Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  The Day of Judgment

  Max Brod had left his publisher, Axel Juncker, and joined Ernst Rowohlt Verlag in the summer of 1912. Rowohlt was the house that two years earlier had rejected the first version of Werfel’s Friend of the World without comment. Now Brod praised his friend Werfel to both Rowohlt and his financial backer, Kurt Wolff, describing him as one of the most talented of the younger generation and, what was more, a poet who could be very profitable to a newly emerging publishing house.[115] Wolff himself had rejected the manuscript back then but now regretted the decision and wanted to patch things up by inviting Werfel on a no-strings-attached visit to Leipzig. The latter knew how to turn that meeting to his advantage, impressing Wolff, a slender, elegant young man, with his tales of childhood and youth, of the strict father who expected his son to take over the family glove business one day; he even told Wolff an amusing version of the Hamburg interlude at Brasch & Rothenstein. He also spoke of his passion for the theater, Italian opera, and literature. He told Wolff that if it was possible for him to land a job that had the appearance of regular employment, his father’s resistance and fears could be allayed at least for a while.

  Instantly charmed by his visitor, Kurt Wolff acted on the spot. He offered Werfel a contract to work for the publishing house as an author and editor, with an annual starting salary of eighteen hundred marks. The contract pointedly did not mention that the publisher was giving his new employee a great deal of freedom and wouldn’t even insist on regular office hours.

  Very soon after this discussion, Wolff and Rowohlt had a falling-out. Business relations between the two had been extremely tense for some time, and this one incident was enough to bring about a final separation. Rowohlt, the founder, felt that his partner had gone over his head; he could not tolerate Wolff’s meeting with Werfel behind his back, so to speak, as if he were the sole proprietor and decision maker. At the beginning of November 1912, Wolff and Rowohlt formalized the break, and Wolff became the sole owner of Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, whose name he changed to Kurt Wolff Verlag in 1913.

  A few weeks after completing his military training, in October 1912, Franz Werfel left his native city and moved to Leipzig. In two large cupboards in his parents’ apartment he left what he now called his literary estate — everything he had produced since he began writing at the age of fourteen.[116]

  Rudolf Werfel had been informed of his son’s new employment and gradually relented.[117] Thus, Franz’s plan had worked perfectly. His father wrote to Wolff, saying that he had resigned himself, after a long struggle, to the fact that his heir would pursue a profession so very far removed from his own. However, he urged the publisher (the twenty-five-year-old Wolff must have impressed him as a very responsible person) to make absolutely sure that Franz did indeed work regularly for several hours a day. In addition, Rudolf Werfel had begun to act in his son’s business interests; for example, he threatened Axel Juncker[118] that he would withdraw the rights to a third edition of The Friend of the World if the Berlin publisher did not agree to certain conditions.

  The young editor Franz Werfel, wearing his long hair combed straight back[119] and otherwise looking remarkably disheveled at all times, rented accommodations from Frau Seyfert on Haydnstrasse. He became known as an extremely unreliable and forgetful person who often misplaced important things and was apt to burst into Verdi arias or recitations of his own poems, a dreamy visionary who adored beautiful women, a coffeehouse addict who slept through the mornings and occasionally put in an appearance at the publisher’s office in the afternoon. He dined at Wilhelms Weinstuben, the wine cellar that had become the meeting place of Leipzig’s poets and thinkers. There he encountered, enthroned at their regular table, Carl Sternheim and Frank Wedekind, Martin Buber and Kurt Hiller, and also made the acquaintance of Else Lasker-Schüler[120], who called herself Prince Yousuf of Thebes and wrote him love letters in which she, fourteen years his senior, addressed him as “schoolboy” and “Franzlaff” (Franzl-ape).

  He was preparing a new collection of poems that he wanted to call We Are (Wir sind); in this first Leipzig period he also wrote several prose pieces, among them “The Season” (“Die Stagione”)[121], in which he drew on his memories of the May Festival in Prague and the military year in the Hradčany. Occasionally he attended lectures at the famous University of Leipzig, particularly those of the old psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and the historian Karl Lamprecht. Now that he no longer felt coerced by his father, he enjoyed the academic world, seeing himself in the tradition of Goethe and Lessing, both of whom had studied in Leipzig.

