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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  “But for Verdi, the ‘idea’ was always just one constructive element, which he took as a starting point for the work as a whole. Werfel never knew how to be economical with his ideas; he used them, so to speak, raw. ‘The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea,’ Thomas Mann said. But it was just that ‘making’ that Werfel never quite managed. Well, of course he didn’t work on the intellectual, rational level that Thomas Mann or, in a different way, Robert Musil did. Werfel had endless ideas — far too many; if Musil had had as many, he would have finished The Man Without Qualities! Werfel just doesn’t always have the constructive creative power. While it is true that most of his works have a genuine idea, they’re then inflated, instead of being realized as slim novellas. Class Reunion [Der Abituriententag], for instance, written in 1927, could have been a truly charming story if Werfel had let it be only forty pages long. That’s why The Man Who Conquered Death is so successful — he didn’t try to make a novel out of it. He was really successful in the small forms.

  “For Werfel, the decisive things were the emotional aspect, the romantic idea, the lyrical substance — the power of language. He did have a language of his own! Unlike Stefan Zweig, who is simply an intolerably poor writer. Zweig blows himself up, he inflates ideas that he doesn’t even have. Whereas Werfel is prodigal with his ideas but often doesn’t know how to make anything out of them. He was an infinitely greater natural talent than Musil, but Musil is the infinitely more interesting writer. I think I know what Werfel lacked: he hardly ever questioned himself. He could be a Marxist, he could be an anarchist or a conservative, he could be a Catholic — it was all interchangeable, it all depended on the moment’s whim, idea, emotion. That is where Karl Kraus’s evil eye did, after all, see the truth: while writing was a necessity for Werfel, while he had the urge to express, what he then wrote — the actual message — was totally interchangeable. Werfel pulled himself under, time and again. That was a talent of a great writer who destroyed himself.

  “On the other hand, someone who wrote The Man Who Conquered Death, and a few very, very beautiful poems, and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and also another book that I don’t regard as highly as Ernst Bloch did, the Verdi — Bloch considered it a masterpiece! — well, he has to be an important writer. And he is part of my youth... I grew up with expressionism, expressionism was the experience that formed me; how could it be otherwise?”

  Barbara, or Reality

  In Rapallo, not far from Genoa, Gerhart Hauptmann owned a splendid villa. Encouraged by Alma, Werfel and Hauptmann had met in recent years, and they held each other in mutual esteem. Werfel even imitated Hauptmann’s sartorial style[377] to some extent: he often appeared in plus-fours and high-buttoned waistcoats similar to those affected by the distinguished German dramatist, and they both wore their hair long, like a flowing mane.

  In January 1927 Werfel and Alma Mahler met Hauptmann in Santa Margherita Ligure, a village close to Rapallo. On his recommendation, they had taken rooms at Santa Margherita’s most luxurious hotel, the Imperial Palace[378], which Werfel found very congenial. It was surrounded by a magnificent park with palm trees and flowers even in winter; the spacious rooms had balconies with views over Portofino Bay. As soon as they arrived, Werfel decided to stay awhile and get some writing under way.

  Alma picked the most appropriate suite for her lover and then proceeded to Nervi, a nearby health spa, leaving Werfel to his work. He was planning the completion of a cycle of novellas[379] that had begun with The Man Who Conquered Death. Childhood memories cropped up in these tales, puppet theater plays, summer vacations in the Salzkammergut, the last years at school. Poor People (Kleine Verhältnisse)[380] described the erotic tension between an eleven-year-old boy, Hugo, and his nanny, Erna Tappert (who came from “poor people”). The story was based on Werfel’s happy memories of his governess Erna Tschepper[381], who had once lived on Mariengasse in Prague, hired to relieve Barbara Šimůnková. Franz had liked her very much, but his mother fired her when she became pregnant.

  In the novella The House of Mourning[382], Werfel resurrected his last two years at the Stefansgymnasium, specifically those nights when he and some classmates made the rounds of Prague’s nightclubs — Franz regaling the world with loud arias — and frequently visited the notorious brothel Gogo on Gamsgasse. He projected some of his own experiences in the Salon Goldschmied onto the year 1914 and the summer night on which word of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne reached Prague. The story, an extended metaphor for the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, also presents Werfel’s ideas about the kinship between Judaism and Christianity, embodied in Max Stein, a Jewish brothelkeeper who believes in Jesus.

