Early in 1931 he returned, for the first time in more than a year, to Santa Margherita.[423] Staying at the Imperial Palace, he began to write that “Neapolitan story” he owed to Alma’s curiosity and Mrs. Orchard’s tale.[424] He made Tina the heroine of the book, calling her Grazia. Her five brothers and sisters, and her father, a widowed banker whom he christened Domenico Pascarella, all had their counterparts in reality.
While he was working on The Pascarella Family, Werfel felt haunted by the feeling that he was taking dictation — not only because he was retracing Tina Orchard’s life story but because he sensed, behind every character and event, a second level, a kind of superreality. From the tale told by a chance acquaintance, Werfel derived a poetic metaphor for the crumbling of the patriarchal world order and male dominance.
“The waters of a story,” Werfel wrote in his working notes, “run together and carry the author along on their ever rising surface.”[425] A surface that reflected, once again, many autobiographical images, among them Werfel’s former difficult relationship with his own father. Placido, Grazia’s brother, is a philosophical dreamer who wants to become a writer. Like young Franz, who had tried to convince his father that he did not want to follow in his footsteps, Placido has to withstand Don Domenico’s rages: “Ever since [Father] has had a suspicion of my writing, he has hated me,” the young poet complains. The annual opera festival that Domenico and his children attend regularly calls to mind Werfel’s experience in Prague.
Alongside this novel, Werfel wrote a lecture to be given at the Viennese Cultural Alliance in the spring of 1931. Entitled “Art and Conscience” (“Kunst und Gewissen”)[426], it was intended as a warning against the blind glorification of technological progress and the “suppression of human inwardness” that Werfel thought had been going on since the end of World War I in both the Soviet Union and the United States. This growing spiritual crisis, he feared, could also be seen in the “hysterical howls and cheers for a Third Reich.” Only a recovery of what was “wondrous” in man could save him from the threat of worldwide brutalization, and as an antidote Werfel proposed a revolution of the spirit: “For the world can live only in the name of the miraculous.”
In the novel about Grazia and her family, there are only hints of this fear of a dehumanization of society. Werfel did recognize that Italian Fascism was threatening individual liberties, but in the novel he did not condemn its inhumanity: the “new Italian” — and this was probably due to Alma’s influence — seemed to him both “handsome” and “strong of will,” and his “verve” really concealed “a shyness or uncertainty” that could surround even a Fascist government prefect of Naples “with a sympathetic aura.” Benito Mussolini had been in power since 1924, and Werfel witnessed annual parades of the Italian blackshirts. It is hard to believe that he could not see their kinship with the howling and cheering hordes that had been marching through the streets of Germany and Austria for years.
During her husband’s absence from Vienna, Alma Mahler-Werfel prepared for a big move[427]: at the beginning of the year, the couple had acquired a luxurious villa at Hohe Warte, in Vienna’s nineteenth district, built by the famous architect Josef Hoffmann. The purchase of the ostentatious building[428] on Steinfeldgasse had been largely financed by Werfel — in recent years, since Paul Zsolnay had become his publisher, the novels and plays had brought in substantial royalties. (The connection between Werfel and his publisher had become even closer since Paul Zsolnay had married Alma’s daughter Anna Mahler in 1930 and had thus become Werfel’s stepson-in-law.) But Rudolf Werfel also assisted his son in the purchase of the palatial dwelling at Hohe Warte by contributing 40,000 Austrian schillings.
Alma Mahler-Werfel, Franz Werfel, Anna Moll, Carl Moll, ca. 1930
The house, which stood in a large garden, was in the immediate vicinity of Carl Moll’s villa, and thus Alma became a neighbor of her mother and stepfather. Steinfeldgasse was in Döbling, high above the noise and dirt of the metropolis, with views of the hills of Kobenzl and Kahlenberg and the vineyards on their slopes. The interior of the Ast Villa, so called for its previous owner, the civil engineer Eduard Ast, was well suited to Alma but hardly to Franz Werfel: three sumptuously furnished floors, twenty-eight rooms partly done in marble. In the salon of this mansion[429], Alma placed glass showcases containing scores by Gustav Mahler and the original manuscript of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony. Paintings by Emil Schindler, Hans Makart, Edvard Munch, and Oskar Kokoschka adorned the walls, and Auguste Rodin’s bust of Mahler was prominently installed in the entrance hall. Alma had designed the top floor to serve as a spacious working studio for her husband, but he hesitated to move in. The entire ambience struck him as alien and uncomfortable. The bohemian Werfel did not enjoy looking down on Vienna from this height, while Alma considered such elevation her due.
