Jeremiad
“Yesterday, late at night[513], after I finished the introductory and transitional notes for the American edition of my novellas[514], to be called Twilight of a World, I lay down with the unpleasant feeling of having no inspired idea, no real vision for a new work, and having to suffer through a time of painful idleness,” Franz Werfel wrote in his notebook in late April 1936. A short while earlier, he had joined Alma and Johannes Hollnsteiner[515] in Ticino, at the Muralto Park Hotel near Locarno. He had been suffering for months from this “work void,” as he called his uninspired state. While his wife had helped him in previous years in the search for new subjects and ideas, she was now almost exclusively engaged with the theologian Hollnsteiner and his world of thought — she had even encouraged Hollnsteiner to write a book.
“I thought of the legends that I had started writing the previous tragic summer after Mutzi’s [Manon Gropius’s] death,” the note continues.[516] Under the title “The Intercessor of the Dead,” (“Die Fürbitterin der Toten”), Werfel then wrote an outline of the life of the “miraculous virgin Christina von Trugen,”[517] a saint who had lived in Holland in the twelfth century. However, he decided, that same day and after eighteen pages of manuscript, that he did not want to proceed with this material “for the time being” — mainly because he was reluctant to “make the story of a saint who is still being venerated... the subject of nonauthentic inventions of my own epic.” But one day later, on May 1, Werfel had an idea[518]: “True, many things within me are warning me not to undertake such a boundless, dangerous, and probably thankless task. But my head started hammering and spinning away. The plan would be to write a novel on the prophets, the proclaimers of God, probably an epic on the prophet Jeremiah, as it is the most suitable in terms of drama and event. So I went to a bookshop to buy a copy of the Bible. I opened it absent-mindedly. To the page: ‘The Book of Jeremiah.’“
In the weeks that followed, first in Muralto, then in Bad Ischl, an Austrian spa, Werfel started making notes for this major novel. He immersed himself in works on Jewish history and the life story of the prophet Jeremiah, and once again, as he had while working on Paul Among the Jews, read Bible and Talmud commentaries. He studied the history of Babylon and old Egyptian writings, the Egyptian Book of the Dead in particular. Mapping out sequences of events, he outlined individual characters and invented a frame story, as he had in the case of The Pure in Heart. A member of a group of English tourists, a writer by the name of Clayton Jeeves, becomes haunted by insistent déjà vu[519] experiences on the site of the first two temples of the Jews in Jerusalem. “Now it’s here again, that feeling. I have lived through this once before... Here the novel of the Jerusalem of the prophets begins. It ends, after perhaps a thousand pages, with Mr. Jeeves’s realization... that his fear of the Dejavue [sic] was really unfounded.” Nevertheless, it was Werfel’s plan to have Jeeves experience the entire, fascinating, story of the life and sufferings of Jeremiah in just a few seconds. “Even if this’ll only be a ‘frame,’ the workmanship of that frame has to be so surprising and tight that even the astute reader won’t be able to slip away.”
Werfel already saw one of the novel’s supplementary characters[520] “during my very first moment of concentration.” He is a friend of Jeremiah’s, not a prophet but a “penetrator of God” who is convinced that “there is no salvation” — the closer you get to God, the more dangerous the chasms opening up in front of the seeker. Franz Kafka was the model for this tall young man “with a low forehead and burning eyes.”
He wrote to Max Brod from Bad Ischl that he was “living” inside a great new epic work, trying his hand at a subject that he would “probably fail” to master. At the end of June 1936 he went back to Breitenstein, where he continued work on the first draft of the novel. He spent the whole summer in Haus Mahler, often writing for ten hours at a stretch and producing hundreds of manuscript pages in a matter of weeks. A deeply Jewish book with profound insight into the history of Israel, it was permeated by great love for the Jewish people. It also replied to all those critics who had, for years now, blamed him for his silence on the subject of Nazism and for his Christian sympathies. Its language possessed a power Werfel had rarely managed before, with the exception of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Jeremiah’s flight from God, his descent into the Egyptian world of the dead, his ascension to Babylonian astral spheres, his final resignation and acceptance of the prophet’s fate imposed on him by God — all these scenes are among the most compelling in all of Werfel’s work.[521] At the same time, he managed to make the novel into a coded call for resistance, with the figure of Jeremiah a symbol of those able to resist and question the might of the state and the smugness of the mighty.
