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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  At the beginning of 1914, Willy Haas dropped his law studies in Prague and followed his friend to Leipzig[149], where Werfel found him a position as an editor with Kurt Wolff. Haas had had some publishing experience as the editor of the Herder-Blätter, a literary journal with a very small circulation; it had published works by Werfel, Brod, Kafka, Janowitz, Pick, and others, but had ceased publication at the time of Werfel’s departure from Prague.

  Haas shared a large Haydnstrasse apartment with Werfel, Hasenclever, and Pinthus. After a night of partying they were usually roused by their secretary, Karl Weissenstein[150], a colorful character who had been a habitué of the Café Arco and had found Prague unbearable without his friends. He slyly coaxed the young gentlemen out of bed by telling each that the others had risen long ago and had been hard at work for hours.

  On the same spring day in 1914 that Franz Werfel was giving a reading in his hometown, his father addressed a dramatic appeal to Kurt Wolff[151], urging the publisher to make sure that Franz began working toward a doctorate, and saying that it was high time he understood the necessity of a secure profession. It was inconceivable, Rudolf Werfel wrote, that Franz would ever be able to start a family of his own if he went on living at night and sleeping away his days. His parents were deeply concerned about their son. However, it was imperative not to let Franz know that his father was the initiator of this idea: Wolff was to act as “go-between.” Two months earlier, the publisher had made yet another attempt to pacify Rudolf Werfel, telling him that his son was about to receive a raise, and that he, Wolff, was particularly proud to count Franz Werfel among his authors and was more than satisfied with his work as an editor. Evidently, none of this had been enough to allay the father’s fundamental misgivings.

  Soon after Werfel’s reading, Karl Kraus came to Prague to give a lecture. In delighted anticipation of a reunion, Werfel left a note of welcome at his hotel. But when he rushed to greet Kraus at the end of the lecture, he encountered conspicuous reserve. “From the coolness of your handshake... I surmise what has come between us,” the unhappy Werfel wrote to Kraus, asking to see him as soon as possible.[152] While admitting that he had been “imprudent” in spreading gossip about Baroness Nádherný, he nevertheless claimed “the purest of intentions.”

  “I am Franz Werfel,” he says in the letter, which Kraus immediately sent on to Sidonie, after underlining Werfel’s stylistic blunders with obvious relish, “and... if you can believe even for a moment that I would have been capable of an indecency, of intentional malice, you also declare my work... to be a lie and a fraud.” Kraus asked his lady friend to advise him how to reply to this “disgusting” letter.[153] By agreement with Sidonie, he had given Herr Werfel “the cold shoulder” when he saw him in Prague. But how to react now, after receiving the enclosed?

  In the next issue of Die Fackel[154], which contained Kraus’s report on his lecture in Prague, readers were informed that in the capital of Bohemia the German-language poets were now multiplying like “muskrats,” “pollinated” by that “child virtuoso” Werfel. This slur on the poet once praised so highly by Kraus must have been quite incomprehensible to the journal’s subscribers.

  On June 28, 1914, the Serbian nationalists Princip and Čabrinović succeeded in assassinating Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and Werfel’s quarrel with Kraus faded in importance. Now political events struck Werfel as the fulfillment of his own prophecy: “Even in our souls, faith has lost its form,” he had written three months earlier in his introduction to The Trojan Women, “and we have to regard that as a portent of the upheaval that is in the making... Tragedy and hapless Hecuba may now return; their time has come.”

  Werfel’s gradual attempts to free himself from obligations to family and state had been in vain. On the last day of July, in the wake of general mobilization, the one-year volunteer reservist had to report to his regiment in Prague and return to the hated barracks of the Hradčany, transferred from Leipzig’s atmosphere of freedom to Battery 2, demoted from poet and editor to lowly gunner.

  One week later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Russia.

  The greater part of Franz Werfel’s literary estate is in the custody of the University of California at Los Angeles, located in Westwood Village. On a hot, cloudless day I cross the parklike campus to the Research Library and descend, now chilled by air-conditioning, to the basement, where large, window less rooms lit by fluorescent light house the Special Collections.

