Over a million men, women, and children became the victims of the first genocide in history ordered by a government and executed according to official plans. The Turks moved the people rounded up in western Anatolia, Cilicia, and northern Syria into so-called concentration camps. Many died of exhaustion on long forced marches through the desert; others were beaten to death, shot, burned, drowned — or simply starved to death.
The deportation orders were ignored only by the inhabitants of a few small communities at the foot of Musa Dagh: some five thousand people moved onto the high plateau of the Mountain of Moses, bringing with them their cattle and their most important belongings. They were ready to die in battle rather than be led as defenseless victims to the slaughter.
Dikran Andreasian[446], an eyewitness whose account Werfel used in his novel, gave the duration of the siege as twenty-four days, while other documents mention thirty-six days. Werfel’s choice, forty days, called up biblical associations: the flood lasted forty days and nights; Moses spent forty days and nights on Mount Sinai; Israel’s time in the wilderness was forty years.
The rebels appoint Gabriel Bagradian their leader, and he takes his people to the Mountain of Moses. Like Moses, his biblical model, he is an outsider in his own land who will not be granted the sight of the Promised Land in the company of his people. Like Moses, who is granted only a glimpse of the land of Israel from the top of Mount Nebo before he dies, Bagradian dies on the summit of Mount Musa while his eyes witness the miracle of the rescue of his people.
Werfel made use of even the smallest details he learned in two years of research. In addition to eyewitness reports, collected primarily by the German pastor Dr. Johannes Lepsius[447], he integrated into his novel data on Armenian children’s games, crafts, architecture, agriculture, and clothing.[448]
In The Pure in Heart, Werfel’s passionate interest[449] in military matters had helped to impart great authenticity to the chapters dealing with World War I; now he meant to describe with absolute credibility the scenes when the Turkish army confronted the Armenian rebels. Ernst Polak researched[450] administrative and jurisdictional matters about the Armenians for his friend and also sent Milan Dubrovic, then a young journalist, to the geographical records of the national library in Vienna, to research weather conditions in Anatolia in the summer of 1915 — the amount of recorded precipitation, the direction of the prevailing winds.
* * *
Werfel worked on the novel almost continuously until mid-November 1932, interrupting it only for a lecture tour. In Amsterdam he lectured on Verdi and then traveled to several German cities[451], where mostly he read “Interlude of the Gods,”[452] a completed chapter from Musa Dagh, which portrays a conference between Johannes Lepsius and the Turkish minister of war, Enver Pasha. Lepsius, the German pastor, had become one of the novel’s main characters, and Werfel had taken, almost verbatim, Lepsius’s documentary report on his dramatic failure to convince the pasha to put an end to the extermination of the Armenian people.
At the beginning of his readings[453], Werfel introduced his project for a novel to the audience — in cities that in those very weeks became arenas of extreme radicalization as hordes of SA (Storm Troops) and SS (Elite Guard) organized their almost daily, bloody street battles. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Werfel explained, was not, as one might suppose, about something that happened in the remote past; rather, it dealt with the fact that “in our own day, one of the oldest and most venerable peoples of the world has been destroyed, murdered, almost exterminated” — and not by “warlike enemies but by their own countrymen.” He said that the Armenians had been the first nation to accept Christianity as their official religion, but the nationalism of the Young Turks had made them commit “one of the most insane atrocities in the history of mankind.”
In early December 1932 the Werfels were visiting the northern Silesian town of Breslau on the same day Adolf Hitler held one of his demonstrations there. In the new Reichstag elections, a month earlier, the Nazis had once again emerged as the strongest party but had lost votes and were still excluded from the government. That evening, while Werfel went to deliver his lecture “Art and Conscience,” Alma stayed in the hotel[454], hoping to catch at least a glimpse of Hitler. After a long wait — Werfel had given his lecture and returned to the hotel — the party leader entered the hotel lobby. Timidly hiding behind the back of an SS man, Alma looked into the “clasping” eyes of a “frightened youth,” as she noted in her diary. To her surprise, Hitler did not seem the least bit pompous — unlike, say, Mussolini. When she asked Werfel’s opinion of Hitler, he replied, “Unfortunately, not all that bad.”[455]
A few weeks later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was charged with forming a viable government and sworn in as chancellor of the Reich by President Hindenburg. After his appointment the National Socialists implemented their long-laid plans to take control little by little until all power was in their hands. Werfel was in Santa Margherita at that time, totally immersed in his work on Musa Dagh and hardly paying any attention to the political upheavals. The Reichstag building in Berlin burned at the end of February, a wave of arrests swept across all of Germany, and the Reichstag elections of March 5, 1933, secured the National Socialists more than 44 percent of the vote. Now he was no longer able to close his eyes to reality. “The terrible events in Germany” were making it impossible for him to “concentrate on anything,” as he noted in the margin and on the backs of pages of his Musa Dagh manuscript.[456] He was “spiritually exhausted” and proceeded sentence by sentence “only with difficulty.” “Perhaps I should even change the plot!”
