Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958)

Feuchtwanger’s account of the life and times of Francisco Goya really brings the artist’s world to life, and as he was an important painter to the court, the lives of the Spanish monarchs at the time as well. The role of sex and extramarital affairs directly impacting matters of state is entertaining and eye-opening. King Charles IV rules Spain but the real seat of power is his queen from Parma, Maria Luisa, along with her lover Don Manuel, the so-called “Prince of Peace”, who was show more politically minded and frequently indecisive, to the detriment of the country.

The world was changing around them: the French monarchy had fallen and Napoleon was on the rise. The power of the Pope in Rome was just beginning to diminish, but the Inquisition was still very much a part of life in Spain, and the Grand Inquisitor was greatly feared. Possession of banned books or any discussion overheard questioning the authority of the Church could lead to banishment, impoverishment, or being burned, as well as the branding of one’s family for five generations. This happened to hundreds of thousands of people in Spain, and Feuchtwanger somehow puts the figure quite precisely at 348,907.

All of this is the backdrop for the life of Goya, who was devout and respectful of the monarchy, and yet who pioneered new forms of painting and saw the corruption in Church and State around him. Goya had risen up in the world over his life and was a man of passion; his tempestuous, love/hate relationship with the Duchess of Alba sizzles throughout the book. His Naked Maja’s identity is not known with certainty, but Feuchtwanger assigns it to the Duchess of Alba, which is titillating though debatable.

As an artist, Goya was a step between the traditional court painter Velasquez, who he revered, and painters who would follow, both in the color palette he used and in the themes he represented. In the Naked Maja, Goya was doing ‘his version’ of Velasquez’s ‘Dona Desnuda’ (also known as the Rokeby Venus, one of my favorite paintings in London’s National Gallery), and taking a huge chance with the Inquisition. Both paintings had to be hidden, and Feuchtwanger has them cleverly concealed behind other works but revealed at the flip of a switch in the wall. It’s hard to know how accurate that aspect is.

Goya was haunted by demons, seeing visions and bordering on madness at times, a condition which worsened when he became completely deaf at age 46. The cause for his deafness is unknown; a doctor in Feuchtwanger’s account speculates that it stems from venereal disease, but there is some belief today that it may have been caused from poisoning from the lead in the pigments he used. Goya drew and later painted frightening, fantastical images of demons and the darkness he imagined. I’ve always considered these to be a function of depression and a darkening world view in his old age, but Feuchtwanger shows them as daring symbolic works, satirizing the church, those in power, and people around him, such as the Duchess of Alba. Regardless, he was again taking a real risk against the Inquisition, and at the height of his powers, when he could have played it safe.

The paintings and the reaction they produced bring to mind the Cesar A. Cruz quote which I recently had the pleasure of hearing: “Art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.”

One of my knocks against the book was that it chronologically doesn’t seem too precise if you look up events and paintings as you read along. Feuchtwanger also leaves out a description of Goya’s classic painting “The Third of May 1808” and how it came to be painted, which is inexplicable to me. Lastly, he gets somewhat choppy in his prose at times, as if the notes to himself were never cleaned up in the editing process.

However with all that said, it’s a great read of you’re a Goya fan, as I am. It really puts his work in a new light for me. As a final comment, I would say it would have been nice had this been an illustrated book, but looking up his paintings online was a good way of enhancing the text:
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/francisco-goya/mode/all-paintings

Quotes:
On Catholicism at the time, you be the judge for how it compares to today:
“The Inquisition had implanted in Spaniards the conviction that more important than a moral way of life was an unshakeable belief in dogma. Foreigners who travelled in Spain reported almost unanimously that precisely in the land of the Inquisition religion had little to do with morality and the passionate zeal for dogma was often coupled with immoral conduct. The Holy Tribunal often dealt leniently with offences which were viewed with revulsion by the whole world; such as, for example, the seduction of children in the confessional. But small technical transgressions against dogma were in all cases harshly treated. In Cordoba, for example, one hundred and seven men, women, and children were condemned to the stake at a single hearing because they had listened to the sermon of a certain Membreque who had been pronounced a heretic.”

On love that one cannot escape from, Goya on the Duchess of Alba:
“’Woe is me that I ever fell into your hands! But now I have seen through and through you and I am seeing you for the last time. I shall never see you again, never come to you again. I will not, I have made a vow and I will keep it.’ And even as he thought thus he knew that he would be fettered to her forever. And together with his hatred and despair he felt a fierce and vulgar exultation that he knew her in a guise other than the one in which she now sat before him. He called up and image of her small naked body quivering in his embrace. He pictured to himself how he would crush this proud unapproachable creature again in his arms, how he would bite the arrogant lips till they melted beneath his, till the hatefully mocking eyes swam and closed. He would not stroke her, nor would she get any flattering words of admiration out of him; he would take her like the meanest whore.”

On lust, this from Don Manuel about his mistress Pepa (who had also been Goya’s mistress):
“But her skin was so dazzlingly white against the black negligee, her green eyes looked huge, solemn, seductive; he inhaled her odour. He was fresh from nights spent with women of Cadiz, fascinating women practiced in all the vices, but he knew that he could not get on without this women who alone could afford him the height of voluptuous enjoyment, true ravishment, Heaven and Hell together, overwhelming.”

On Spanish women, and the maja in particular:
“Spanish men eulogized the maja as having those qualities they most prized in women: she was said to be proud and inaccessible in public, an angel in Church, a devil in bed. Even foreigners agreed that no other woman in the world could arouse so much desire, afford such satisfaction, as the real maja.”