While the novel on the prophet was taking shape, Karl Kraus died in Vienna[522] at the age of sixty-two, without ever having reached a reconciliation with Werfel. Adolf Hitler and Kurt von Schuschnigg signed an agreement in which the Third Reich acknowledged the sovereignty of the state of Austria; in return, Schuschnigg promised an amnesty for jailed Austrian Nazis and declared himself willing to accept into future cabinets politicians of German nationalist persuasion.
In mid-July there was a military coup in Spain, in the wake of the assassination of Carlo Sotelo, a leader of the monarchists. The coup was soon followed by the outbreak of civil war. Werfel’s sympathies were with the lawfully elected, leftist government of Spain, but Alma sided with the rebels, militarily supported by both Hitler and Mussolini and led by Francisco Franco. While the Spanish Civil War raged on with increasing heat, the Werfels, too, had almost daily and extremely vehement fights over their political convictions, which were drifting ever further apart.
“Title still undecided,” Werfel noted on the title page of the first draft of the Jeremiah novel[523], completed in Baden near Vienna in mid-November 1936. “The Harbinger of the Lord??? The Terrible Voice??? The Eternal Hunter??? The Gold Refiner???” Werfel’s epic ends with the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the deportation of the Jewish people to fifty years of exile in Babylon. Jeremiah has prophesied this apocalypse to the people of Israel, but they have not heeded him. Now the prophet follows the punished people into exile. As a final consolation, Werfel lets God speak to His messenger: “Look upon the sign I send to thee in the midst of these abominations, so that thou mayest live! Thou hast suffered so that thou wilt be mine, and I, thine. Your victory groweth from defeat to defeat, so that ye may live!”
With his Jeremiah novel, clearly written against Alma’s wishes and as a polemic against Johannes Hollnsteiner’s philosophy, Werfel himself was trying to be a warning voice, more consciously so as he proceeded, in a time whose everyday political realities impressed him as deeply ominous. He feared that a new apocalypse would take place if the excited and propagandized masses of Europe could not reach a point of calm and reflection. A modern Nebuchadnezzar, Adolf Hitler, could unleash it, and its consequences could be more horrifying than the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., even more fateful than those of World War I.
Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel, ca. 1937
While he was working on the second draft of his novel, in the spring of 1937, Werfel received the highest Austrian decoration for achievement in the arts and sciences, on Kurt von Schuschnigg’s initiative. The chancellor visited[524] “his” poet laureate regularly at Hohe Warte and liked to hear him read poems, not only Werfel’s own but also the German classics. Occasionally he even discussed political matters, and both Werfel and Alma repeatedly encouraged him in his decision to resist pressure from Hitler’s Germany as much as possible. In spite of his fears of catastrophe — yet naively confident that the Third Reich would not interfere with a “strong” Austria — Werfel went on enjoying his role as a favored child of the Austro-fascist corporate state.
At the end of April 1937, a few days before the destruction of the Basque capital of Guernica by German fighter-bomber planes of the Condor Legion, Werfel completed the second draft
[525] of his novel and gave it the final title: Hearken Unto the Voice (Höret die Stimme). His quarrels with Alma over their contrary attitudes toward the Spanish Civil War had escalated to the point of marital crisis: Werfel retreated to Zurich, to his sister Marianne Rieser[526], while Alma contemplated the sale of the villa at Hohe Warte. She said that she regarded it as a “house of misfortune” in any case, and besides, her husband had never liked to work there. The Werfels agreed to rent out the mansion for the summer, and Alma started packing their possessions into countless crates. In the middle of June they threw a kind of farewell garden party[527] that continued into an evening of new wine and song, to which they had once more invited the so-called elite of Viennese society, members of the nobility, tycoons, politicians, and artists.
