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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  The Austrian press accused the Red Guard of having instigated the bloodshed and condemned its leader, Egon Erwin Kisch, as an irresponsible adventurer. Franz Werfel, too, was linked to the events and painted as an active member of a gang of criminals, a sympathizer of looters and arsonists.

  On the morning of that historic day[252], Franz Werfel had visited Alma Mahler in her apartment to ask for her blessing, refusing to leave until she gave him a kiss. When he returned late at night, exhausted and disheveled, his beloved — who was a monarchist — showed him the door, turning her back on him in a gesture of revulsion. Walter Gropius, however, took care to see that the police did not get their hands on his rival. He intervened on his behalf in high places and even went to Werfel’s apartment on Boltzmanngasse several times to warn him of possible raids.

  After the waves of public outrage had died down a little, Werfel retired to the “netherworld” of coffeehouses and — now that his duties at the Military Press Bureau had ended and he no longer had regular working hours — fell once again under the influence of his friends.

  He paid daily visits to the Café Central and to the year-old Café Herrenhof[253], only a few steps away on the same street, the dark and narrow Herrengasse. In the Herrenhof, dim light filtered through a yellow glass ceiling; the café had numerous spacious booths, arranged in a star pattern, each with its own presiding spirit. One of them was a friend from Prague, Ernst Polak[254], Werfel’s intellectual mentor in the happy Café Arco days, who had moved to Vienna a short while before. Polak had married a Czech woman, Milena Jesenská[255], thus freeing her from the mental institution to which her father had committed her. A foreign-currency clerk at the Austrian National Bank in the mornings, Polak spent the rest of his days in the Herrenhof. Milena, who had had a large circle of admirers in Prague, did not find it easy to adjust to the postwar austerity of Vienna; she felt lonely, insecure, unloved. She gave private Czech lessons, worked as a maid, and was even a porter at the Western Railway Station[256], while her husband sat and philosophized in the Café Herrenhof, always gathering new disciples of both sexes.

  Alma Mahler’s premature child survived the aftereffects of its difficult birth surprisingly well, but at the end of November 1918, when the baby was four months old, its condition took a drastic turn for the worse. It suddenly developed water on the brain[257], and its head swelled alarmingly. Deeply anxious about the survival of her child, Alma now permitted Werfel to visit her occasionally.

  He told her about the large-scale play he had been planning in recent days. Its title was Mirror Man: A Magical Trilogy (Spiegelmensch: Magische Trilogie), and Alma took an instant liking to the idea. She suggested that Werfel move to her house in Breitenstein for the winter to complete the play there, in peaceful and undisturbed surroundings — a prospect that closely matched his own longing to get away from the chaos of the city. Even before meeting Alma, he had told Gertrud Spirk that he hoped to be able to leave Vienna one day when the war was over, for a place where he could do nothing but write, in peace and without distractions.

  Shortly after Christmas 1918 he arrived in Prague and spent two weeks with his parents. More than ever he realized, there in the city of his birth, that Alma had become the absolute center of his life — and he told her this in ever new variations in each of his daily letters. For instance: “Back here, I realize that I have become a man without a fatherland. It is a deeply alien city!” In conversations with his family he now echoed Alma’s opinions and enthusiasms. Thus he, once a Verdi fanatic, suddenly considered Richard Wagner the greatest dramatist of all time. His mother shook her head sadly and summed it all up by saying, “He has become a total stranger.”

  During his visit, some Czech nationalists heard him speaking German in the street and beat him up. After the dissolution of the empire, Jews and Germans had become even less popular than before; from now on, fear was Werfel’s constant companion in Prague. He met Gertrud Spirk again. She treated him with great reserve but showed surprising empathy[258] when Werfel told her about his ailing son. “My feelings for G.S. are those for a remote acquaintance,” he claimed in a letter to Alma. “I feel incredibly alienated.” His former love was becoming “an ever more ghostly apparition... like all of Prague.” At the same time he expressed anxiety that Alma might distance herself from him now that he was gone; indeed, he had not received a single letter from her during his time in Prague. “Why,” he asked, “are you so mean, so cold, and do not give me any news of my son?” And he exhorted her, “Woe unto you if you do not, while I am away, declare every day that Jesus of Nazareth is the one you love most!”

