Lion Feuchtwanger's Erfolg: Film Technique and the Modern Historical Novel

Abstract

<p>Feuchtwanger feit that due to such technological advances as film, the twentieth-century reader demanded something different from the novel, and he believed that this new film audience would eventually look at verbal texts from a different perspective. Through film techniques he hoped to meet this demand and provide what he felt was a much-needed "Erneuerung" of the novel. He sought to employ these cinematic methods in an attempt to liberate the narrative form from what he perceived to be its limitations. His ultimate goal was to stimulate the reader's social understanding and commitment through his/her emotions. To this end he experimented in a limited but revealing way with film techniques derived from Sergei Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage. Surprisingly, the significance of Feuchtwanger's use of this type of montage and its implications for Erfolg and the novel in general has not yet been thoroughly investigated or illuminated in the current secondary literature available. This thesis aims at providing an analysis of Feuchtwanger's theoretical considerations regarding the "modernisation" of the historical novel via film techniques in his 1930 novel, Erfolg: Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz. I address Feuchtwanger's intentions concerning the employment of film techniques in the novel. as set out in his theoretical writings, and have dealt with his artistic use of Eisensteinian montage. I also examine Feuchtwanger's use of a less "filmic" type of montage, along with the techniques of simultaneity and changing point of view, techniques he hoped would render his novel more "filmic." One of Feuchtwanger's main requirements for the historical novel is the didactic element. The film techniques he employed have specific implications for his theory of the historical novel, and it is through the application of techniques derived from Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage that he is able to create didactic art in his historical novel.</p>