  An extremely shy, fragile-looking young librarian introduces herself as the cataloguer of Franz Werfel’s unpublished works. Of Japanese descent, she was born in the United States, she tells me in a quiet voice, blushing a little when she admits her ignorance of German — this explains the numerous spelling errors that occurred when she was typing the catalogue lists, she says. She also admits that she is totally unfamiliar with Werfel’s oeuvre. As silently and imperceptibly as she appeared, Mrs. Hatayama retires again.

  I sit at a work table in the Special Collections room, dozens of shoebox-sized containers of letters, diaries, notebooks, sketches, and original manuscripts by Franz Werfel stacked before me. His life’s work of fantasizing and philosophizing is preserved in these shabby cardboard boxes — cardboard tombs in which I look for signs of life, feeling like a grave robber, digging through papers that were never intended for the eyes of strangers.

  A supervisor watches me from some distance, while I leaf through hundreds of unknown letters from Werfel to his beloved — and later, wife — Alma Maria Mahler. I keep on opening boxes, feeling rather greedy. I discover some of the earliest poems, written in almost illegible pencil in thin exercise books that are now falling apart. I find dried flowers between manuscript pages, dramatic sketches, bits of prose, thought fragments...

  The notebook “Leipzig 1913” comes to hand. It contains, among other things, a list of long-lost Werfel texts: “The Town by the Sea” (“Seestadt”), “A Soldier’s Letter” (“Ein Soldaten-Brief), “Jesus and Hatred” (“Jesus und der Hass”). During his Leipzig days, Werfel was planning a dramatic work titled Theresa; there is an outline for thirteen scenes. His serious involvement with Christianity first becomes apparent in this notebook: “Redemption! The world can only be redeemed from the world,” reads one entry. “Christianity gets by with an illusionary pessimism. The church performs the magic of a retrospective Utopia that has taken place in the past.” Elsewhere, Werfel quotes — probably at the time he was translating The Trojan Women — a verse from the Second Epistle of Peter: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

  Before the beginning of the war he wrote, “Logic of the state. Because blood has been shed, more blood has to flow, so that the blood already shed won’t have been shed in vain.” And when the Great War broke out, he noted laconically, “The modern state, well designed for war, really presupposes war as the true challenge of its organism... created for war, as a cholera hospital was built for cholera — this state denies, one grows pale at the thought, any responsibility for the creation of the war.” During his renewed service in the barracks, where he saw countless casualties “suppurating, feverish, delirious, dying,” he wrote, “The war an experience? It is the opposite of all experience. A destruction of all differentiation, all harmonies and discords, a department store, a going-out-of business sale of all experiences — it devalues them by cheapness, mass, and inevitability.”

  The Good Soldier

  Franz Werfel had never cherished the ideals of fidelity to the fatherland and bravery under fire. He did not hesitate to feign physical illness and mental instability to his military superiors. To him, it was a matter of indifference whether officers and comrades regarded him as a weakling or a coward. He was excused from active military duty[155] as early as the end of November 1914, initially for three months, until the “handing down” of a “superarbitration finding,” as noted in the official memorandum of the Royal and Im
perial Army.

  More than happy to have escaped from the military machine at least temporarily, Werfel moved in with his parents on Mariengasse. Here he wrote the first act of a play, Esther, Empress of Persia (Esther, Kaiserin von Persien)[156], in which he used the biblical subject to refine his sense of the dramatic and to practice writing consistent dialogue. Using methods similar to those he had applied to The Trojan Women, his apprentice piece, he now assimilated the rules of classical theater and attempted to emulate Shakespeare, Lessing, and Grillparzer.

  He worked on the dialogue Euripides, or On the War (Euripides oder über den Krieg)[157], in which he blamed “the fathers,” the old men, for the outbreak of martial conflict. The old men, argues Euripides in Werfel’s text, sent “the young men to war in order to redeem their own vices... All states are the symbol of the old men.”

