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

Feuchtwanger beschwor mit seinem Roman eine humanistische Tradition,
um am Beispiel eines Kampfes gegen die historische Reaktion den
Widerstand gegen die zeitgenössische zu unterstützen. 159
On the other hand, however, later critics have also seen the film as a
“response to attacks made on certain artists and film makers in the course of the
Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of SED in 1965 and later 1960s.” 160 In
other words, the film, though produced under the contraints of a socialist context,
was nevertheless able to take up the strategies of Feuchtwanger’s historical novel
by using the historical content to present oblique criticism of his own times.
In spite of the historical nature of the novel and the film, both take
considerable liberties with dates and chronology. In fact, the time frame of the
novel is a brief five-year span (1795-1800), into which earlier and later events are
inserted to corroborate the novel’s interpretation of Goya’s career. Thus,
Feuchtwanger posits the Caprichos as Goya’s height of artistic maturity and links
them to the peace treaty with Amiens even though they are actually three years
apart. Likewise, the condemnation of Pablo Olavides by the inquisition and the
liberation of the enlightenment writer Jovellanos from exile each depart in the
novel about fifteen years from their historical dates, but “dank dieser
‘illusionsfördernden Lüge’ können sie nun die Politisierung Goyas motivieren.” 161
159 Rolf Richter, “Goya – der Weg zur Erkenntnis,” Sonntag, Berlin/DDR, Nr. 40, 1971.
“Feuchtwanger entered with his novel a humanistic tradition, using the resistance against a
historical reaction in order to support the resistance against the contemporary one” (my transl.)
160 Wolfgang Gersch, quoted in Sean Allan, “’Die Kunst braucht kein Feigenblatt’. Art and the
Artist in Konrad Wolf’s Goya and Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz,” Finding a Voice:
Problems of Language in East German Society and Culture, eds. Graham Jackmann and Ian F.
Roe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 171.
161 Feuchtwanger, qtd. in Reinhold Jaretzky, “Der Künstler als Held: Zu Lion Feuchtwangers
Goya oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis,” Lion Feuchtwanger: Materialien zu Leben und Werk,
ed. Wilhelm von Sternburg (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989) 239. [“thanks to this ‘productive lie’, they
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