Goya is invited to observe an interrogation before the Holy Tribunal. There he is witness to a macabre spectacle in which the defendants incriminate themselves, plead guilty or are burned as heretics. Thus his 'hard way to enlightenment' begins. Konrad Wolf and Angel Wagenstein (screenplay) had been working on this film adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger's novel “Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment” since 1963. It tells the story of an artist who evolves from conformist to rebel and is driven by notions of truthfulness as opposed to ideology. As President of the GDR's Academy of Arts, Konrad Wolf was not only well aware of the extent to which an artist could be a servant of power; his own youth was also shaped by the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. He and his brother Markus had experienced the Great Terror – the Stalinist purges between 1936 and 1938 – in Moscow, the fear for their own father Friedrich Wolf, and the disappearance of a number of acquaintances. In 1952 the Wolfs, who had meanwhile returned to the GDR, were again subject to a blow of fate, this time by the news of the show trial against Rudolf Slánský. Among those executed was Friedrich Wolf's friend Otto Katz. How much danger was the family father really in? After a screening of Goya, Markus noted: “The discussion of the Inquisition may give some people pause for thought and yet the choice of subject matter isn't coincidental; instead, these are questions that every generation has to struggle with in one way or another.”
Text: Lisa Schoß
English: Peter Rickerby