Werfel attended the International PEN Congress[528] in Paris on June 21-24. Lion Feuchtwanger, who had emigrated from Germany into exile in southern France years earlier, gave a short speech in which he attacked the reign of terror instituted by the Nazis. Werfel, who spoke immediately after Feuchtwanger, attacked the latter because of his trip to the Soviet Union, where the writer had been received by Joseph Stalin; he accused Feuchtwanger of condemning Hitler’s Germany in the Pariser Tageszeitung while deliberately not saying a word about the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks. Despite this vehement difference of opinion[529], the two writers became friends during the days of the congress and enjoyed their impassioned political-philosophical arguments.
At the same congress, Werfel’s American publisher, Ben Huebsch, introduced his author to James Joyce[530]: they celebrated the meeting at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées and discovered, at a late hour, the one thing they truly had in common — a passion for Italian opera. Joyce, who had once wanted to become an opera singer, performed one Verdi aria after another. The later it got, and the more deserted the restaurant, the louder they sang. Joyce’s son joined in to form a trio.
Invited by the League of Nations’ organization for intellectual cooperation, Werfel gave a speech[531] in Paris on the subject of the conference, “The Future of Literature” (“Die Zukunft der Literatur”), in which he advocated the establishment of a “World Academy of Writers and Thinkers” that would voice its opposition to the current widespread “barbarization of life.” Like the Christian synods, this academy would provide an antidote to the “thundering avalanche of propaganda” and thus become an “essential organ for peace.” The delegates rejected Werfel’s naive proposal almost unanimously.
“After I had been working for an average of twelve hours a day, every day, for fourteen months to complete my major epic Hearken Unto the Voice,” Werfel told a newspaper reporter in October 1937, “I was so utterly exhausted that I had actually decided not to start anything new and to avoid anything that could possibly inspire me to do so.”[532] But no later than July, when he was back in Breitenstein, he was plotting a verse drama about civil war, set in no particular period, to be called Our House (Unser Haus). But that project was set aside when he happened to read a newspaper item “taken from the British press” that engaged his imagination so actively that he could see his “newest dramatic piece like an apparition.” “All thoughts of rest were then forgotten; it literally forced me to my desk.”
In a few summer weeks in 1937 Werfel produced an embarrassingly bad play, One Night[533], the drama of a triangle between Felizitas, her husband Eduard, a landowner, and Gabriel, the love of Felizitas’s youth and also an old friend of Eduard’s. The landowner’s jealousy culminates in the murder of his rival, but the latter is only in a state of suspended animation and returns to new life on Halloween night.
Each of the play’s characters[534] corresponded to a fundamental concept in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, much admired by Werfel. Virtue, Good, and Evil were reflected and personified. Elements from Werfel’s one-act play The Visit from Elysium, written when he was only twenty, resurfaced twenty-seven years later: the former Hedwig corresponds to the desirable Felizitas; Lukas, the returnee from the land of the dead, to Gabriel, the man in suspended animation; and the gross and violent civil servant of the first play to Eduard, the crude owner of the castle. Tensions and scenes of jealousy that had taken place between Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel were also woven into the play: as had been the case with Alma and her lover, music is the particular element that unites Felizitas and Gabriel. After all these years, the trauma of the death of their son reappears: we are told that Felizitas’s only child died a few hours after its birth.
Max Reinhardt, who had returned from the Eternal Road disaster in New York for a short stay in Europe, immediately started rehearsals for the world premiere of One Night at the Josefstadt Theater. Werfel was a frequent participant in the rehearsals but did not always agree with the director and had to prevent him from indulging in overly melodramatic notions. The play opened in early October 1937, with Helene Thimig, Attila Hörbiger, and Anton Edthofer in the main parts. It was an instant success. The reviewers, it is true, concentrated mainly on the reception given in the theater’s gala rooms by its director, Ernst Lothar, and his wife, Adrienne Gessner. In addition to Chancellor Schuschnigg and many of his cabinet ministers, diplomats, and heads of departments, the guests also included Deputy Police Chief Johann Presser, the same man who in November 1918, then only a lowly commissioner, had interrogated Franz Werfel and threatened him with expulsion from Austria.
