SOURCE: Tyler, Simon. “Homage or Parody? Elias Canetti and Otto Weininger.” In Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, edited by Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms, pp. 134-49. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Tyler discusses parallels between Canetti's Auto-da-fé and Otto Weininger's famously misogynistic 1903 tract Sex and Character.

Weininger's principal work, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), received enormous interest in Austrian literary circles when it was first published in 1903, an interest heightened by the fact that Weininger committed suicide shortly after its publication in the house where Beethoven had died. This suicide is but one disturbing element in the conception and reception of this vehemently misogynist and anti-Semitic work, which Gerald Stieg has claimed to be a psychological and metaphysical prelude to National Socialism and its variants.¹ The extraordinary popularity of this work is indicated by the fact that it went through twenty-eight editions...