Canetti had fled from this place: the old Jewish cemetery of Marrakech.
Image: ddp
“The Voices of Marrakesh” was Elias Canetti’s most successful book for a long time. It has remained one of his best. But what do you find when you look for your subject, the Moroccan city, anew today? A guest post.
Et was a long-cherished dream, but a spontaneous decision: for more than thirty years I have been reading and writing about Elias Canetti, who traveled to Marrakesh with a film team in 1954. This generated a desire to visit all the places he evokes in his little gem of a book, The Voices of Marrakech (1967). But something always got in the way – the kids, administrative tasks, deadlines, the sheer extravagance of the trip. In the end, the cold, rainy and unbearably dark winter in North Rhine-Westphalia was decisive. I complained to my therapist that I mojo just couldn’t find – not with these early sunsets. In addition to a daylight lamp, he recommended a short trip to a sunny place. Barely a week later I found myself in Morocco.
The plan was simple: read Canetti again, explore Marrakech and enjoy the sun. Losing my luggage wasn’t a major setback: it allowed me to take in the remarkably beautiful Marrakech Airport and reflect on how much lavish architecture can do for a person’s mood. Unfortunately, that does not seem to have played a role in the design for the Duisburg-Essen campus, where I am currently (and very happily) a scholar in residence, on leave from my American home university. As I waited, I thought pityingly of the students and colleagues there, to whom the frankly uninspired and dilapidated infrastructure tells them on a daily basis how little they matter in the richest country in Europe. But I was on vacation, and as Canetti famously writes in the “Stimmen”: “When you travel, you accept everything, the outrage stays at home. One looks, one hears, one is enthusiastic about the most terrible thing because it is new. Good travelers are heartless.”