IN 1950 — ONE YEAR BEFORE HIS DEATH — Hermann Broch was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature by the Austrian P.E.N. Club. Broch did not receive the award; it went to William Faulkner and Bertrand Russell. Thirty years later one of Hermann Broch's Viennese friends, the one-generation-younger Elias Canetti, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech Canetti paid homage to those writers who had influenced him most: Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch. Canetti stressed that in a way he was accepting the distinguished award as a proxy for these four writers, who had not been awarded the prize. Canetti's statement was meant as more than an empty gesture: it was a show of respect for the authors who were hardly acknowledged during their lifetimes, yet without whom a literary work such as his own would have developed differently. It was Broch who was the first to take Canetti under his wing. As early as 1933, two years before Canetti's debut, Die Blendung was published, Broch, who was a friend to many, introduced the then twenty-eight-year-old, as yet unknown, author in a speech to the Viennese audience as one of the hopefuls of contemporary Austrian literature. In those days Broch and Canetti also discussed what might be done against the spreading mass hysteria that was arising in the wake of Fascism and National Socialism. These talks spawned the plans for their books Massenwahntheorie and Masse und Macht, written in exile during the Second World War.