  He usually went to the Café Felsche or the theater in the evenings, then spent the night making the rounds of bars, cabarets, and brothels. His new friends[122] were other editors at Kurt Wolff’s: there was his contemporary Walter Hasenclever, a poet from Aachen, high-strung and very talented, whose conflicts with his father had been similar to Franz’s; and Kurt Pinthus, a little older than his colleagues, a heavy-set, ponderous, rather more settled young man, also a writer, as well as a reviewer and correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt.

  Early in 1913, as the three of them sat with Kurt Wolff in the wee hours in the so-called Intimate Bar, a decision was made[123] for which Werfel had been pushing from the moment he joined the publishing house: to give unknown writers their first chance at publication by means of a new series of avant-garde literature in slim paperbound volumes. It would be a series, Werfel proposed, that could be published inexpensively[124] at irregular intervals, and that would stand out from the literary production of other publishing companies. On that February night in 1913 Kurt Wolff for the first time seemed willing to agree to the proposals of his three editors: the new series would be presented to the public that spring. The galleys of Werfel’s collection We Are happened to be lying on the marble-topped bar table; Pinthus stabbed at them with a pencil, hitting a line from the dramatic sketch “The Sacrifice” (“Das Opfer”): “O Day of Judgment! O reunion!” That night the series was titled Day of Judgment.

  Its first volume was Werfel’s own one-act play The Temptation, written one day on maneuvers in 1912; the second was Hasenclever’s Endless Conversation (Das unendliche Gespräch). The new series, the public was told in an advertisement written by Werfel for the German book trade journal, had been created “by the collective experience of our time.” In another slightly confused ad[125], also written by Werfel and distributed as a leaflet, we read: “In these little books we welcome the true, true poet... who every moment bleeds with the knowledge that... the act of realization itself obscures and blinds... The world begins anew every second — let us forget literature!!”

  Around this time, Franz Werfel gave his first public reading, in the Mirror Room of the Deutsches Haus in Prague.[126] He read from The Friend of the World and We Are, and the audience was receptive to his natural pathos. The daily papers reviewed the event most favorably. During his visit to Prague, Werfel met frequently with his friends from the Café Arco and renewed his friendship with Franz Kafka[127], in whose work he was far more interested now, since he was able to see it more clearly than he had a few years before. At this time, Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in Berlin and told her that he was growing ever fonder of Werfel, also rhapsodizing about his friend’s practically paradisiacal new existence as an editor in Leipzig. Together Kafka and Werfel attended a guest performance by the Ballets Russes[128] and saw Nijinsky and Lydia Kyasht, an event that made a lasting impression on Werfel. He was impressed by the wonderful non-nationalness and the mad being-beside-oneself (freedom from preconceived form) of the Russian ballet. “I did not experience these as aesthetic stimulation but as the symbol of [a] new humanity. All emotions swell up to a rage ‘to be in the world,’ to celebrate.”

  Werfel and Kafka read their latest works to each other. Over and over again, Kafka told the younger man how impressed he was by his poetry. In November 1912 Kafka’s first volume of prose, Meditation, had been published by Ernst Rowohlt Verlag in an edition of ei
ght hundred copies. After his return from Prague, Werfel told Wolff about Kafka’s new stories, praising them highly. Wolff then wrote to Kafka, asking to see these works. When Kafka visited Leipzig not long after and met with Wolff at Werfel’s urging, he told the publisher about a novel-length work in progress. The first chapter of that novel (Amerika) appeared under the title The Stoker in May 1913 as volume 3 of the Day of Judgment series. The Metamorphosis and The Judgment followed in 1915 and 1916, as volumes 22-23 and 34 of the series.[129]

  It was Werfel who first brought Karl Kraus to Kurt Wolff’s attention.[130] As the audience for Kraus’s journal Die Fackel consisted almost exclusively of readers in the states of the Danube monarchy, Wolff had never heard of him. Werfel insisted that he try all means at his disposal to make Kraus one of his authors. He spoke obsessively about his idol and kept at it until Wolff actually went to Vienna in Werfel’s company and persuaded Kraus to publish his future writings exclusively with Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig.

