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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  In the fall of 1929, while the Werfels were still in Italy, The Pure in Heart was published, and like Verdi, it sold extremely well. The first printing was fifty thousand copies, considerably more than any previous Werfel book.

  Reviewers called the novel a classic and its creator a genius of the epic mode, praising The Pure in Heart not only as the high point of his oeuvre to date but indeed as a masterpiece of Tolstoyan dimensions.[401] But there were others who called Werfel a bore and a cliché-monger whose work was devoid of both style and form. Heinz Liepmann, the critic of the Berlin Weltbühne, recommended that the author be sent to Canada or Siberia to lose his smugness and operatic floridity in the Arctic cold.[402]

  In Die Fackel[403], Karl Kraus quoted a few fairly random passages from the third life-fragment to demonstrate why Werfel “should be chased off Mount Olympus with a wet rag.” Although he admitted to having read only a single chapter of the roman à clef, he called it simply “popular garbage.”

  Jewish critics were dismayed by Werfel’s deep sympathy for Catholicism and accused him — without knowing about his separation from the religious community — of desertion.

  Even Willy Haas joined the chorus of negative reaction, up to a point.[404] In his journal Die literarische Welt, he called The Pure in Heart a noble and wonderful monument to love, but also pointed out the flaws of the eight-hundred-page novel; they could have been remedied so very easily that he, Haas, was reluctant to so much as mention them.

  For years, Ernst Polak[405] had been Werfel’s editor. In the case of The Pure in Heart, he missed a number of grammatical errors and gross breaches of style; the extremely short fourth life-fragment, which deals with Ferdinand R’s medical training and his farewell from Barbara, had turned out very badly and destroyed the novel’s dramatic structure.

  Soon after the publication of the book, a reporter asked Egon Erwin Kisch whether he felt offended by the portrait of Ronald Weiss, who was clearly modeled after him. Not at all, Kisch replied[406]: no question about it, it had been at least partly his fault that Werfel, whose close friend he had been many years ago, had joined the Red Guard and become involved in the chaotic events of the November revolution — exactly as the novel described it. Furthermore, Kisch said, his friend had a stupendous memory: there were instances of dialogue in The Pure in Heart that had taken place ten or more years ago but were rendered with such accuracy that one might think Werfel had somehow managed to record them on phonograph discs.

  “Hedda Aschermann” is what Werfel called Gina Kranz[407], his friend from the Café Central days, in The Pure in Heart. “A radiant,... expensively dressed woman” and easy on the eye as well. “She really possessed some cultivation which, with masculine instinct, she displayed to the best advantage.” The adopted daughter of the Viennese tycoon Josef Kranz lived in a splendid mansion. “Thus Hedda, who did not want to part with either, had begun to lead an intricate double life between Aschermann’s splendors and the café.”

  In 1920, at the age of twenty-six, Gina Kranz married the writer Otto Kaus. She then wrote and published, under the name Gina Kaus, numerous novels — such as Catherine the Great (Katharina die Grosse), a fictional biography of the Russian empress — as well as plays and later, as an immigrant, successful scripts for Hollywood studios. For more than forty years she lived in Los Angeles, in a large Brentwood bungalow surrounded by tall eucalyptus trees and a neglected garden. But this is not where I find her: I am driving down a wide boulevard toward the Pacific Ocean; a few weeks before her ninetieth birthday, Gina Kaus has been moved to a nursing home in Santa Monica.

  “Get me out of here!” is her greeting from the wheelchair. “This is a terrible place! You have to promise that you’ll get me out of here. You see, my housekeeper has been waiting for me to die for years. Because I was stupid enough to make her my heiress. This time she just picked some silly little thing as an excuse to have me brought here. I just happened to stumble at home, and before I know it, I’m here. To make me hurry up and die.”

