Restless and curious: The now published diaries of the almost forgotten writer Friedl Benedikt tell of exile in England and the complicated relationship with Elias Canetti.
© private collection
It is 1942, in the middle of World War II. In the North England And in the Midlands, hate schools have formed that give their dislike against the German expression. “Once a week, these people go into a slaughterhouse,” writes the Austrian author Friedl Benedikt in her diary notes from British exile, “where a lively pig is slapped from top to bottom, so that the blood sprays out.” A instructor Would monitor the matter and whip the participants: “HATE! HATE! HATE THE HUN!” In one of these groups there is also a surgeon from London: “When the pig was killed, he went there, bathed his hands in the blood, and then he washed his face with it and licked it.”
