This workshop focuses on the ‘Prague-Vienna Circle’, a group of Jewish friends from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who, having survived the Holocaust and reunited in British exile after 1945, sought to make sense of the momentous events they had witnessed. The circle comprised Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, poet and Oxford anthropologist Franz Baermann Steiner, and writer, sociologist and philosopher H.G. Adler. They combined, in Michael Hamburger’s words, the virtues of the ‘imaginative writer’ and the rigour of the ‘polymath’.
Whilst Canetti and Steiner had come to the UK in the late 1930s, from Vienna and Prague respectively, Adler only arrived in 1947 having survived incarceration in several concentration camps. Displaced from Prague, he transformed his experiences of Nazism and state terrorism, recording them in the ground-breaking Theresienstadt 1941–1945. The Face of a Coerced Community. Steiner and Canetti were no less engaged in trying to come to terms with totalitarian experiences: Steiner pursuing his (unfinished) comparative study of the origins of slavery and Canetti discussing the nature and dangers of the contemporary subject in modern societies in his monumental Crowds and Power.
Mutual influences between the friends and wider ‘Prague-Vienna Circle’ in exile can be traced throughout their œuvres which bridge several disciplines, from anthropology, ethnology and psychiatry to political science and economics, and genres from essays, novels and poetry to aphorisms and letters. Despite differences in intellectual and literary temperament, their styles of thinking converge in an attempt to interpret the trend towards authoritarianism. Whilst the debate in the UK, both before and after 1945, was dominated by geopolitical issues and the transition from a pre- to a post-war order, Adler, Canetti and Steiner took advantage of their position on the margins to proffer new concepts and forms of analysis and challenge the intellectual mainstream.
The workshop will discuss the pervasive subject of authoritarianism, the critique and exertion of power, its continuation and its implications for the present day. Speakers will include: Jeremy Adler (King’s College London, Peter Filkins (Bard College, New York), Maria Peacock (Iris Murdoch Research Centre) and Erhard Schüttpelz (University of Siegen).
Organisers: Andrea Capovilla (Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture, ILCS), Till Greite (British Academy Fellow, ILCS), and Frederic Ponten (Regensburg/ILCS).
The workshop will be held in person at the University of London Senate House. Attendance is free, but advance online registration is essential.
More information and booking: https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/thinking-authoritarianism-prague-vienna-circle-british-exile