Heinrich Mann[457], president of the Prussian Academy of Literature, had been one of the signatories of a manifesto published in early February 1933, urging the Socialist and Communist parties to join in a united front against the threat of a final takeover by Hitler. As a result, some members of the academy forced Mann to resign even before the March 5 elections. One week after the fatal elections, all members of the Academy of Literature received a circular initiated, formulated, and classified as “confidential” by Gottfried Benn[458], in which they were asked to let the new board of the academy know whether they were willing, in view of the “changed historical situation,” to remain in the service of the parent organization, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Should the response be positive, the circular stated, this would entail a simultaneous renunciation of any public political stance or action directed against the new government. What was more, this declaration of loyalty would oblige the signatories to cooperate in a “national-cultural” sense.
Of the twenty-seven members of the literary section[459], nine replied to this circular with a “no” — among them Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, and Jakob Wassermann. Ricarda Huch vehemently rejected the demand for a declaration of loyalty, saying that she was not willing to relinquish her right to express her opinions freely. She announced her resignation from the academy and expressed her condemnation of actions already taken by the new government, such as the defamation of dissidents and the state-sanctioned rabble-rousing propaganda against Jews.
Franz Werfel, however, signed the declaration of loyalty to the new ruling powers[460], having sent a telegraphic request for the appropriate form on March 19. Perhaps his major reason for taking this step was his desire not to jeopardize the future sales of Musa Dagh: if he were stripped of academy membership, the epic about the Armenians might be banned altogether, especially since it was directed against the inhumanity of nationalist fanaticism. Like so many others, Werfel did not expect the sinister charade staged by Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels to last very long, and thus underestimated the consequences of his action.
In a letter he wrote from Santa Margherita to his parents in Prague[461], there was not a word mentioning his declaration of loyalty. He excused his lengthy silence by saying that he was totally immersed in his work, writing eight to ten hours a day, and that he had completed three-quarters of the first draft of Musa Dagh on the Ligurian coas
t. “It may well be my major work,” he wrote, adding that the book had “acquired symbolic timeliness because of events: oppression, destruction of minorities by nationalism.” He admitted that the political changes in Germany were deeply depressing but said that he would rather devote all his strength to work than fritter it away in “empty cries of woe.” “What will happen, will happen. Probably not all that much.” He was reliving the fate of the Armenians, and this gave him a “different perspective.” As in Italy, the German variety of fascism would probably and slowly “consolidate itself... until nobody talks about it anymore.” After a period of steady advancement, the Jews would now suffer a setback, he could at least see that coming, “but perhaps it will be only a brief setback.” In any case, he had only “the best of news” about the sales of his books; in Germany they had not “diminished by a single copy.”
Only a few weeks later, Franz Werfel’s works were being burned on bonfires. German students, acting in unison with hordes of Storm Troopers, had removed the works of some 130 authors from private, university, and lending libraries, from bookshops and publishers’ sales rooms. On May 10, 1933, at the end of four weeks of this large-scale action “against the un-German spirit,” the book burnings took place in the centers of all German university towns.[462] They were accompanied by energetic incendiary speeches and patriotic songs and marches performed by SA and SS bands. The students’ “fighting units” flung into the flames the works of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, Alfred Kerr and Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, along with Mirror Man and Goat Song, Class Reunion and The Pascarella Family, Juarez and Maximilian and Paul Among the Jews.
Two days before the book burnings, Werfel had received a registered letter from Max von Schillings, the new president of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences, informing him that, according to the principles now in force in the state, he could no longer be regarded as a member of the literary section. On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag had passed an enabling law that gave Hitler the power to govern for the next four years without any parliamentary interference. After the Reichstag Fire, the German Reich began establishing so-called concentration camps for thousands of political internees. Jewish citizens were systematically removed from leading positions in cultural life and the civil service, and a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses was proclaimed.
“An idea conceived in fifteen minutes, how to get rid of H[itler].”[463] So begins a diary entry of spring 1933, noteworthy as a demonstration of how amazingly reactionary and naive Werfel could be. His idea was that a papal bull be sent to the German bishops, pointing out that “the persecution of the Jews” would only make them persist “in their error” and thus postpone “the kingdom of God.” A congress of German nobility should be held in Regensburg to demand the return of Kaiser Wilhelm and Crown Prince Otto von Hapsburg to the throne. Along with the idea that President Roosevelt should send a telegram to Hindenburg to avoid further reprisals or — and this was not implausible — that a militant organization should be formed “to protect endangered world democracy and freedom,” there were more absurd notions: “Kempinsky and similar eating establishments to introduce open free lunches on future boycott days, only for Christians... And 44 other ideas that I won’t write down.”
In mid-May 1933 Werfel participated in a music festival in Florence[464], giving the Verdi lecture he had previously delivered in Amsterdam. His knack for turning off worries of a political nature and focusing on subjects that seemed to matter the most to him is truly surprising: a photograph taken during the Maggio Florentino shows a jovial and high-spirited Signor Werfel. He then returned to Breitenstein to complete the first draft of Musa Dagh.
