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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  “Did you tell him that Alma was a fervent supporter of Franco in the Civil War?” Albrecht Joseph calls out from an adjacent room. “And the affair with Hollnsteiner? That she rented a small apartment for him and herself — with Werfel’s money? Where she served champagne and caviar to her lover?”

  “Well, that gossip’s not that important,” Anna says. “But I have to admit that Hollnsteiner was to some extent responsible for Alma’s reactionary politics. She was really infatuated with him, probably mostly because he was a priest, and the cardinal’s right-hand man, and yet she had managed to seduce him. Yes, Werfel demonstrated his nobility and native wisdom in that affair: even though he knew about it — of course he did — he tolerated it without saying a word.”

  “One of Alma’s rules of life,” adds Albrecht, who has joined us at the kitchen table, “was ‘Whoever needs help does not deserve it!’ And another one of her maxims — borrowed from Nietzsche, if I’m not mistaken — was ‘If someone falls, give him a kick in the ass while he’s down!’“

  “Mammi used to say, ‘I know everybody at first glance.’ But she didn’t even know me. Much later, she confessed to me, ‘If I had known you as I know you now, I wouldn’t have treated you so miserably.’ That really shocked me — because it showed that she had done it consciously, all those years. For instance, when I received the Grand Prix de Sculpture at the Paris World Exposition in 1937, she hardly acknowledged it. She didn’t treat Manon any differently, really — she never recognized her uniqueness. Everything that she (and Werfel, too) later wrote about Mutzi was essentially dishonest and dictated by their bad conscience. Alma decided, ‘Manon, you’ll study Italian and become a teacher of Italian.’ But Mutzi had extraordinary theatrical talent — her greatest desire was to become an actress.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting,” says Albrecht, “but I just remembered a story from the thirties in Bad Ischl, when I was working on a film script with Rudolf Forster. One morning, to my surprise, I ran into Werfel on a bridge there, and he told me about his Jeremiah novel. He had just gotten started on it. He was grinning like a schoolboy playing hooky: he said that Alma had wanted him to work in Vienna or in Breitenstein, but that he had preferred to retire here, to the Salzkammergut. That same night I was sitting at a table in some inn, and I heard this voice behind me: ‘All right — a week without any results, that’s reasonable. Even two weeks. But almost three weeks without a line?!’ It was, of course, Alma. Next morning I ran into Werfel again, on the same bridge. Now he looked sad. He sighed and said, ‘No more good times. My wife has arrived from Vienna. She’ll take me back there tonight.’“

  “I’ll tell you more another time,” says Anna Mahler. “We have to take a break for a couple of days. It’s too strenuous for me, digging in the past like this. I can’t sleep at night. Next time I’ll tell you about the catastrophic year 1938. But not today, not today.”

  1938

  Early in 1938 the Werfels spent a few vacation weeks on the Mediterranean island of Capri, staying in a suite at the Hotel Morgano & Tiberio Palace. “I’ve been rushed and abstracted,” Werfel wrote to Stefan Zweig at the end of January, “and then really ill, for weeks. Only here in Capri am I beginning to come back to myself.”[537] He wrote numerous poems: one of them was called “The Friend of the World Does Not Know How to Grow Older” (“Der Weltfreund versteht nicht zu altern”).[538] He was also planning a collection of his essays[539] since 1915 and wrote a prophetic new essay, “Thoughts on Tomorrow’s War” (“Betrachtung über den Krieg von morgen”).[540] The impending world war, whose advent Werfel no longer doubted, would not be an unequivocal “national war,” as the last one had been, but “a comprehensive civil war across national fronts.” While in 1914, when World War I broke out, certain conventions were still observed, at least in principle, and despite all the cruelty there still was some respect for international law, the second time around only the law of strength would prevail and, by means of broadcast propaganda, spread across all countries, across all boundaries. “If no miracle happens, the white nations will be buried not only in a hail of projectiles but in the ashen rain of lies.”