  This period of preoccupation with childhood and youth culminated in a novel whose first draft Werfel also began in Santa Margherita while still working on the cycle of novellas: Class Reunion: A Story of Youthful Guilt.[383] His Berlin reunion with Willy Haas and Ernst Deutsch in early 1926 may have inspired the story of a group of students in Prague fond of the same kinds of adventures that Werfel, Haas, Deutsch, Kornfeld, and Janowitz enjoyed — frequent absences from school, visits to nightspots, spiritualist séances, garden parties given by wealthy Prague German families. Surrounded by her numerous admirers, even Werfel’s first love, tennis enthusiast Mitzi Glaser, puts in an appearance. “To be in love with her,” we read in Class Reunion, “was fashionable... This fashion had made particular, deeply painful inroads in my heart. Encounters with Marianne gave me palpitations and slight cases of vertigo.”

  Werfel’s teacher Karl Kyovsky was rendered lovingly and often verbatim, and other professors of the Stefansgymnasium[384] came back to life in the story. Even his own earliest attempts to write poetry became part of the novel’s subject matter, but Werfel divided himself between two contrasting characters, both of whom write poems, plays, and fiction: the Jew Franz Adler, a young genius (who also shares some traits with Paul Kornfeld and Ernst Popper), and the Christian Ernst Sebastian, a sadistic sophisticate. The novel is framed by the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the graduation of Sebastian’s class. Sebastian, now an examining magistrate, stays awake all night remembering the sin of his youth that had the gravest consequences: he undermined the position of the precocious young poet Adler, the best student in the class, and systematically tried to destroy his already sickly classmate both psychologically and physically. It was a battle for survival, a duel — to a considerable degree, one between Judaism and Christianity — and Adler emerged as the moral victor.

  Once again Werfel was engaging the subject matter that had become a leitmotiv in his life: the emancipation of Christianity from Judaism.

  * * *

  In mid-July 1927, after Werfel had returned to Austria, thousands of workers staged a protest in Vienna against a court decision they considered unjust. The city’s police chief, Johann Schober, hunted the demonstrators down like rabbits: the police shot and killed ninety people in bitter street battles, and there were more than two hundred casualties. At the high point of the melee, the city’s Palace of Justice burned to its foundations.[385] The events gave rise to vehement political arguments between Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler. Alma regarded the people’s unrest and the general strike as Moscow-inspired and said that communism and socialism were now showing their true colors. Werfel, on the other hand, tried to defend the cause of the protesters, investigated facts, and ended by sympathizing with the workers up to a point. He was horrified by Alma’s opinion that the doomed republic could be saved only by the unification of Austria and Germany. While they had had frequent and similar disagreements during their first decade together, Werfel had never been quite so upset by Alma’s political outlook as he was now.

  It was not a productive summer. Werfel worked mainly on editing a large selection of his poems of the past twenty years, in which he included a small number of new poems written since 1923, the year of Incantations. In his afterword to the book, which was the first v
olume in Werfel’s Collected Works to be published by Zsolnay, he stated, “As I leaf through the beginning of this book, my own words seem to me as if they came not from another time, but from another life; especially those I love best.”[386]

  At the end of 1927, after an extended stay in Venice, Werfel and Alma returned to the Imperial Palace Hotel in Santa Margherita. They met Gerhart Hauptmann and his wife again and celebrated New Year’s Eve with them. In early January there were several champagne parties[387] at the Hauptmanns’ in Rapallo, during which the two writers often read from their works. Hauptmann once read his essay “Jehovah” (“Jehova”), which had certain anti-Semitic overtones. The slightly intoxicated Werfel heckled him so much that he had to stop.