  In the meantime the child’s condition had grown worse.[259] When Werfel returned to Vienna in January and saw the baby again, he was horrified: the boy’s hydrocephalic head had assumed nightmarish dimensions.[260] Cerebral and spinal taps were performed several times, but the condition persisted.

  Once again Alma withdrew from Werfel. Now she promised Walter Gropius[261] that she would soon stop seeing Werfel and wrote in her diary that she had never really loved anyone except Gustav Mahler[262]; compared to him, men like Kokoschka, Gropius, or Werfel seemed insignificant, negligible, “mites.” She picked fights with her lover, made mountains out of molehills. Once she forced him to justify his decision to ask some café friends to his apartment on Boltzmanngasse, a group that included two women whom he had certainly not invited. In despair he defended himself, saying that he had already “given up so much” since he had known Alma and that he no longer had a “serious relationship with anyone,” not even his own family.

  In spite of all this ill feeling, Werfel was allowed to retire to Breitenstein, to Haus Mahler. Vienna was still suffering the miseries and grave shortages of a lost war. Basic foods could only be purchased at exorbitant prices on the black market, and there was hardly any coal. A great many Viennese starved or froze to death that winter, while others perished in an insidious Spanish flu epidemic.

  In the Semmering hills, Werfel led the life of a hermit.[263] The caretaker couple next door attended to his needs sporadically. When the weather warmed up, he went on long walks, up the Kreuzberg, the Rax, and Schneeberg, down to the Adlitz valleys or through imposing forests to Payerbach-Reichenau. In a few weeks he completed the first act of his fantasy play Mirror Man[264], a “magical trilogy” whose protagonist, Thamal, retires into a monastic cell in some legendary highlands, isolated from the world, determined to find his way back to himself. In a fit of self-loathing, he fires a shot at his own reflection, but from the splinters of the mirror is born a Mephistophelian alter ego, the Mirror Man. At first Thamal totally succumbs to this creature’s seductive wiles. As he had done in his one-act The Midday Goddess, Werfel wove autobiographical elements into the plot: Thamal declines to accept his father’s heritage and seduces the wife of a friend; she, Ampheh, gives birth to a boy, but the child “is ill, lame, broken in the bud.”

  “I am leading the life of the monks in Mirror Man. Insane loneliness!” Werfel wrote to Alma, complaining of his incessant, almost unbearable longing for her. He claimed to be working on the play for eight to ten hours every day, often feeling so “like a medium, so electrified” in the evenings that he almost frightened himself. He was also following a milk diet for weight loss that Alma had prescribed; on some days, he assured her, he even fasted. However, even these desperate measures did not in the long run change his characteristic corpulence.

  Meanwhile, Alma noted in her diary that her resolve to love Werfel had blinded her for months. In actuality he was the cause of all her misfortunes; the child’s malformation in particular had alienated her from him. She did not wish to see Werfel again.

  The boy had been christened Martin Carl Johannes. His condition was deteriorating so rapidly that he had to be kept under constant observation in a hospital. Surgery was performed on his head, without result. “Twice, Alma spent a week on the verge of suicide,” Werfel wrote in his diary.[265] “Even though she has been vehemently claiming o
therwise in recent times, we are tied to one another by an incomparable physical enchantment... What will become of us?... In one year, we have shared an entire lifetime.”

  In March 1919 Werfel visited Vienna briefly. Alma told him on that occasion that she intended to join Walter Gropius in Germany. She had also decided to suppress radically any passion that she still felt for Werfel. Sad and completely at a loss, the rejected lover returned to Breitenstein. Slowly he recovered and then took up his work again in Alma’s house, which he now called his “true home.” First he wrote two fairy tales, “The Djinn” (“Der Dschin”)[266] and “Play Yard” (“Spielhof”)[267], the latter clearly inspired by his relationship with Alma. “I had to put Mirror Man aside because it doesn’t concern the two of us,” he told Alma. Instead, he had written a fairy tale “in which our entire story is told in dreams. Does that make you angry? Is it indelicate of me to have written down words that were spoken by us?”

