Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Chapter 4:
Goya’s El sueño de la razón in Lion Feuchtwanger’s Novel and
Konrad Wolf’s Film Adaptation: Private or Social Demons?
INTRODUCTION
Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis, 154
written between 1948 and 1950 from his exile in America and published in 1951,
was adapted to film in 1971 by East German director Konrad Wolf. Wolf’s Goya,
then, is a film about a novel about a painter and his art works. In other words, it is
a film adaptation of two other art forms, and its ekphrases translate both
Feuchtwanger’s novel and Goya’s paintings to screen. However, rather than
directly adapting Feuchtwanger’s ekphrases and thus producing second-degree
ekphrases, the film generally constructs its own cinematic ekphrases or alters
those found in the novel. Thus, although both the novel and the film have three
ekphrases of Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, they occur at
different moments in the film and the novel, and moreover are different types of
ekphrasis. While in the novel, interpretive ekphrases predominate, the film mostly
animates the etching in dramatic ekphrases. This change of ekphrastic type
correlates with a change in the point of view of the ekphrasis, and different
interpretations of the aquatint.
154 The novel was translated into English as This is the Hour, trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter and
Frances Fawcett (New York: Viking Press, 1951). This title takes up the stirring caption of the
final plate of Goya’s Caprichos, Ya es hora, and has, in Lothar Khan’s opinion, contributed to the
misunderstanding of the novel in the English-speaking world (cf. Lothar Khan, “Der arge Weg der
Erkenntnis,” Lion Feuchtwanger: The Man, his Ideas, his Work: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. John M. Spalik (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Infalls, 1972) 201. (The literal translation of the
original German title would be Goya or The Dire Way to Knowledge/Enlightenment.)
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