  A young nurse in a dazzlingly white uniform pushes the wheelchair out onto the patio, past rooms with half-open doors. Motionless bodies lie on their beds, their heads shrunk down to the skull. Outside, in the shade of wide palm leaves, Gina Kaus starts reminiscing: “Franz Blei and I — it’s true what Werfel says in The Pure in Heart, we were the closest of friends. I have to admit I never cared that much for the book, nor for Werfel either, really. But Blei: he truly was an amusing, genuinely witty, incredibly cultivated man. He knew everything. By heart. My adopted father hired him as his private secretary; that’s how he got to Vienna from the provinces. And in no time at all he became the focus of the literary café crowd in the Central and the Herrenhof. And such a nice man! He really had an abundance of good manners. And that was rare.

  “No: my experiences with Werfel were not so pleasant. You see, I had this pied-à-terre on Boltzmanngasse, because I really couldn’t stand that Kranz mansion in the long run. So I told Kranz, Listen, I have to rent some place to keep my thousands of books. And he agreed. It was a really nice, large studio apartment, and that’s where we had the editorial office of the journal Summa. Two of the rooms had a view of a park with wonderful trees and monks walking around in it. Well, when Summa folded after four issues, and Werfel was really poor back then, I said to him, ‘Let’s rent this space together. You need a place to live, I need a studio. In the daytime, you’re working at the Military Press Bureau — but I won’t use it all that much anyway.’ But I must say that Werfel really behaved abominably: he never paid his share, not even half the rent. Well, I can see that; he simply thought that I could afford it better than he could. But I even paid for his maid; you see, he lived there, Alma came to visit, there were sheets to be laundered, and so on — but Werfel never paid dear old Frau Reisinger anything! And I couldn’t really believe he was that poor. That was too much, I couldn’t swallow that.”

  In a meeting room, two clergymen are trying to get a group of wheelchair patients to join in on some hymns, but after various futile attempts they simply choose “God Bless America.” “I implore you,” Gina Kaus says again, while the choral voices ring out in the background, “please see to it that I get out of here! Well, sometimes when my adopted father was out of town, I would invite my favorite people in the Central to this tremendous mansion, the so-called Villa Kranz. We made a lot of music, as I remember. Blei played the piano. And Werfel sang Verdi arias — that was really very nice... and it went on until late, late into the night. You know, that Werfel, he sang with love!”

  Gina Kaus is pushed back to her room, and two nurses help her into bed. Talking under her breath so as not to disturb her roommate, she continues: “I think that Werfel really had only one true friend, and that was Ernst Polak. Musil, Broch, and others did not care for him at all. At least, I can’t remember one memorable conversation between Werfel and Musil, even though Musil — whom I revere as an author — came to the Herrenhof every day. I think Karl Kraus liked Werfel at first, but he just couldn’t stand anyone who rose to such prominence. He could stand Brecht, to a certain extent — Brecht best of all. I myself liked Kraus a great deal; there was a time when we saw each other every day. And often until five in the morning: Kraus could talk endlessly. But then we had a big argument, in the thirties, when he started praising that right-wing Austrian militia, the Heimwehr, because he saw it as a possible antidote to Hitler. And it was the end of our friendship. The last thing he said to me was, ‘I know you can’t stand me! I know it.’ And I didn’t contradict him. Goodness, I think I’m remembering all these things for the first time.”

  Her small, deeply wrinkled face rests almost motionless on the large white pillows. She whispers, “Please don’t forget what I asked you to do. Promise?... Now! Wait a minute! Don’t leave yet. Please, give me a goodbye kiss.”

  Hohe Warte

  At the beginning of 1930[408], the Werfels went on their second journey to the Near East, first to Egypt, as in 1925, and then on t
o Palestine.[409] In contrast to their impressions on the first visit, Palestine now seemed much less barren, even livable: Alma liked Jerusalem so much that she toyed with the idea of acquiring a house there. While Werfel still did not identify with Zionism, he felt the greatest respect for the Jewish reconstruction of Palestine and acknowledged its Utopian vision. He also had more sympathy for Jewish national consciousness than before. Arab nationalists had perpetrated a massacre of Jewish settlers in the summer of 1929, and Werfel realized that the Jews would have to arm themselves against future pogroms. Nevertheless, his main sympathies lay with the pacifist organization Brith Shalom, which worked for reconciliation with the Arab neighbors. Werfel’s idealistic world view simply could not accept that the two nations would remain in a perpetual state of war.