  In late April, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar[268], a state institution that combined the Weimar School of Crafts with the Academy for the Visual Arts. Alma and Manon traveled to Weimar for the occasion. They were staying with Gropius, and Werfel wrote daily letters. “Do not do anything against me and against yourself,” he pleaded. “Please, Alma, make sure to come back at the beginning of June. I can’t stand it much longer!”

  Manon Gropius with her father, the architect Walter Gropius

  In mid-May he received a letter from Alma’s friend Berta Zuckerkandl informing him of the death of his ten-month-old son.[269] The child’s mother received the news in Berlin but did not interrupt her stay in Germany. She returned to Vienna a month later. Alma had not made a final break with her husband, but they were both considering a divorce. With increasing urgency Werfel asserted his desire to forge a permanent bond. “It would be ridiculous,” he wrote to her in Germany, “not to get married as soon as possible.”

  Mirror Man was once again on the back burner. Werfel applied all his energies to his longest and stylistically most brilliant prose piece yet, a fantasy inspired by Gustav Meyrink, Edgar Allan Poe, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Titled The Black Mass (Die Schwarze Messe)[270], it incorporated elements from Mirror Man as well as Werfel’s passion for Italian opera, intermingled with dream images from Babylonian mythology and biblical history. But as soon as he returned to the play, he abandoned the “magic novella” and never completed it.

  After Alma’s return from Germany, she surprised Werfel by not keeping her distance but, on the contrary, joining him in Breitenstein and thus granting her “man-child” his heart’s desire. Overjoyed, Werfel kept working through the summer with great vigor. He had hardly felt so happy and sure of himself in his life. In a few weeks, they would celebrate Alma’s fortieth birthday. She admitted that she was longing to have another child with Werfel[271] — a son, if possible. It seemed as if they had finally surmounted all the dark and threatening events of the year.

  During a brief stay in Vienna, the lovers spent an evening in the Prater amusement park. Alma wanted to revisit one of the stalls[272] where, years before in the company of Oskar Kokoschka, she had observed a boy handing the patrons of his father’s concession the wooden balls to be thrown at the bizarre faces of life-size character puppets. Kokoschka had remarked that it would be almost a miracle if the boy did not grow up to be a murderer. When Alma and Franz entered the amusement park that summer’s evening, they found a crowd gathered around this particular stall: the night before, its operator had been killed with a pickax — by his son. Werfel instantly saw the literary potential of this well-nigh unbelievable story, and on their return to Breitenstein he wrote, in record time, his first complete novella, Not the Murderer (Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig).[273] The title for this father-and-son tragedy was provided by Alma; “Not the murderer, the victim is guilty” was a proverb she had heard from an Albanian diplomat.

  The lovers

  “All these fathers aren’t... givers and bearers of love and wisdom,” read a key sentence of the tale, “but [they are] weak and addicted... poisoned monsters of authority.” Werfel had presented similar views back in 1914 in his dialogue Euripides, or On the War, but they only became effective in this new text, the tale of Lieutenant Karl Duschek and his unbridled hatred for his father. The book’s philosophical underpinnings were derived from the anarchist credo of Otto Gross, psychoanalyst and bohemian, Werfel’s friend from the Café Central. Gross’s attack on a patriarchal world order that he found guilty of war, hatred, and malice was combined in Murderer with aspects of Franz’s own often unharmonious relationship with Rudolf Werfel (although the actual relationship between the Werfels was by no means as grim as the novella would seem to indicate). There were also traces of Martin Buber’s and his friends’ cabal against militarism, whose meetings Werfel had been allowed to attend several times; even his former sympathy for the Czech irredentist movement was reflected here. A certain atmospheric similarity to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was clear indication that Werfel was still very insecure as a stylist, greatly dependent on the giants that had gone before him.