  Before the end of the year he had completed the collection of poems Each Other (Einander), which he had begun a year earlier in Malcesine on Lake Garda. The confusions and anxieties he observed in himself during the first months of the war were reflected in his latest poems, which now stood contrasted with earlier expressions of religious exuberance: “But God’s music is mercy /... O mankind, highest curved wave, / Soprano in God’s entirely endless orchestra!”

  Werfel worried that this new volume would not succeed without the personal involvement of Kurt Wolff[158], who was now serving as an aide-de-camp in an artillery regiment on the French front. Wolff had left all business matters to Georg Heinrich Meyer[159], an experienced publisher, whom he considered entirely trustworthy. In January 1915 Werfel met Meyer in Leipzig and felt some liking for the new director of his publishing house, even though the latter let him know that Werfel’s kind of poetry was not his cup of tea.

  In February 1915 the Prague military command found Werfel still unfit for service and deferred him another two months. He traveled to Berlin to visit Martin Buber[160], whom he had revered for years. Buber had presented his “Three Lectures on Jewry” (“Drei Reden über das Judentum”) in Prague, and Werfel had met him on that occasion. They exchanged some letters, met several times in Leipzig, and had last seen each other in the spring of 1914, after a reading Werfel gave in Berlin.

  Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Buber, Gustav Landauer, and Max Scheler had formed a secret antimilitarist group.[161] Werfel was invited to their meetings; at twenty-four, he was extremely proud to be accepted as an equal in this circle of far older men and truly felt like a conspirator as he listened to the talks and animated discussions in Landauer’s home. They confirmed him in his own antimilitarist views.

  The deferment Werfel had been granted was to end on April 1. Afraid that he would wind up in the trenches after all, he put in a personal appearance at the offices of the Supreme Command in Vienna.[162] He pointed out that his nerves would be unable to stand the stress of frontline service, enumerated his literary successes, and explained the precariousness of his health. He claimed that he wanted to serve but asked to be assigned duties commensurate with his exceptional status. Surprisingly enough, the Supreme Command actually agreed to these special requests by the well-known antiwar poet and assigned Private Werfel to office duty in Bozen (Bolzano). At that time, the capital of the province of South Tyrol was still far removed from the battle lines.

  Shortly before his transfer to Bozen, Werfel saw Karl Kraus sitting in a restaurant in Vienna and went to greet him.[163] When the gaunt man with the small round spectacles saw Werfel, he jumped to his feet and launched into a long tirade, accusing his former protégé of fabricating all the scandalous stories about Rilke and Sidonie, slanderous lies based only on Werfel’s injured vanity. Werfel replied haltingly that he really couldn’t remember those events in Dresden all that well, then shamefacedly admitted that he was now unable to comprehend “what he had been thinking of at the time.” As a poet, Kraus countered, he should take care to think of better things in the future — whereupon Werfel apologized once again, begging Kraus not to treat him with such biblical severity and to give him credit for his contrition. But the furious Kraus was implacable and turned away in disgust.

  In mid-April 1915, Private Werfel moved into the Erbacher Hof, an inn in Bozen — at his own expense, as was duly noted in his record. He considered his posting an undeserved stroke of luck; he had a lot of free time and was able to read, write, and make excursions into the Dolomites. One day, he was walking through a gorge not far from town, carrying a Reclam edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which had become a kind of second Bible to him. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that past and future, birth and death, this world and the next were simultaneous, and that distinctions between them were purely conventional, designed to keep people from losing their sanity. He thought that heaven and hell — as Dante, too, described them — were not to be located exclusively in life after death, but that they were already unfolding in this life. Enchanted by this idea, he returned to his room at the inn and immediately began to write “Dream of a New Hell” (“Traum von einer neuen Hölle”)[164] in terza rima, following Dante’s example.[165]

  He spent the following days in a trance. Each moment gave him new proof of the existence of hell in this world, even a ride in the funicular from Bozen to Kohlern. “He feels condemned to such a hell,” he wrote a little later in his somewhat overwrought “Bozen Journal” (“Das Bozener Buch”) “as he steps into the small carriage of the funicular railway. He is surrounded by hostile petits bourgeois. To get away from them, he steps out onto the platform...” And before the funicular reached its terminal on the mountaintop, he jumped off, was dragged along for some distance, and suffered severe injuries to both legs[166], especially his right foot. He was rushed from Kohlern to the hospital in Bozen.

