Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...
Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...
Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...
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have not a separ<strong>at</strong>ing but a complementary function for Kunert. 116 Thus, the<br />
images <strong>of</strong> unreason th<strong>at</strong> extend r<strong>at</strong>her than describe Goya’s Capricho 43 also<br />
represent Kunert’s vision <strong>of</strong> life in the GDR, there<strong>by</strong> prefiguring his l<strong>at</strong>er open<br />
criticism. 117 Just as Goya presented his criticism <strong>of</strong> the vices and corruption <strong>of</strong> his<br />
own society in veiled form through the disjuncture between the images and the<br />
commentaries, so does Kunert veil his own verbal, poetic criticism through his<br />
ekphrasis <strong>of</strong> a visual image in order to show th<strong>at</strong> the social corruption as well as<br />
the political censure are as relevant for him as they were for Goya.<br />
Buero Vallejo’s Drama<br />
This ambiguity about an enlightenment interpret<strong>at</strong>ion <strong>of</strong> the Sueño de la<br />
razón also marks the second text th<strong>at</strong> anim<strong>at</strong>es Goya’s Capricho 43 in a dram<strong>at</strong>ic<br />
ekphrasis, Antonio Buero Vallejo’s play El sueño de la razón (1970). 118 Buero<br />
Vallejo had started as a more conventional playwright in the early fifties, but<br />
began to turn to actual historical events as subject m<strong>at</strong>ter for his plays in 1958<br />
with Un soñador para un pueblo (A Dreamer for a People). A drama about the<br />
116 Manfred E. Keune, „Günter Kunert,“ Deutsche Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts, Ed. Hartmut<br />
Steinecke (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1994), 748.<br />
117 Kunert was <strong>of</strong>ficially recognized in the GDR until 1963, when criticism <strong>of</strong> his work began as<br />
he started to reveal contradictions in the socialist st<strong>at</strong>e. In 1977 his membership in the SED, the<br />
GDR’s party, was cancelled, and in 1979 he received a visa to move to West Germany. He had<br />
already published several <strong>of</strong> his works in the West during the 1960s and 1970s, and had been wellreceived<br />
there since his poetry collection Aus fünfzehn Jahren (From Fifteen Years) in 1963 (see<br />
Keune 742-57; Manfred Durzak and Hartmut Steinecke, “Einleitung,” Günter Kunert: Beiträge zu<br />
seinem Werk, eds. Manfred Durzak and Hartmut Steinecke (München and Wien: Carl Hanser<br />
Verlag, 1992), 11.<br />
118 Antonio Buero Vallejo, El tragaluz. El sueño de la razón (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1970). <strong>The</strong><br />
play has been transl<strong>at</strong>ed into English <strong>by</strong> Marion Peter Holt as <strong>The</strong> Sleep <strong>of</strong> Reason (<strong>University</strong><br />
Park: Estreno, 1998).<br />
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