Neither friends nor enemies of the Werfels had any doubts about the true reason for this move. Alma needed the baronial building in order to continue her famous salon and her large parties on the grandest possible level. At long last she had vanquished her friend Berta Zuckerkandl in the struggle for social status — her house at Hohe Warte was now considered one of the best addresses in Vienna.
On his return from Santa Margherita, Werfel did not move into the Ast Villa but went to Breitenstein to work on the final version of The Pascarella Family through the summer of 1931, chain-smoking and drinking black coffee in his modest wooden mansard studio. He loved the story of Domenico Pascarella and his six children more than he did any of his previous books; he was not only satisfied with its linguistic form but felt that the novel as a whole was as close to perfect as he could make it.
When the book came out in the fall, it was a hit of the now customary kind: the first printing sold out quickly, and the book was well received by its readers, whereas the critics were lukewarm. He received congratulatory telegrams and letters from admirers, and numerous journalists asked for interviews.
Two years earlier, when they had first met Mrs. Orchard, the Werfels had taken a mutual vow never to reveal the source of Pascarella. Werfel now said publicly that the Neapolitan story had “approached” him sometime last winter: “I think we should call my book a fairy tale.”[430] He said that the novel — he had felt this every moment while writing it — had come into existence as if some secret source had “whispered” it into his ear. “The characters assumed a dictatorial life of their own and chose their own paths.” Nevertheless, his conscience prompted him to make a small concession to the truth: “The first seed of this idea,” he told a Viennese reporter, “came to me in an anecdote told by a lady of my acquaintance.”
The Werfel villa at Hohe Warte became the scene of magnificent parties, a meeting place of writers, theater people, painters, politicians, philosophers.[431] Alma Mahler-Werfel was a famous hostess with the special knack of introducing people to each other who might otherwise not have met, at least not easily. She devised her guest lists for success.[432] Egon Friedell, Carl Zuckmayer, Ödön von Horváth, and Hermann Broch participated in these festivities — which often continued into the early morning hours — as did Ernst Bloch, Elias Canetti, Franz Theodor Csokor, Fritz Wotruba, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bruno Walter. On her way home after one of these soirées, Arthur Schnitzler’s mistress[433], the writer Clara Katharina Pollaczek, burst into tears: the lavish circumstances of the Werfels had aroused her envy, and she blamed herself and her lover for not having achieved a similar level of luxury.
Arthur Schnitzler, summer 1930
Ever since the suicide of his eighteen-year-old daughter Lily in the summer of 1928, Schnitzler had been a shadow of his former self. He died on October 21, 1931, not long after his seventieth birthday, of a cerebral hemorrhage.[434] At the Berlin Volksbühne theater Werfel delivered a eulogy[435] for his revered friend “who had not given a damn for the... honors bestowed by whoever was in power.” Werfel stressed that it would be absolutely wrong to regard Schnitzler’s oeuvre as outdated: on the co
ntrary, the nonfashionable, timeless quality of his writing would carry his influence beyond his own day. Schnitzler himself must have realized this when he decreed that certain writings “could only be published thirty, in some cases, fifty years after his demise... The author was certain that, when he died, his work and personality would go on living and exerting their power in distant times. And if he, the old, tenacious skeptic, believed it so firmly, then we need have no qualms if we believe it too.”
Starting out in Berlin in the fall of 1931, Werfel went on an extended reading tour that took him to Basel, Zurich, Munster, and Cologne.[436] After his lecture “Art and Conscience” in the East Prussian industrial town of Insterburg, he had to flee[437] the hall in a hail of catcalls and whistles, inadequately protected by police. The audience, mostly students, interpreted Werfel’s call for a return to spiritual values as Jewish-communist propaganda.