  “For God’s sake, please, I do not intend to have a ‘tendentious success’ à la Son by friend Hasenclever,” Werfel wrote to Kurt Wolff[274] after receiving galley proofs of the novella in the fall of 1919. Walter Hasenclever’s play The Son (Der Sohn) premiered in 1916 and was staged at every important German-language theater. It was impossible to overlook the influence of this play about a father-son conflict on Werfel’s own text. “The Last Judgment phase is all over now,” he informed Georg Heinrich Meyer[275], the publisher’s managing director. “I am taking pains to become more accessible.” But he confessed to himself in his diary, “I still don’t have, or will never acquire, the cunning of the true novelist.”[276] As in everything he had written so far, “the mathematics of the story” were “problematical.”

  Alma had ordered the conversion of Haus Mahler’s attic into a spacious studio, an ideal workplace for her lover. In the fall of 1919 Werfel resumed his work on Mirror Man. Chain-smoking, he sat under the shingled roof, looking down at flowering meadows and distant larch forests, but often he worked at night, to the point of exhaustion, which gave him a feeling he knew from his schooldays — one of frightening powerlessness accompanied by panic. Sometimes it could even give rise to thoughts of suicide. “Feeling of impotence,” he noted in his diary, “of not being able to write a serious book. Then shortness of breath, queasiness, inability to think, and the sudden sense that I can’t take it anymore.”[277]

  Alma Mahler thought she knew one of the reasons for these debilitating attacks.[278] She claimed that her lover had destroyed himself by indulging in “insane masturbation” from the time he was ten years old until he met her. No wonder, she thought, that he often felt so exhausted, having weakened his heart and body cells; she even worried about a “softening of the brain.” She decided to take good care to see that her “Franzl” led an ascetic life from now on and decided to put fewer demands on his vitality.

  After months of living together in Breitenstein in great harmony, Werfel and Alma returned to Vienna in mid-November 1919. Gina Kranz had evicted her tenant from the Boltzmanngasse apartment after numerous arguments[279], but Werfel no longer needed a pied-à-terre in the city. When he came to town, he either stayed in Alma’s apartment or took a room at the Hotel Bristol. Alma suffered greatly from the cold that winter; even she was hardly able to obtain fuel during the worst of the coal shortage. Austria, now a small country, seemed to be paralyzed; train service was curtailed, and industry had ground to a halt.

  Werfel went to Prague[280] to apply for a Czech passport. In a Europe of sudden new national boundaries, such a document had become a necessity of life; after the end of World War I, Werfel could no longer claim Austrian citizenship. He spent four weeks in the city of his birth, and they were once again painful. He counted the days as he had done at the front, slept most of the time, and
was unable to work. His fear that Alma would slip away from him as soon as he left her seemed to be confirmed.

  He wrote her that he was suffering because she could not give up meeting people who were “antithetical” to him and his work. She had given breakfast parties for people who were not, in his opinion, “worthy of the woman in whose domain Mirror Man is being created.” He himself — he added reproachfully — was leading “an orthodox life in the Almasium.” He had refused all invitations up to now because he did not want to sit around with “women” and generally found all “females” disgusting. Otherwise, he had paid only two visits to a “neutral” coffeehouse — which was meant to indicate that he had avoided the Arco — and was seeing, apart from his own family, only his old friends Oskar Baum, Max Brod, Willy Haas, and Franz Kafka. “Max Brod shyly asked me about you,” he wrote to Alma. “Then he started singing your praises! He can’t wait to meet you. For him, Mahler is the greatest art experience in this life.”

  In recent months Gertrud Spirk had begun a relationship with another man, to Werfel’s tremendous relief. Now he was free of all obligations; he did not even need to write her the formal letter that Alma had recommended. But he was less than delighted to find out that his sister Mizzi had become best friends with Gertrud. Twenty-year-old Mizzi was the cause of great displeasure in the Werfel family: although her engagement to a non-Jewish Czech had broken off, she was still passionately in love with the man. Unresponsive, ill, and gaunt, she moped around her parents’ apartment. Franz urgently asked for Alma’s advice: she had met his sister briefly in Vienna — perhaps she would be able to help the girl. Somewhat surprisingly, Alma did write to Marianne Werfel and even relieved her depression a little. Without any correspondence addressed to himself, her brother read this letter “over and over” just so he could see the handwriting of his beloved.