  After their arrival in Egypt, Werfel suffered from a recurring slight fever in the evenings. A physician in Jerusalem reassured him that it was just a mild case of malaria, and there was no reason to abandon his plan to travel on to Syria and Lebanon. The Werfels went to Damascus, accompanied by a heavily armed tourist guide as protection against roving bandits in the Syrian desert. A group of these did, indeed, cross their route but only observed them from a distance before riding on.

  The guide took the Werfels through Damascus, a decayed, sad, and dirty city, showing them, among other sights, a carpet-weaving establishment. Around the numerous looms, they saw many crippled and emaciated children and youths who seemed to be staring vacantly. When Werfel asked about these pitiful creatures, the owner of the establishment told him that he had taken them in a number of years ago, to save them from death by starvation: they were orphans, children of Armenian Christians. Between 1915 and 1917 more than a million people had become the victims of a massacre of unimaginable dimensions — ordered by the Young Turk regime of the time, an ally of Germany in World War I. While serving in the Military Press Bureau, Werfel had repeatedly heard about the genocide committed against Armenians[410], but it took this personal confrontation with Armenian orphans to transform the abstract number of casualties into a horrifying reality.

  That encounter at the carpet weavers’ was one he could not forget: on the subsequent way stations of their journey, in Baalbek, Beirut, Acre, and Haifa, he wrote down what the man in Damascus had told him. He tried everywhere to find out more about the fate of the Armenians and looked for survivors who would be able to tell him more about the atrocities. Thus he heard about a community of some five thousand Armenians who had armed themselves and retired to the so-called Mountain of Moses, Musa Dagh, and there defended themselves against superior Turkish forces. Not only were these courageous people able to hold their positions, they also inflicted considerable casualties on the enemy. When they had used up all their ammunition and supplies, so Werfel was told, a French warship sighted them on the mountain, as if by a miracle, and the French marines came to their rescue.

  After his return to Austria, Werfel visited the French ambassador to Vienna, Count Bertrand Clauzel[411], and asked if he would help him obtain official documents on the Armenian genocide. Werfel had decided to devote a literary work to this event, the greatest organized mass murder in the history of mankind up to that time, and to create a lasting memorial to its victims. Clauzel was able to provide Werfel with large amounts of material, including French investigative protocols on the atrocities committed by the Young Turk government and statements given by survivors of the massacres — among these, documents on the heroic freedom fight of a group of rebels on Musa Dagh.

  Before turning to his time-consuming research for a novel about the fate of the Armenians, Werfel first devoted himself to another subject entirely. The play The Kingdom of God in Bohemia[412] was based on a sketch made in the summer of 1926: a historical tragedy, it described the religiously inspired, antifeudal struggle of revolutionary Hussites, the Taborites, against the high nobility of Bohemia. Werfel completed the first version of this drama of civil strife in only five weeks in the spring of 1930. According to his own words, his intention was not to produce a historical genre painting[413] but to clarify an ancient struggle between fundamentally different views of the world — the recurrent overthrow of one dominant ideology by another. “Everywhere, and in every epoch, people have tried to establish a ‘Kingdom of God in Bohemia,’“ Werfel stated in a newspaper interview. “We always see the impetuous new... trying to supplant the conservative and complacent element. That is the battle humanity has fought innumerable times, and in which... time and again the immovable and static has maintained itself and the dynamic has perished.” He quite consciously refused to take sides for either the revolutionary forces or those of reaction: “That is not the dramatist’s business.”

  The characters of this “tragedy of a leader” used the language of the twentieth century: Werfel was not interested in historical realism. Nevertheless, they were reminiscent of characters in plays by Raimund or Grillparzer, dramas the young Werfel had once loved. When he was fourteen, the smell of dust that wafted into the audience from the stage of the Neue Deutsche Theater in Prague was the most wonderful odor he could imagine. Juarez and Maximilian, Paul Among the Jews, and finally The Kingdom of God in Bohemia, written when Werfel was forty, provide clear evidence of his nostalgia for the theater of the nineteenth century.