Franz Werfel and Gerhart Hauptmann in front of the Hotel Südbahn, Semmering, ca. 1930
He stayed briefly at Hohe Warte after his return but soon retired to Breitenstein. He paid a visit to Gerhart Hauptmann, who had come to spend the end of the year in the Südbahnhotel on the Semmering, and he collaborated with Lothar Wallerstein, an opera director, on the translation of Verdi’s Don Carlos, which Verdi had based on Friedrich Schiller’s play about Philip II of Spain. “I have to admit,” Werfel said in an interview published in a Viennese daily[438], “that these ten years in the service of Verdi’s oeuvre and its rediscovery constitute a great sacrifice, as they have taken up most of my working hours. But I offer this sacrifice because I regard the enrichment of the world by the inexhaustible music of the Italian master as an increment of happiness in these dark days.”
He was also preoccupied with a very different idea[439], although it too was closely related to the disturbing developments in world events: four or five times a year, he wanted to write position papers on political questions of the day and have them distributed by Zsolnay as low-priced pamphlets. The publisher, however, was skeptical: polemical writings might be harmful to the image of the great author. Although Werfel insisted he did not really intend to be polemical, Zsolnay did not agree to the project.
Werfel gave a lecture in March 1932 at the Vienna Cultural Alliance that had political undertones: “Can Mankind Survive Without Religion?” (“Kann die Menschheit ohne Religion leben?”).[440] It was a sequel to “Art and Conscience,” given the previous year, and it presented Catholicism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in particular, as the true road to salvation in an era poisoned by communism and Nazism: “This world that calls itself civilized can heal itself spiritually only if it finds its way back to a genuine form of Christianity.” This was a conviction, he pointed out, to which he felt entitled by “ancient ties of blood and nature, precisely because I am a Jew.” One should not be content with the “spiritual surrogates” that the spirit of the times had produced “in a hundred variants,” but one had to listen to “the divine” within oneself: “And once the empty secular belief has been lost, it is possible to advance into one’s own inmost self.” Only then could the “perception of the divine” permeate everyday life “step by step.”
Hundredth birthday of Franz Werfel’s grandfather Bernhard Kussi, Pilsen, 1932
Werfel went to Pilsen in April 1932, to participate in a large family reunion[441] celebrating the one-hundredth birthday of his maternal grandfather, the mill owner Bernhard Kussi. Franz asked the old man, who had been born only a few weeks after Goethe’s death, which single event in the course of his life had left the greatest impression. After hesitating for a moment, Kussi told his grandson that the most memorable event of his life had been the abolition of serfdom in czarist Russia in 1861.[442]
“Not to take life for granted!” “Always believe in miracles!” “Meditate about the soul’s salvation!” These were notebook entries Werfel made on a trip through Italy, shortly after his visit with the centenarian. He often felt like “a newcomer from the beyond” — and he firmly resolved to record, from now on, “every second” of his life as consciously and accurately as if he were “a guest from distant centuries.”[443]
The palazzo facing the magnificent Basilica dei Frari in the San Polo district of Venice, purchased by Alma Mahler in 1922, still stands. Its surrounding walls, the entry portal, the small garden with its palms and lemon trees, the townhouse itself — all of it has remained practically unchanged.
In Santa Margherita, the massive white edifice of the luxurious Imperial Palace Hotel towers above Portofino Bay. I stand in the same hotel park that Franz Werfel liked so much, sixty years ago, and look up at the grand suite with its wide balcony, on the second floor, where Werfel first stayed in 1927 and to which he returned many times.
At Elisabethstrasse 22, in the first district of Vienna, I look for Alma Mahler’s former apartment. On the fourth floor, I ask a tenant for help. “Of course I know where Werfel used to live with his Alma,” she says. “Right here, above me. I saw the two of them many times when I came here to visit my grandparents. Werfel wrote The Pure in Heart up there, and our concierge used to tell us that she was the model for the main character. Did you know that? That wasn’t true, you say? But I heard it from her own lips. She was a lady, let me tell you, that concierge of ours; she was a delight! Well, why don’t you go on upstairs, the Frau Doktor who lives there enjoys unannounced visitors.”