  While Wolff was away on vacation[131] in April 1913, Werfel ran the house practically single-handed. He now received manuscripts by unknown authors daily and saw how popular the new series was becoming. A voluminous bundle of poems by a young writer from Salzburg, Georg Trakl, pleased him particularly. He wrote the unknown poet[132] to tell him that he had read the poems “with great admiration” and that “I have — the publisher tells me that he is already negotiating with you — selected a number of poems. I hope you will find the selection agreeable.”

  Werfel’s second volume, We Are, came out that spring and was favorably received by the critics, although they did not find the work as startling and fresh as The Friend of the World. The book, Werfel stated in an afterword, was “the first in a succession of volumes that will eventually, as one work, bear the title Paradise [Das Paradies].“ Domestics and prostitutes, dogs and telephone conversations, ladies’ orchestras and theater scandals — all enlivened its pages as subject matter wholly novel to German-language lyric poetry. The Dionysiac-expressionist style, breathless and hyperbolic, was clearly reminiscent of Werfel’s idol Walt Whitman[133], whose Leaves of Grass he had adored since his schooldays, and whose influence had been unmistakable even in Werfel’s first book. A saying of the revered poet’s, uttered on his deathbed, provided the epigraph for We Are: “Well then, now I’ll go sit on the porch and enjoy life!”

  Werfel spent May 1913 with his friends Hasenclever and Pinthus in Malcesine, on Lake Garda. At the publisher’s expense[134], they stayed at a pension by the lakeshore and lived the life of Riley, ingesting huge bowls of asparagus[135] at fifty centesimi a bowl, savoring wonderful meals in the osterias, enjoying excursions to the beautiful countryside, to Riva del Garda, Sirmione, Verona.

  During these weeks in Italy, Werfel was already preparing a third volume of poems, writing numerous odes and hymns. For the first time his poems included subject matter to which he had been curiously attracted from his earliest childhood; now his writing began to draw closer to that strange yet familiar religion of Catholicism, with which Barbara Šimůnková had once acquainted him when she took the little boy to morning mass. One of these new poems was “Jesus and the Carrion Road” (“Jesus und der Äser-Weg”)[136], another “The Procession” (“Die Prozession”), whose third stanza read: “Up the stairs into the church they dive / A thousand, praying and kneeling wildly. / Chaotic candlelight bursts out of blue smoke, / Under a picture, a bell is rung. / There — and horns and organs roar under the vaults.”

  In the summer of 1913 Werfel received a letter from Rainer Maria Rilke.[137] The verses in The Friend of the World and We Are had moved him to an extraordinary degree, Rilke wrote; moreover he believed that he had found a kindred spirit in the young poet, whose senior he was by fifteen years. Werfel considered this praise the highest honor yet bestowed on him in his life. As a schoolboy, he had regarded Rilke as the very embodiment of the Poet and looked up to him as if to a saint. Rilke’s poetry had fired his will and compulsion to write. “How can I tell you how many tears I have to thank you for since the days of my awakening?” he replied to Rilke s first letter. “How, years ago, when you gave a reading in Prague, I was unable to breathe and almost swooned in your presence. Those long, pure-as-rain consolations I received from you in my schooldays! And now, this man is writing to me!!”

  The two agreed on a first meeting in October, at the festival in Hellerau near Dresden. Both looked forward to it: the quiet older man with the peaceful smile, blue eyes, drooping moustache, and delicate features, so careful in every gesture, so exquisitely attired, an aesthete through and through; and the loud, chubby younger man, always sweaty, always shabby, always full to bursting with the joy of reciting and telling stories. Rilke had decided, so he told his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to embrace Werfel on their first encounter, but when they actually met, he just shook hands quickly and then, embarrassed, put his arms behind his back.[138] They took a walk, and Werfel sensed a remoteness on Rilke’s part; only later, after lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, did the older man yield to Werfel’s urging and start telling him, tentatively at first, about his own childhood in Prague and his time at the Piarist school. He talked about his sense of being condemned to spiritual homelessness by the fact of being a German from Prague, and about the indignities to which he had been subjected during his time in the military. He never looked directly at his companion but sat there with downcast eyes.

