpow- der barrel” as Bismarck called it.17 Though the region had often been envi- sioned as a strange and dangerous place, the greater powers of France, Ger- many, and Russia engaged in continuous struggles to gain influence in the Balkans. Partly as a result of these ongoing disputes, the Balkan countries — Bulgaria included — were not particularly enticing as literary subject matter. At least not in the literature of German high culture, for Bulgaria lies outside the boundaries of imagination that otherwise included most of the Central and Southern European countries. At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century Roustchouk was a small but important port on the Danube, marking the border between Bulgaria and Romania. Elias Canetti was born there on July 25, 1905, and lived there until 1911 with his mother Mathilde Canetti (née Arditti), his father, Jacques Canetti, and his brother Nissim (GZ, 44). With the birth of his brother Georg, the family moved to Manchester, England, where his father hoped to succeed in business. Even more important was the couple’s desire to escape their despotic father and father-in-law (GZ 44–45). At home, the Sephardic family spoke Ladino, a language derived from medieval Spanish and spoken by Sephardic Jews mainly in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Near East, and Canetti learned Bulgarian from the family’s housemaids (GZ 17, also Canetti in Gespaltene Zukunft, 103). The history of the Canetti family goes back to 1492, when the ancestors of both father and mother were forced to leave Spain under the edict of Isabella the Catholic and Ferdinand of Aragon, which expelled 35,000 families from Spain because of their Jewish origin.18 Many of these families eventually settled in Turkey. At this point, Bulgaria had been part of the Turkish Empire for a century and a half. For almost four hundred years, the Canetti family had lived in Adrianople (Edirne in Turkish), where Canetti’s father Jacques was born, and the family moved to Roustchouk in the 1860s,19 when it still belonged to the Turkish Empire. The period when the Canettis moved to Bulgaria was one of growth and significant economic development for Roustchouk. According to the city’s historian Vassil Doikov, in 1864 Roustchouk had been chosen as the capital of the Danube region and named “Tuna-Vilaet” (Danube Region) by the governor of the Vilaet, Midhad Pasha. This region included thirteen sandjacks (districts) with several 262 E SVOBODA ALEXANDRA DIMITROVA & PENKA ANGELOVA major cities in the South (Nish, Pirot, and Sofia) and in the East (Varna and Tulcha). Midhad Pasha was one of the leading figures of Tanzimat reforms,20 which affected the double taxation of Bulgarian subjects as well as the edu- cational system in Bulgaria, and had visited Paris, London, Brussels, Vienna, and other European cities in 1858. He was a precursor of the Young Turk movement, which modernized and westernized Turkey, and was keenly aware of the fact that, from a European perspective, Turkey was underdeveloped.21 Midhad Pasha undertook far-reaching reforms in urban and social development: he eliminated corruption, was instrumental in the construction of new public and municipal buildings such as the railway station, city and consular offices. He included younger men (between forty and fifty) in government affairs, and advocated equality for all subjects of the Turkish Empire.22 Pasha sought to rescue the Turkish monarchy through these reforms and to make it competitive with Central and Western Europe.

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