  The Werfels made several visits to nearby Naples[541] and excursions to the countryside around it. They met Tina Orchard again, the heroine of The Pascarella Family, whose husband — ”Arthur Campbell” in the novel — had died not long before. Werfel now met Tina’s family for the first time and immediately made notes of scenes and dialogues for a possible sequel to his favorite book.[542] He drafted a couple of chapters, “Placido Visits the Sibyl” (“Placido bei der Sibylle”), “The Keening Bell” (“Die schrillende Glocke”) — the latter intended as the projected climax, a description of the death of Tina’s sister Annunziata. He also wanted to introduce, as a new main character, nine-year-old Franca[543], one of Mrs. Orchard’s nieces, whose “wild imagination” had enchanted him.

  On February 12, 1938, while the Werfels were still in Capri, Adolf Hitler and Kurt von Schuschnigg met at very short notice for talks at Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. Hitler insisted on the unconditional fulfillment of the agreements made in July 1936 concerning the immediate release of all imprisoned Nazis and demanded more evidence of a pro-German policy on the part of the Austrian government: the Hitler salute was to be legalized, the swastika flag declared nonsubversive. To prevent Hitler from making good his threat of sending troops into Austria, Schuschnigg accepted the ultimatum.

  Even though Alma at first wanted to go back to Vienna immediately in order to get a clearer picture of the situation, she let another two weeks go by in Naples before her departure. These were two weeks of indecision, two weeks of fear for Austria’s independence, during which the Werfels distracted themselves from their anxiety by visiting the Teatro San Carlo, the opera house of Naples, almost every night.

  Werfel found it unusually difficult to part from Alma[544] and needed days to recover his psychological equilibrium. Soon after her departure, he wrote to her that, without her, he “truly felt like a man with only one arm and one leg.” His longing was as great as it had not been since the early days of their relationship. At first Alma had only reassuring news to report from Vienna, where there was a general upsurge of hope after an optimistic speech by Schuschnigg to Parliament.

  Disturbed by the noise[545] of neighbors behind the thin walls of the Hotel Morgano & Tiberio Palace, Werfel dedicated himself, with his customary intensity and sharply raised consumption of nicotine, to a new play, The Lost Mother, or The Foundling of an Evil Time (Die verlorene Mutter oder Der Findling einer schlimmen Zeit).[546] The play centered on the fate of a young man who, after twenty years of aimless wandering, meets his mother, whom he had believed dead. The project, Werfel thought, was rather like a popular “romantic horror” story, and he was afraid — to an unusual degree — of “sounding the wrong notes,” as he confided to Alma in a letter. He was fully aware of “the dangers of sentimentality and trashiness” inherent in the subject, yet he could not desist and completed the first act as if under some compulsion. With this play, “a classical drama disguised as a modern comedy,” he was aiming for a big theatrical hit, but, on the other hand — as he openly admitted to Alma — there just wasn’t any other idea he found urgent enough.

  Alma advised him to get started on the sequel to The Pascarella Family, but Werfel did not feel like taking that advice: “I can’t get going on the second Pascarella novel for a while yet. With me, an incubation period is essential. Something has to be generated unconsciously before it appears clearly in the mind... I am an anachronism in an age of machers who can get to work as soon as they have a subject. Without inspiration and inner heat, I am less talented than those types. My associations don’t start moving until the emotion is there.” Besides, the Pascarella II idea was not suitable for the United States, as the first novel had not appeared there. And it was from the United States that the author who had been banned in Germany expected his salvation: “There just is no other real help for us except
success in America!”

  At the beginning of the year, the Jeremiah novel, Hearken Unto the Voice, had been published by Viking Press in New York, and Ben Huebsch sent a telegram saying that prepublication orders and first reviews had been most encouraging. At first Werfel did not want to believe in an American success for his epic on the prophets: although he thought the book “the weightiest and most complex of all of mine,”[547] he did not assume “that this untam [Yiddish-Viennese word for someone hounded by bad luck, an awkward person; here it refers to the prophet Jeremiah], the most grandiose in all of history, would achieve a posthumous success.”