  After the festival performance of Paul Claudel’s[139] play The Annunciation, a large group of people proceeded to Dresden’s noble Palast Hotel, among them Werfel, Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Baroness Sidonie Nádherný of Castle Janowitz in Bohemia, an admirer and close acquaintance of Rilke‘s. Baroness Nádherný knew about Rilke‘s enthusiasm for Werfel; he had told her in a recent letter that he was reading and rereading Werfel’s poems. Now, however, as Werfel was introduced to her, she immediately pulled Rilke aside and let him know how much she disliked this “Jewboy.”[140] All evening long, she treated Werfel with marked condescension, making her contempt quite clear. Anti-Semitism alone cannot have been the reason for such behavior. Only a few weeks earlier, Sidonie Nádherný had met a man who, according to her diary, “understood” her like no one ever before — a simply unforgettable man: Karl Kraus.[141]

  The deeply offended Werfel[142], aware of that liaison, took care to let Kraus know as soon as possible that Rilke seemed to be very close to the baroness, going in and out of Castle Janowitz at all hours. He also spread some other rumors[143], partly invented, partly assumed, such as the piquant morsel that Baroness Nádherný had to be a fascinating lady, since at one point in her life she had spent months traveling with a rather derelict circus troupe...

  During his visit to Hellerau, Werfel met several times with Jakob Hegner[144], the initiator and organizer of the festival. Although Hegner was a Jew and entertained no thought of conversion, he was particularly interested in Christian subjects. In conversation with Werfel he mentioned that he regarded Euripides as an early forerunner of Christianity. He urged Werfel to do a new adaptation of The Trojan Women, saying that there had been no truly stageworthy German version of the tragedy since Schiller’s antiquated translation. Hegner told Werfel that such work would give him a chance to deal intensely with questions of dramatic structures, and also to introduce his own ecstatic and hymnodic language to the German stage.

  Hegner’s suggestion[145] resulted in Werfel’s translation of The Trojan Women (Die Troerinnen)[146], on which he worked from the fall of 1913 until the beginning of the following year. It marked a great leap in Werfel’s development. Since his departure from Prague, this childlike dreamer, the sheltered, dependent son of the haute bourgeoisie, had become a writer with an analytical bent, well read in philosophy, and an editor who bore the great responsibility of participating in decisions on the fate of other writers. His blunder in regard to Baroness Nádherný and Karl Kraus, however, was indicative of a regression to late adolescence.

  In his introdu
ctory note[147] to The Trojan Women, Werfel pointed out that the fall of Troy could be seen as a metaphor for the present. Then as now, the world was suffering a period of upheaval and the dissolution of value and meaning: “In its cyclical course, human history once again passes through the conditions out of which this work may well have been created” — thus he justified his decision to retranslate Euripides’ tragedy. He said that he had seen in the figure of Hecuba, tried by suffering, an anticipation of the passion of Jesus Christ; by carefully altering the original, probably with Hegner’s encouragement, he had the Queen of Troy act and argue like an early Christian. Thanks not least to this delicate manipulation, he came to the conclusion: “And thus we see the notorious atheist Euripides as a harbinger, a prophet, an early dove of Christianity.”

  For years, Werfel had felt alienated from his Jewishness but unable to express the reasons for that alienation. His relationship to Judaism was characterized not so much by self-loathing or conscious rejection as by an indifference that he himself did not see as a problem. He had hardly set foot in a synagogue since his schooldays. His world consisted of the writers and composers of Europe, most of whom had strong ties to Christianity.[148] Yet he did not really belong to this world: like Rilke, Werfel saw himself as a man without roots who had to find his home in his work.