  In Santa Margherita, ca. 1928

  After finishing Class Reunion Werfel spent months without a new project, and once again his state of indecision troubled him. “I feel at home with myself as if I were merely a tenant,” he wrote in a notebook at the beginning of 1928.[388] At the age of thirty-seven, without any apparent need, he made his will and named Alma Mahler his sole heir. The will also asked her never to publish posthumously anything of his that didn’t come up to the level of his better writings. He also told her to give his “parents and sisters... those mementoes that she would be asked for.”

  Intense preoccupation with his own past and the reliving of memories of childhood and youth may have given rise to thoughts of death, and they may also have sparked reminiscences of war and his soldiering days. Werfel found himself contemplating literary projects based on this segment of his life — as well as his experiences as a supporter of the Red Guard. He had recognized his literary facility with autobiographical material while working on the cycle of novellas and the roman à clef Class Reunion. His approach to the continuation of his autobiography would remain much the same.

  Then came the idea to use the Catholicism of his nanny Barbara Šimůnková, her innocence and capacity for love, as the main motive force of his new narrative. It excited Werfel’s imagination. In the character of Bábi — now past seventy, she was still living in his parents’ household on Mariengasse — he felt he had discovered a heroine to inspire his work with a protective and guiding hand. Thus began his most ambitious project to date, the novel The Pure in Heart (Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit).

  Divided into four sections, called “life-fragments,” the book followed the German tradition of the Entwicklungsroman, a novel charting the spiritual growth of its protagonist, in describing the life story of Ferdinand R, a ship’s doctor. Ferdinand, thirty-six years old, endowed with “a very intense and exceptional power of visual memory,” stands one night on the foredeck of a luxury liner on its way to Africa: “The doctor, staring at the horizon, stood quietly leaning out over the handrail.” Within a few seconds, his entire life passes before his mind’s eye: “Ferdinand’s mind still holds a reality which dates from his very earliest years... He can feel himself quite clearly, for instance, lying back in a white perambulator, being wheeled down the broad main avenue of a public park... Barbara’s huge face looms down on Ferdinand. And with her face the insidious scent of wild cherry, which pierces and envelops her hair.”

  Ferdinand R experiences the war in eastern Galicia as an army telephone operator, then participates in the Viennese revolution between the Ringstrasse and the “netherworld” of the Café Central as a fighting comrade of a Red Guard. Time and again the biography of the fictional character R parallels that of the author W, although there are some rather trashy, purely fictional scenes concerning the parents of the adolescent. Barbara — Werfel calls her “Guardian of Sleep” and the one who comes “to awaken the living fire” — often recedes into the background but remains the most important figure in Ferdinand’s life, “the sheltering image of his childhood,” a symbol of Christian virtue and his invisible guide in all of life’s decisions.

  In Class Reunion Werfel divided his own characteristics between Adler, the Jew, and Sebastian, the Christian. He now lent autobiographical traits to the ship’s doctor, R, a Christian, and his best friend Alfred Engländer[389], the rebellious scion of a wealthy Jewish family of textile manufacturers, who believes in Jesus but does not want to be baptized. He preaches the final reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity, and repeatedly states that he is “a Jew in the flesh and a Christian in spirit, like the apostle Paul — whom I know as I do myself.”

  In the third life-fragment, all the figures of bohemian Vienna have their counterparts in Werfel’s own coffeehouse acquaintances between 1917 and 1920. The reporter Ronald Weiss, Ferdinand’s comrade in the war and later the founder of Vienna’s Red Guard, is clearly modeled on Egon Erwin Kisch. It is Weiss who during the last year of the war introduces Ferdinand to the Café Central on Herrengasse and to its circle of friends, including Gebhardt, anarchist psychoanalyst and sexual theorist — an unmistakable portrait of Otto Gross. The newspaper publisher Basil is kin to Franz Blei; his friend Hedda Aschermann corresponds to the writer Gina Kranz (later Kaus), and the wealthy Aschermann to her adoptive father Josef Kranz. The painter Stechler is Albert Paris Gütersloh; the panhandling poet Gottfried Krasny is a pseudonym for the poet Otfried Krzyzanowski, whose death by starvation[390] and subsequent burial in Vienna’s Central Cemetery are described exactly as they happened in real life.