On transience, and seizing love, this from a dance performance:
“Therefore let us
Plunge into the
Deepest lap of
Love; because we
Live but such a
Short time here on
This our earth and
We are such a
Long time dead.
…
And the girl’s dance is slow, savage, and vehement too, always the same and always different, a stilly raging dance, a dance involving the whole body; obviously the girl is showing herself off to her lover, letting him see all the lust, sweetness, and savagery her body has to offer.”

And lastly, on the Maja paintings:
“He wasn’t going to compete with the dead Velasquez. And this was his ‘Dona Desnuda.’ In this clothed and unclothed nude he painted all the women he had ever lain with in bed and in corners. Painted a body calculated to arouse all the passions. And two faces to go with them; one full of appetite and expectancy, vacant almost with lasciviousness, the expression hard, alluring, and dangerous; the other a little drowsy, slowly awakening from satisfied desire, already thirsty for new fulfillment. What he was trying to paint was neither the Duchess of Alba nor any maja. It was lust itself, lust the insatiable, with its torpid blisses and all its perils.” show less

A remarkable achievement that left me wondering how Feuchtwanger can have essentially dropped out of sight of modern readers. I have several other books of his and now they need to move up the list. I cannot help but wonder how he would fare in a modern translation (mine, and I think the only one in English, is old; it was done by the indefatigable translators from the 1930s, Willa and Edwin Muir. There were some oddities but overall I thought it a very fluid job); the writing is strong and show more wonderfully evocative. Feuchtwanger has chosen a true story to retell and, of course, embellish. It’s one of those stories that is so unbelievable that it cannot be anything except true (and my quick researches suggest that it is largely based on history, though deviating significantly in the end. Even so, Feuchtwanger’s ending struck me as just about perfect.) It is the story of a court Jew, Joseph Süss (or Süß) Oppenheimer (1698-1738), whose extraordinary gift for finance and feel for politics leads to his position as the top financial advisor—and then, the top advisor in all ways—for the Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. It is the story of his rise and fall and is crammed full of politics, religion, psychology, and even sex, all in a cauldron of inconceivable wealth and power. It evokes the time and the place so brilliantly you can smell the decay. Hubris? To excess. Wisdom? Remarkably enough, more than plenty. By turns hilarious and immensely sad, it is an extraordinary book. show less

This chilling novel tells of the advent of insidious discrimination, harassment, and oppression of Jews by the nascent Nazi regime. As the "nationalists" (Nazi's) took control in 1933, they started an immediate campaign against Jews in all facets of life in Germany: business, the arts, academia, etc. The Opperman brothers were prominent in Berlin. Martin managed the family's successful furniture business, Edgar was a highly respected surgeon, and Gustav was a figure on the literary scene. show more Martin's son, Berthold, was a student in secondary school whose talk on a legendary German hero was distorted by the new teacher who was a Nazi sympathsizer. The teacher's pressure on Berthold to apologize was so intense resulting in the boy's suicide rather than giving in. The Oppermans became the targets of a smear campaign that threatened their business and standing in the community. The brothers left the country to seek refuge. Gustav, learning of the abuse and torture of Jews and dissidents, returned under an assumed identity to join the resistence. He was arrested and sent to one of the new concentration camps where he was subjected to physical abuse. Ultimately released only after the intervention of high-ranking authorities, he returned to France as a broken shell of himself.

It is crucial to know that the novel was written in 1933. One is struck with the awareness that we know, as the author did not, how this turned out; how the fascist takeover destroyed the country and cost millions of lives in the most horrific ways imaginable. The book was recently republished and surely its description of the rapidity with which the Facists took control is intended to resonate with Americans who fear the dangers facing our own country today as right-wing zealots are exercising their new-found powers to dismantle our democratic insitution and pervert the rule of law. show less

Published in 1933, shortly after the National Socialist Party took power in Germany, this novel looks into the ensuing years to show its impact on the country’s German-Jewish population, as well as the destruction of the socialists seeking to preserve democracy in the country. It is eerie how Feuchtwanger, a Jew, was able to predict the destruction of not only Germany’s well-established Jewish population, but anyone who dared to question the Nazi party’s legitimacy. While the author show more failed to imagine the later ability of its military to overrun western Europe, he does show how such a nationalist party succeeded to overwhelm Germany’s fragile democracy, despite the fact that the majority of the population did not support its radical agenda.

The novel focuses on the Oppermanns, a family of German-Jewish extraction, who have for a century established themselves as a well respected merchant family. Witnessing the rise of the Nazis, at first they make fun of the rise of nationalism in the country, believing Germany to be so culturally advanced that it would never succumb to the thuggery which the party exposed. While portraying the effects of this rise on a number of various other Jews, the story ultimately concentrates on Gustav Oppermann, a fifty year old family member, a well known author who slowly begins to realize what the rise of the Nazi party will mean for his family as well anyone who does not subscribe to or fit into its beliefs.

After fleeing Germany to escape persecution following Hitler taking power, Gustav returns, hoping to encourage what he perceives as the majority’s opposition to the Nazi agenda. This results in his arrest and being sent to a concentration camp. The author presciently describes the horrors taking place in these camps to break the will of those who dare to oppose the party’s dominance. It serves as a red flag, showing what the Nazis’ rise means for the rest of western Europe, where neighboring countries continued to believe that Hitler did not intend to carry out the acts he exposed. Despite the fact that its prose at times seems overblown and strident, this novel served as one of the first warnings of a truth the rest of the world was much too slow to acknowledge. show less