From
Willie Winkler
Elias Canetti was outraged when the young Fritsch proudly presented his suspicion that Buchmendel could be the model for Peter Kien, the main character in Canetti’s novel “The Blinding”. The Buchmendel was an invention of Stefan Zweig, and Canetti hated Zweig simply because Zweig had enabled him to publish The Blinding. In any case, for Georg Fritsch, Buchmendel with his “incomparable, this diamond book brain” was the model, that’s what he wanted to become when he and his father took the tram from Schottenring to Döbling in 1964, to the bookstore of Dr. Goldschmidt, with whom he should start as an apprentice.