Elias Canetti and "The Voices of Marrakesh"
This British film has a certain significance for German literary history because the writer Elias Canetti (1905-1994) was present during the filming in Morocco as a guest of the film producer Aymer Maxwell.
The author processed his experiences in Marrakesh in his travel report "Die Stimmen von Marrakesch / The Voices of Marrakesh", which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1968. Following in the footsteps of his Jewish roots and with a close eye for the dignity of the people in Morocco, who often live in abject poverty, he inspired numerous readers. This work became the first major sales success for the author, who was already over 60 years old at the time, and made him well-known in German-speaking countries.
The son of Spanish-Jewish parents, who had only learned German as his fourth language, had already published a number of things in the previous decades. His enigmatic novel "Die Blendung / The Blinding" was published in 1936, his sociological mammoth work "Masse und Macht / Mass and Power" in 1960, and in between a few plays such as "Hochzeit / Wedding". But none of these extraordinary works were able to gain acceptance for the author. This only happened gradually afterwards in the 1970s and culminated in the best-selling successes of his autobiographical works "Die gerettete Zunge / The Saved Tongue" (1979) and "Die Fackel im Ohr / The Torch in the Ear" (1982). In between, Elias Canetti was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
The film, whose creation Canetti was able to follow, was considered lost until 2007 and is said to be characterized by wonderful shots of the Moroccan landscapes.