  In Austria, the political situation was moving toward a flashpoint. Chancellor Schuschnigg found himself the target of ever more aggressive polemics from Berlin. “The Nazis’ new wave of attack” was being treated by the Austrian government, as Werfel feared, with excessively “great fear and kid gloves.” In his opinion Schuschnigg should have “called for an instant plebiscite” immediately upon his return from his talks with Hitler. It took the Austrian chancellor until March 9 to see his way to that decision: he called upon the Austrian people to decide their own fate on March 13. If the majority would vote for the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich, Schuschnigg (who was counting on an overwhelming show of support for the sovereignty of the Austrian state) would respect it. Word of the referendum triggered hectic reactions in Berlin: German troops were massed on the border with Austria, and Schuschnigg was asked to postpone the referendum and, finally, to resign. On March 11 the chancellor of Austria did resign, declaring in his last radio speech that he was yielding to force. The following night, a National Socialist government was proclaimed under the leadership of Arthur Seyss-Inquart. On the morning of March 12, the German Wehrmacht marched into Austria, greeted with jubilation by most of the populace. The Austrian army joined the German troops, and Adolf Hitler’s dream of joining his homeland to the German Reich had come true. Hitler entered Vienna in triumph on March 15, feted by hundreds of thousands who lined the main streets of the city.

  “This Sunday, March 13, my heart is almost breaking with pain, even though Austria is not my homeland,” Werfel wrote in his Capri diary.[548] “O house in Breitenstein, where I worked for twenty years, shall I never see you again?” An attack of angina accompanied by a high fever had been “divine succor” — thanks to “feverish somnolence,” he had experienced “these abominable days that are now forcing me for the third time since ‘33 into a new epoch of life” only “as if through a veil.”[549] And he wrote, on the last page of the first act of The Lost Mother, “The Finis Austriae renders this piece a fragment.”

  Alma fled Vienna[550], going first to Prague with her daughter Anna, then on to Milan, where she was reunited with a despairing Franz Werfel. They then went to Zurich[551], where Werfel’s sister Marianne Rieser had invited them to stay in her villa in Rüschlikon. Little by little, the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to Werfel: more deeply shocking news arrived from Austria every day. Two days after Hitler’s entry into Vienna, Werfel’s friend Egon Friedell had taken his life by throwing himself out of the window of his apartment. Kurt von Schuschnigg had been arrested immediately. Csokor, Zuckmayer, Horváth, and most other members of Werfel’s circle of friends left Austria within hours; all who began their flight too late were captured and disappeared into prisons and concentration camps. In Vienna alone, 67,000 people were arrested in the first few days after Hitler’s entry. Because of his loyalty to Schuschnigg, Johannes Hollnsteiner was deported to Dachau as a political prisoner. Vienna’s Jewish quarter in the second district became the scene of pogromlike atrocities committed by the Storm Troopers and their cohorts. Throughout the city and the whole country, open season had been declared overnight on all Jewish men, women, and children.

  Soon after the completed Anschluss, the Viennese dailies[552], duly brought into line, wrote about the “Werfel” (a wordplay on Würfel, or die) being cast: now that the “Jewish charade” was over, thank God, even that Jew from Prague, Schuschnigg’s favorite, Franz Werfel, with his arrogant aristocratic crowd of admirers, would “never rise again” in Greater Germany.

  Werfel had fallen into a state of absolute indecisiveness and spiritual paralysis. In April he wrote to Kurt Wolff[553] saying that he had now spent three weeks in Zurich “without having made a definite decision for the future.” In the meantime, on the tenth of the month, a well-organized referendum had been held under Nazi auspices: 99.7 percent of the Austrians said yes to the Anschluss of the “Ostmark” (as Austria was now called) to the German Reich.

  In the Rieser household[554], there were tensions between Alma and her sister-in-law Marianne, not least due to Alma’s frequent anti-Semitic remarks. After attending to basic passport formalities, the Werfels left Switzerland at the end of April and went first to Paris; then, a week later, via Amsterdam to London.[555] “It really doesn’t matter to us what happens and where we live,” Werfel had written to Alma as recently as early March. “We are at home everywhere.” But now, after the catastrophe, after the loss of the working studio in Breitenstein and the villa at Hohe Warte, the search for a new home proved to be a painful and demeaning reality.

