Friedl Benedikt was the lover and student of Elias Canetti. She soon surpassed him

What story of Friedl Benedikt should we tell? That she was born almost unnoticed in the fall of 1916? In a Viennese taxi. The driver didn't even notice the event. That she, as one of the few German-speaking émigrés in England during the war, pursued a career as a writer? That she was Elias Canetti's lover?

It's not a disservice to the young woman that her work still hangs like a footnote in the biography of the Nobel Prize winner in literature. It is a disservice to him. From Canetti's estate in Zurich, something that can be called a treasure has now been recovered: Friedl Benedikt's notes from her years of exile in England and beyond the end of the war, until shortly before her death in 1953.

They are sparkling miniatures from the social lives of British artists and cosmopolitan exiles. Case studies from a madhouse called war. And quietly between the lines lies the story of a woman who, in every free minute, jots down scenes worthy of literature to provide the great master with samples of her skills.

Half admiringly, half patronizingly, Canetti notes in his autobiographical book "Party im Blitz": "No one noticed how she took possession of everything with her green eyes and then wrote it down, word for word, as she had learned it (from me)." Canetti, the feared loudmouth of literature who hardly allowed anyone to be his equal, and the gaping maw of the archives – both have caused damage in Benedikt's case. The recently published magnificent volume "Wait in the Snow in Front of Your Door" with Benedikt's previously unpublished texts makes up for much of this.

Stalking sometimes leads to the end of love, but here it was the other way around. In 1936, Friedl Benedikt met the writer Elias Canetti for the first time in Vienna's Liliput Bar. She was fascinated by the intelligence of the somewhat plump thirty-year-old with the characterful head. Afterward, she did everything she could to cross paths with him as if by chance. It wasn't difficult. The author of the recently published novel "The Blinding," which the twelve-year-old read with enthusiasm, lived across the street.

Frieda, called Friedl, is the granddaughter of the famous publisher and editor-in-chief of the "Neue Freie Presse." For Karl Kraus, Benedict was the height of journalistic corruption. Because Elias Canetti was an unconditional admirer of Kraus, he kept his distance from the family's activities. Until Friedl, quite literally, entered his life. Vienna's Himmelstrasse, the address of both, became the staging ground for a tender encounter. The young woman wanted to become a writer herself and learn something. "What began as a defense against love paves the way for it," Elias Canetti later noted about his mixed feelings.

Canetti's wife, Veza, reacted with sovereign steadfastness. She allowed the affair because she believed it would help her husband get over an insult inflicted on him by Alma Mahler. Friedl Benedikt was the antithesis of the promiscuous composer's widow. Until the end of her life, she remained devoted to the writer she admired, constantly inventing new names for him. She called him "Ilja," "Thor von Yabasta," "Sternchen," "Orion." She dedicated her first two novels, published while she was still in exile in England, "in gratitude and admiration," to Elias Canetti, "my great master."

At the same time as her boyfriend, Friedl Benedikt fled to England in 1938. Her aunt Heddie was married to an Egyptologist and had a sprawling country house in Hampshire, where guests took turns. This provided enough illustrative material to develop a writing style in her notes in which humor served as a tool for refining psychology. Canetti's idea of ​​"acoustic masks" was put into practice here.

Even in Viennese night cafés, people practiced listening together, eavesdropping on conversations at neighboring tables and weaving voices into possible novel plots. Friedl Benedikt did the same in England from 1939 onward. She wrote, then delivered it to her teacher. Canetti made his annotations. This left two significant gaps in the diary-like notes written between 1939 and 1952. Given what was so profoundly perfect before her, why would outside help have been necessary? The 23-year-old wrote in a style all her own.

The second gap: Canetti himself does not appear in the texts themselves, except perhaps in the salutation. The superego must have witnessed a process of emancipation, a literary self-invention with which the student soon surpassed her teacher in exile. While Canetti was gathering material for "Masse und Macht," Benedikt's two novels, "Let Thy Moon Arise" and "The Monster," were published in 1944 under the pseudonym Anna Sebastian Friedl. They were a success in the relevant press, and it was the young author who was subsequently able to open many doors for her role model in the London of artists and art lovers.

What Friedl Benedikt does in her writings, and which ultimately also influences her novels, is that she seeks in human encounters that core that transcends the original. Something that could become a story. The passages are connected in such a way that something almost epic emerges. A portrait of the times with characters.

If Canetti's book about England is titled "Party in the Blitz," then Benedikt's notes are a more humane equivalent. The strobe lights of war, air raids, and bombing raids hang over the London district of Hampstead, where the writer lives from 1942 onward. People meet in pubs or try to carry on with life in the bohemian circle.

Writers like Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, and Peter Weiss appear in these literary kaleidoscopes, as do people from the street and from snack bars. There's the fighter pilot whose lover has died and who, in war, encounters death like a friend: because it reminds her of that very same lover. There are the two deaf-mute men who, in a corner of the London snack bar, seem to be fighting over each other with everything their facial expressions can muster. They are a couple.

Friedl Benedikt meets an aphorist who hopes to one day make a career and a lot of money with his misogynistic musings. Another has already achieved this. He writes crime novels by the dozen, turning newspaper stories into a mixture of murder and passion.

Passion is also a major theme for the Austrian author. Her texts are pneumatic, speaking of the "exalted and exalted air" one breathes in a state of love. The sensuality that Elias Canetti forbids in his autobiographical literature is always present in Friedl's work. Veza Canetti immortalized her respected rival in her novel "The Turtles" as a young girl in a sailor's dress: "It's as if there were no dress, so self-important is the body."

Only in Friedl Benedikt's later writings do we begin to recognize her bouts of depression. She commuted between London and Stockholm. In her gloomy phases, abandoned by her world-encompassing joie de vivre, she lived with the idea that she would die young. This would prove true in the early 1950s. The writer was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a disorder of the lymphatic system.

In November 1952, she made her final notes at the American Hospital in Neuilly in Paris. The days in the hospital were agonizing. "If one could make the funniest, most wonderful novel out of it, the suffering would not have been in vain." Friedl Benedikt's relationship with Elias Canetti had already ended by this time. They had quarreled.

The grief following his girlfriend's funeral nevertheless plunged Canetti into a deep abyss. He tried to maintain his composure, which for him always meant defending himself against emotions. Friedl's "Ilja" notes, as if in a monologue: "Eight weeks without her were enough to cement her in you for a hundred years. Anyone who truly wants to be loved only needs to die."

Friedl Benedikt: Wait in the Snow in Front of Your Door. Diaries and Notes for Elias Canetti. Edited by Fanny Esterházy and Ernst Strouhal. Paul-Zsolnay-Verlag, Vienna 2025. 336 pp., CHF 37.90.