Franz Werfel in Florence, May 1933
True, he felt most abandoned and lonely in this moment of the “last battle with a monstrous world,” as he wrote from the Haus Mahler to his “sweet, sweet life,” but on the other hand it pleased him greatly that Johannes Hollnsteiner[465] was with Alma, as he had “a great, great deal of love” for “genuine and serious priests.”[466] Hollnsteiner was a Catholic professor of theology and a close confidant of Cardinal Innitzer, archbishop of Vienna. During Werfel’s months away in Santa Margherita, Alma had entered into an intimate relationship with this slender, bespectacled man of the cloth who now visited the house at Hohe Warte almost daily. When Werfel, rarely enough, spent any time at Steinfeldgasse 2, he was certainly not unaware of the somewhat bizarre love story unfolding between his wife and the thirty-eight-year-old theologian, but he was able to contain his jealousy: he did not begrudge the fifty-four-year-old Alma this late passion.
At the end of May he completed the first draft of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Almost immediately, and while still in Breitenstein, he embarked on the second draft of this work, which had grown into his largest and stylistically most convincing literary accomplishment to date. Now he discussed the individual chapters with his friend Ernst Polak, who warned him against modeling such characters as the priest Ter Haigasun; or Krikor, the apothecary; or the wild deserter Kilikian; or the schoolmaster Oskanian after the Jews they had both known in Prague. Polak advised him[467] to mask the characteristics of these Armenian personalities a little more, and after some hesitation Werfel agreed.
He tried to avoid the kind of black-and-white narrative in which the Armenians would be given only positive attributes, the Turks nothing but negative ones. In marginalia to his manuscript, he frequently reminded himself: “Don’t be polemical about the Turks... Enver [Pasha] has to be right in some instances.” The novel stressed the existence of dissident Turkish intellectuals and Islamic clergy who deeply regretted the turn of political events in their country and loathed their government. Thus a doctor from Istanbul told Pastor Lepsius that the majority of the Turkish nation did not at all support the intrigues of Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, and Mustafa Kemal.
Before Musa Dagh went to the printers, Werfel wrote a third and a fourth draft, revising some passages of the three books into which the novel was divided — ”Coming Events,” “The Struggle of the Weak,” “Disaster, Rescue, The End” — as many as eight times.[468] It was like climbing a mountain, he told Alma, and every time he had the sense that he had reached a high point, the next one beckoned, “and yet the summit seems ever farther away.” Nevertheless, he was optimistic, and the second volume would be “a thousand times more exciting than the first.” He worked daily from ten in the morning until 1 A.M., felt periodically ill and exhausted, and subjected his constitution to further wear and tear by excessive smoking of cigars and cigarettes. “Nicotine is my bane,” he said in one of his letters of lamentation to Alma.
After finally completing the novel, Werfel started worrying about his publisher’s possible lack of interest in it, as he told his wife in a November letter from Prague.[469] He felt that Paul Zsolnay would hardly be able to consider the “Chimborazo of a work” with the empathy and understanding it required. He also expected Zsolnay to print a far smaller first edition than originally planned, due to possible cancellations of German prepublication orders. “I really don’t have any party on my side in this world.” He went on to say that he felt betrayed by Zsolnay — after all, the name Werfel had earned the house not only “a lot of money” during the ten years of its existence but also “its only honorable recognition.”
Toward the end of 1933 anti-Semitic slogans proliferated on billboards and walls in Prague. Rudolf Werfel was afraid[470] that this rabble-rousing would grow more intense even in Czechoslovakia. In the German Reich, in yet another Reichstag election, the Nazis won 92 percent of the popular vote. Werfel’s sister Mizzi arrived from Zurich to visit her parents, and Franz had a violent political disagreement with her. Ferdinand Rieser, Mizzi’s husband, had been the director of the Zurich Schauspielhaus since 1926 and was responsible for the theater’s repertory, together with his very ambitious wife. Mizzi now wanted to present only plays that were directed against Hitler’s Germany and Nazi cultural policies. This caused her broth
er to fly into a rage: under no circumstances, insisted Werfel, was the theater to be misused as a political arena.
The second sister: Mizzi Rieser, née Marianne Werfel
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh appeared at the end of November 1933. In Austria and Switzerland the reading public received the novel with practically unanimous acclaim. By contrast, official reaction in Germany was negative and vitriolic: even the least sensitive reader had to understand the parallels between Young Turk nationalism and Nazi ideology. Even though no publicity for the book was permitted within the boundaries of the Reich, German booksellers sold all the copies they had ordered.[471] That it was at all possible to market a work by the “burned author” Werfel was one of the contradictions that prevailed during those first months after Hitler’s rise to power.
On the initiative of Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, the Reich Association of German Writers had been founded in the summer of 1933, under the aegis of the so-called Reich Chamber for Literature. In the fall of 1933, all German writers were called on to register with this new association, whose members had to be “of German blood” and politically acceptable. In December 1933, shortly after the publication of Musa Dagh, Werfel wrote to the association’s general directorate in Berlin, applying for “membership in this Reich Association.”[472] Once again, as with the earlier declaration of loyalty, his first concern may have been the dissemination of Musa Dagh in Germany; nevertheless, it is hard to imagine how he could possibly have hoped to be accepted by the association.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 20