2 - The Case of Veza Magd

Summary

They know what there is to find before they've seen it.

— A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990)

AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF obscurity Veza Canetti could not have anticipated that more than a quarter of a century after her death her story would become a feminist cause célèbre. Yet there is no other way to describe her impact in Germany when her writings began to appear in the 1990s. On the publication of The Tortoises in 1999, Anna Mitgutsch, a distinguished Austrian writer and critic, author of a contemporary feminist classic on abusive family relationships, wrote a scathing attack on her husband. She accused him of direct responsibility for Veza's neglect both before and after her death, of writing condescendingly about her in the foreword to Yellow Street, and of comparing her realistic stories unfavorably with his own celebrated modernist novel of cultural and mental disintegration, Auto-da-Fé. While the great man created, his wife merely “reported,” she alleged Canetti had written. Even if we put aside the other grounds for her polemic, it remains a peculiar way to greet a novel which contains one of the most powerful literary accounts of the Kristallnacht since Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.

Mitgutsch was not the first reviewer to think that Veza's “case” was more interesting than anything she had actually written. The opinion was first expressed in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in response to Yellow Street.