  There was nothing in this world of which he was so sure, he wrote to Kurt Wolff in March 1930[414], “as that... The Friend of the World and The Pure in Heart are one and the same.” Certainly he had not changed into another person in the course of the years, as so many were now claiming publicly. The reason for Werfel’s letter to his former publisher was an urgent plea to do more for the work of his youth: “I find it... very hard to accept that our volumes don’t deserve at least a modest existence.” This state of affairs was even more deplorable considering that Wolff had to be regarded as “the literary instrument of the last poetic movement” that Germany had known. Admittedly, he wrote, “the shape of the world... has changed so considerably that only a future time will be able to do justice to the generation to which we both belong.” Wolff’s reply[415] must have had a sobering effect on Werfel: he informed his erstwhile favorite author that he had to close down his publishing operation because he had not been able, for some time now, to achieve even nominal sales. Wolff said that he had paid for the enterprise with his “life’s blood,” both materially and psychologically, and that he was now living quietly on the outskirts of Berlin, slowly recuperating from the hardships of the last years.

  While he was still working on the play about the Hussites, Werfel made his first visit to the Armenian monastery of the Mekhitarists in Vienna and met Archbishop Mesrop Habozian.[416] He told the archbishop about his project to write a long novel about the heroic fight of the rebels of Musa Dagh, which was by now fairly well delineated. The cleric strongly encouraged Werfel in his plan and put the monastery’s large library at his disposal. Werfel began his research there in June 1930.[417] He first read the comprehensive reports of the German pastor Johannes Lepsius, who had pleaded for the Armenian people with the highest Turkish authorities and had also tried to pressure the German government into threatening Turkey with abrogating their military alliance if the genocide was not stopped.

  Werfel went on to read the eyewitness accounts of the priest Dikran Andreasian and descriptions of the terrain around Musa Dagh on the Gulf of Alexandretta; he studied the flora and fauna of the region, made lists of names of Armenian notables, sketched first drafts of a possible plot line. He even thought he had found a name for his hero: Grigor Bagratian.

  Franz Werfel’s fortieth birthday coincided with the elections for the fifth German Reichstag in September 1930. The results of these elections were closely watched in Austria; they marked a clear swing to the right. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, under its leader Adolf Hitler, received over 18 percent of the votes, and the number of its seats in the Reichstag increased from 12 to 107. The Nazis were now the second strongest party in Germany, after
the Social Democrats. Werfel, in Vienna to discuss the staging of The Kingdom of God in Bohemia, was not intimidated by the anti-Semitic atmosphere in the neighboring country: talking to a reporter from a Vienna daily[418], he openly admitted his origins and even stated that the “notion that I have left Judaism” was “quite incorrect.” Actually, from the standpoint of rabbinical law, his decision to leave the community of worship was little more than a trifle: in the eyes of God, Werfel would have remained a Jew even if he had converted to an alien faith; thus his official resignation from the Jewish congregation, staged to please Alma, was really quite meaningless. “Religion as such is one of my main preoccupations, now even in my work,” Werfel went on to say. “I believe I would be happiest in a world that... comes closest to the period of primitive Christianity. Then, Jewish and Catholic ethics were joined in one wonderful idea.”

  During the rehearsals for the world premiere of The Kingdom of God[419] at Vienna’s Burgtheater, which lasted for weeks and in which Werfel often participated, there were violent disagreements[420] between him and the director, Albert Heine, who turned a deaf ear to all Werfel’s suggestions for changes and drove him to despair. After the opening night, at the end of 1930, some critics did indeed criticize the author for failing to take a clear point of view, and Werfel was extremely hurt by this accusation. But there were very positive responses as well: Werfel’s friends Raoul Auernheimer and Felix Saiten wrote rhapsodic raves and attested to the incontrovertible success of a play they felt was Franz Werfel’s “strongest” to date.[421] A few weeks later[422], Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Friedeil, and the Werfels talked together about what could be done to secure the Nobel Prize for Franz in the very near future.