The elderly heiress of a Salzburg brewery guides me patiently through the rooms of her large, high-ceilinged apartment. Here Alma Mahler lived first with Oskar Kokoschka, then with Walter Gropius, and finally with Franz Werfel. “In this room,” the old lady tells me, “Gustav Mahler had his piano. This was where he worked. And he had one of those washstands, he never used a bathroom. And there, in that room, catty-corner from this one, Alma used to have her orgies with Werfel, and I’m sure Mahler was aware of them.” When I venture the remark that Frau Mahler did not move into this apartment until 1914 and did not meet Franz Werfel until 1917, six years after Gustav Mahler’s death, the lady of the house is indignant: “Nonsense! You see, I heard that from our concierge — she’s dead now, God rest her soul — she was there when it all happened, and I’m sure she told me the truth. No doubt about it!”
On Hohe Warte, only a few steps from the terminal of tram line 37, stands the Ast Villa, onetime mansion of the Werfels. A policeman is doing sentry duty in front of the entry gate, a submachine gun strapped to his shoulder. The white-and-green flag of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia flaps in front of the bulletproof windows of the building, now the residence of His Excellency the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Austria.
As we walk through splendid salons and reception rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, the petite Filipino maid tells me about her homeland, about the hardships of her extended family, to whom she sends most of her earnings. In the hallways hang garish paintings bought in department stores: sunsets, moor landscapes, horses. In the great salon where once Alma Mahler received her guests and paintings by Munch, Makart, and Kokoschka adorned the walls, there are now huge color photographs of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Prince Abdullah, commander of the National Guard. Precious swords hang on the marble walls. The glass cases that formerly contained Gustav Mahler’s scores now display Arab necklaces, gilded knives, turquoise vases, and other knick-knacks received as gifts from numerous statesmen.
The fourth floor, once the studio space Werfel never really liked, was destroyed by a bomb a few weeks before the end of World War II. The reconstructed floor has been divided into several guest rooms — unfurnished except for one containing an exercise bicycle.
I look down into the large, flowering garden in which Manon Gropius sometimes fed the deer that ventured here from the surrounding forests. The small pond is unchanged; Manon’s pet turtles used to walk its stone rim. From the other side of the top story, I have a view of the vineyards of Kobenzl and Kahlenberg, of the nearby St. Michael’s Church and the former Jewish orphanage right next to it. I tell the maid that the poet W
erfel used to enjoy this view from his desk. She says that she feels so terribly lonely here in Vienna and asks me to come back soon to tell her more about that stranger who used to live and make up stories here, so very long ago.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
In the spring of 1932, during Werfel’s absence from Austria, the country was in a state of political turmoil: after the resignation of Chancellor Karl Buresch, Austria was governed by a right-wing coalition under the former minister of agriculture, Engelbert Dollfuss. His attempt to create a nonpartisan government had failed. Two months later, at the end of July, Germany elected its sixth Reichstag, with the Nazis emerging as the strongest party by far; their ringleader, however, had no say in the formation of a government. And during those days, Franz Werfel — now back in Breitenstein — began the first draft of his great novel about the Armenians, whose title was to be The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
Gabriel Bagradian — Werfel’s final version of his hero’s name — returns to his native home at the foot of Musa Dagh after more than twenty years spent in a state of “total assimilation” in Paris. He has married Juliette, a Frenchwoman; his son Stephan has received a French education. Their visit to Yoghonoluk, to take care of some family matters, is meant to be short — but during their stay, World War I breaks out and the Bagradians are trapped.
Turkey’s Islamic Young Turk government distrusts its Armenian-Christian citizens, especially after the outbreak of the war, and accuses them of fomenting rebellion and entering into secret agreements with foreign enemies. This is the historical background to Bagradian’s story. These suspicions were sufficient reason for Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, and Mustafa Kemal to impose the death sentence on more than two million people.[444] This death sentence was camouflaged by terms such as “deportation” and “resettlement” in order to reassure the victims that they were merely part of a large-scale relocation operation. In reality, Istanbul had ordered all the regional presidents to exterminate the entire Armenian population[445] of Turkey, with the exception of a few inhabitants of the large cities.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 19