Hotel Südbahn, Semmering: Franz Werfel, Frau Hauptmann, two unidentified men, Ernst Lothar; Alma Mahler-Werfel, Gerhart Hauptmann, Adrienne Gessner
With this opening and the simultaneous publication of the Jeremiah novel, Werfel’s fame within Austria’s borders reached its zenith. Nevertheless the poet laureate now asked himself with increasing urgency whether he should not leave the country, in view of the threat of a Nazi coup. That question hung in the air at a reunion dinner[535] at the Franziskanerkeller in Vienna with his former publisher Kurt Wolff, in November 1937. Besides Wolff and his wife, who had emigrated from Germany in 1933, the orchestra conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was also present but seemed restrained and did not say much. At any rate it was courageous of Furtwängler to appear publicly in the company of such a renowned Jewish writer: any of the waiters could have been a spy. Werfel’s extreme nervousness was contagious, although Alma was apparently untouched by the oppressive atmosphere and talked optimistically about her good relations with the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer, and Chancellor Schuschnigg. She said that she wouldn’t dream of emigrating; Vienna was her home and would remain so. There was no question of her leaving all her possessions and fleeing the country.
“Of Man’s True Happiness” (“Von der reinsten Glückseligkeit des Menschen”)[536] was the title of a lecture Werfel gave in early December 1937 to the Austrian section of the League of Nations in Vienna. He lamented the fact that art had been condemned to a life in the catacombs, because only by a rediscovery of the true values — the “visionary nature” of art — could mankind awaken from its present “nightmare.” “The neobarbaric fanaticism of the hate-fed masses” could be neutralized only by means of a conscious remembering of the cultures of antiquity. The enjoyment of art was not only a pastime, Zeitvertreib, but, as he said he had found out for himself, “Art is the opposite... It is a Todvertreib, a way of banishing death.”
My mobile home is parked in Beverly Glen Canyon in Los Angeles, on a slight incline — the bed tilts, my feet lie lower than my head. The heat of the morning sun and the chirping of the cicadas wake me up, and I take a short walk uphill to Anna Mahler’s modest, slightly sagging frame house. Here, on bumpy dead-end Oletha Lane, the sculptor has created most of her works of the last three decades; many of them populate a concrete surface at the bottom of a steep orange grove, like mysterious alien organisms.
“I had a hard time falling asleep last night. I had nightmares after all the matters we’ve been talking about,” Anna says as we sit down to breakfast in her kitchen. “All those suppressed
and forgotten things reemerge. Why don’t we give the memories a rest for a few days?” But when I agree, she immediately goes on: “When my mother first met Werfel, her political orientation wasn’t all that far to the right. That only came about with her resistance to Werfel, when he returned to her after his escapades during the revolution in Vienna. After that, they kept having political arguments, but even those only really came to a head during the Spanish Civil War. The daily battles between Werfel and Mammi (every year I spent a couple of weeks on the Semmering and witnessed quite a few) were horrible, and Alma kept growing stronger, Werfel, weaker. You see, she had worked out a very clever strategy: she never tried any new arguments but simply repeated the same opinions over and over again. Werfel kept trying new arguments. It was stupid of him to try to convince her. Then, after hours of embittered yelling, he lost his patience and ran out of the house, still seething, while Alma proceeded to attend to entirely different matters with the greatest composure, paying no attention to the fight they had had. He would come back, still upset, not relaxed in the least, and would start roaring again. Alma, fresh and in a good mood, received him graciously, as if she had won the argument. That was her strength: she didn’t really take the political disagreements seriously, while Werfel was ready to shed his heart’s blood over them. She used these quarrels against him. Werfel and I would commiserate in whispers behind closed doors. And the Spanish Civil War lasted for such a long time! I often met Werfel in Vienna, in one of the less-crowded coffeehouses. He would call and ask me to come and meet him. Back then, I was way over to the left in my political views. And he would tell me, every time, that he couldn’t stand living with Alma anymore and wanted a total separation. He was really ready to leave her. But he didn’t have the strength to do it. He went back to her every time. His weakness, his tendency always to give in — those were the negative aspects of his character. He submitted to Alma, quite consciously. It wasn’t good for either one of them — a lot of the time she really treated him as if she were his governess.”
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 23