  Although he was suffering intense pain, he felt curiously happy in the bright hospital room: “He is filled by a wonderful feeling of having done penance... With this event (whether it was a punishment or not, I did not ponder the mysterious chain of events), with this event, my soul had rid itself of all guilt, all sense of sin... Now I belonged to the suffering, to the poor, to the not-so-fortunate of this earth — I thought, with joyful satisfaction.” Subconsciously, he may well have inflicted this damage on himself in hopes of being excused from frontline duty for the duration — surely the war would be over by the fall or winter at the latest. He spent several weeks in the Bozen hospital before he was allowed to return to Prague. As late as mid-June 1915 he still had to use crutches and put up with the inevitable questions of Prague acquaintances as to what battle he had been wounded in.[167]

  In the meantime Each Other and the translation of The Trojan Women had appeared. Neither book sold at all well, although G. H. Meyer mounted the most intensive publicity campaign[168] the German publishing world had ever seen: big red posters advertising Kurt Wolff Verlag were plastered on kiosks and columns everywhere.

  Werfel consoled Meyer[169], saying that many of his readers were in the trenches and that the “spontaneity” of sales was not as important as their “continuity”; furthermore, he was working on a book that was “sure to put the house back on its feet” — so convinced was he of the potential of the project begun in Bozen, “Dream of a New Hell.” However, the work proceeded only by fits and starts. Convalescence made Werfel tired, apathetic; a novella about Montezuma, the Aztec ruler, did not get past its initial pages either.

  Most of Werfel’s friends from the Café Arco — except Kafka, Brod, Urzidil, and the blind poet Oskar Baum — were now in military service. During the summer of 1915, Werfel and Max Brod engaged in vehement disputes[170] about Judaism and Zionism. Brod had become an enthusiastic supporter of Theodor Herzl’s ideas and dreamed of the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. Werfel, on the other hand, felt increasingly drawn to Catholicism; he loved the wealth of imagery, the opulence of the Church, in which he thought he discerned a kinship to the intoxicating sumptuousness of Italian opera. Judaism — Torah and Talmud — appeared too abstract, so much ar
id theory. He was intensely preoccupied with Christian theology, studying the Church Fathers and Scholastics, reading Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, the Confessions of St. Francis, the writings of Albertus Magnus.

  Werfel advocated a once-and-for-all dispersion of the Jews among all other nations, hoping that everyone of Jewish descent would sooner or later convert to Christianity. Brod was outraged by his friend’s opinions and passionately urged him to give up this aberration and return to Judaism. Werfel’s mind remained unchanged even after discussions that lasted for days — they only tended to reinforce his convictions. Deeply disappointed[171], Brod finally gave up. He incorporated the conflict with Werfel into his novel Tycho Brahe’s Road to God (Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott)[172], on which he was working at the time, giving his Johannes Kepler character traits that were clearly those of the apostate Werfel and identifying himself with Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s mentor and onetime idol.

  In the spring, Werfel had been granted another four months of leave because of his leg wound. There was, however, the threat of a court-martial on charges of self-mutilation. It never came to that, but in early September 1915 the final call-up loomed large: Werfel had run out of excuses.

  He spent the last week before that dreaded date in Marienbad with his family; then, a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday, he proceeded to Trebnitz, near Lobovič in Bohemia, where his regiment, the Eighth Heavy Howitzer Division, was stationed. Just as in Bozen, he did not live with the other soldiers in the barracks but took lodgings at an inn at his own expense. And once again he succeeded in achieving what he himself had hardly thought possible: by complaining ceaselessly about severe pain in his right foot and imploring his superiors to release him from combat exercises, he managed to get discharged in a mere six weeks — only days before his unit was sent to the front.