  Within the framework of the third life-fragment, Werfel also describes, with remarkable sarcastic distance, the events of the November revolution in Vienna. This time, it seems, he manages to do what he had already tried to do in Goat Song — dismiss his participation in the revolt and his espousal of communist ideals as youthful blindness, a folly he regrets now, ten years later, as an acclaimed Austrian author.[391] The erstwhile anarchist[392] had become a disillusioned socialist, and the socialist has turned into a propagandist of Roman Catholicism — hardly identical anymore with the poet of The Friend of the World, the creator of Mirror Man and Goat Song.

  Nevertheless, the atmosphere of the collapse and self-inflicted dissolution of the Hapsburg monarchy had rarely been described in a more gripping fashion.[393] Rare, too, was Werfel’s compelling picture of the Vienna of 1918 in The Pure in Heart. His photographic eye and remarkable memory resurrected post-World War I Vienna and cast a clear and harsh light on Austria’s postwar despair.

  The novel was written in Breitenstein, Vienna, and Santa Margherita. Between February and May 1929[394], Werfel hardly left the Imperial Palace Hotel. He worked mostly at night, drinking endless cups of strong black coffee and surrounding himself with a dense cloud of cigar and cigarette smoke.

  In Santa Margherita, ca. 1929

  At the end of June, after his return to Vienna, Werfel completed the first draft of The Pure in Heart. Only a few days later he carried out a decision that would have been quite apposite for his fictional character Alfred Engländer: on June 27, 1929, he abandoned the faith of his forefathers and, in an official act affirmed under oath, he resigned from the Jewish community.[395] He did not take this step just to be faithful to his literary model: ten years had passed since he had first expressed his desire to marry Alma Mahler, and now she had finally acquiesced to his repeated pleas. Shortly before her fiftieth birthday, she declared her willingness to marry Werfel, but on one condition — he would have to leave the Jewish faith before the marriage, even if he could not see his way to convert to Christianity (even in this respect he resembled Alfred Engländer and Max Stein).

  Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler’s civil wedding[396] took place on July 8, 1929. Alma’s decision had been influenced in large part by the wishes of her fourteen-year-old daughter Manon Gropius: her mother’s lover now became, at long last, her legitimate stepfather. Only a few weeks after the wedding, Alma noted in her diary that she felt constrained by this new marriage, to an even greater degree than she had feared before the wedding.

  Manon Gropius

  In this summer of 1929 Werfel appeared years older. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sudden death[397] at the age of fifty-five had a
ffected him greatly: “Now we have lost one of the very last poets — in the sacred, classical sense — we had in this world,” he wrote in his eulogy.[398] “He was a seraph, a messenger of alien powers in our midst. His timelessly youthful appearance confirmed that. In the twenty years that I knew him, not a single feature changed in his beautiful face.”

  After completing the second draft of The Pure in Heart, the Werfels went back to the Ligurian coast, first to Nervi, then to Santa Margherita. While Werfel spent an evening at the opera in Genoa[399], Alma approached a young woman in the dining room of the Imperial Palace who struck her as simpatica and who had attracted her attention for some time. As the young woman’s husband was away that evening, Alma invited her to her drawing room, where she plied her guest with large quantities of Benedictine, her own favorite drink. Young Mrs. Tina Orchard[400] told Alma her life story. She had been born in Naples, the daughter of an extremely strict father who had had to spend time in jail after the bankruptcy of his firm; she spoke of her great love for her brothers and sisters, and of Mr. Orchard, a British citizen who had come to the rescue and brought about a happy ending to the family drama by marrying Tina.

  Alma sensed material for a novel in the story. As soon as Werfel returned to the hotel that night, she told him about it, and that same night the two of them elaborated the outline of a tale of a Neapolitan family. Werfel went on inventing subplots, auxiliary characters, and complications into the wee hours. During the following days he asked Mrs. Orchard numerous questions about her family, asked for detailed descriptions of her brothers and sisters, and so forth — but Tina had become more cautious; she was no longer as forthcoming as she had been that first evening. Nevertheless, Werfel had the basic outline for his next novel. It even had a working title: Die Geschwister von Neapel (eventually published in English under the title The Pascarella Family).