  In mid-May, Gottfried Bermann Fischer[556] visited Werfel in a London hotel. The son-in-law of the publisher Samuel Fischer had become the director of S. Fischer Verlag in 1934 but had to emigrate from Berlin to Vienna in 1936 and then flee Austria in the days of the Anschluss. He was now staying in Stockholm, hoping to be able to establish Bermann-Fischer Verlag there. He had come to England to persuade Werfel to sign a publishing contract: after the coup in Vienna, Werfel’s relationship with Paul Zsolnay Verlag seemed unclear, and there had been no communication between the author and his publisher, who was still in Vienna. At the time Werfel had no plans for an extended work[557], but he agreed with every point of Fischer’s proposal, which guaranteed him a monthly income.

  Werfel liked London[558] much better than he had expected and tried to persuade his wife to choose the city as their place of exile: he felt that Anna Mahler’s decision to establish her new home there was an additional reason. Alma, however, absolutely refused to remain in Great Britain and insisted on going back to France.

  In Paris the Werfels took lodgings in a small but comfortable hotel close to the Madeleine, the Opera, and the Gare St. Lazare.[559] At the beginning of June 1938 the Royal-Madeleine, on rue Pasquier, became their new home. They met fellow exiles every day, in the streets, cafés, and restaurants; the city was teeming with émigrés. Often fighting with each other, these people who had fled persecution in Germany and Austria — monarchists and communists, Schuschnigg supporters and socialists — often shared the smallest spaces and anxiously waited for what else this, the most difficult time in their lives, would bring.

  On June 1, the day the Werfels arrived in Paris, their friend Ödön von Horváth died in an unusually absurd manner: during a violent storm, he was killed by a heavy branch from a shattered chestnut tree on the Champs-Elysées. “I have seen the face of a dead man,” Werfel noted in his diary.[560] “It was in the hospital mortuary. A terrible cellar... Exhausted by the brooding heat of the summer’s day, the mourners crowded into that narrow and bare cellar space. They were mostly writers, refugees, exiles, people without hope in a strange land... In all of their faces there was so much pain, so much distraction and destruction, that everyone seemed to shrink back from the rest... If it didn’t sound so horrible, one might say that, among all these yellow and greenish gray faces who had gathered to mourn him, [Horváth] looked like the healthiest, handsomest one.”

  The burial took place[561] in the cemetery of the Parisian suburb of St. Ouen. Here, too, the writers in French exile foregathered: Werfel, Joseph Roth, Carl Zuckmayer, Walter Mehring, and others. The brief eulogies were drowned out by trains thundering past the cemetery. All his life, Horváth had liked trains, and now his grave lay in the immediate vicinity of railroad tracks: every train that left the Gare du Nord passed by it
.

  In mid-June[562], Werfel moved away from the humid heat of the metropolis to the suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye, about twenty minutes by train from the center of Paris. He had felt quite ill and weak for several days, and hoped to recuperate from what he suspected to be nicotine poisoning. In the Hôtel Pavillon Henri IV[563], an annex to the building in which Louis XIV was born, he took a very large room with a fine view across the Seine and the outskirts of Paris: he could spot the tip of the Eiffel Tower on the horizon. The hotel was near the Château St. Germain, where in 1919 an Austrian delegation had signed the peace conditions set by the Allies, sealing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the fragmentation of Central Europe.

  Werfel took daily walks in the large park of the château and the even larger oak forest that surrounded it, and slowly recovered from the physical and psychological ordeals of the last weeks and months. Alma was meanwhile traveling[564] in the South of France, looking for a better place for both of them. She liked the climate of this region, which is similar to that of the Ligurian coast, and thought it would be better for Werfel’s health and work to gain more distance from the excitements and strains of Paris. Her choice was the small fishing town of Sanary-sur-Mer, near Marseilles, where painters, writers, and philosophers who had left Germany since 1933 had already established a kind of artists’ colony in exile. The first to arrive in St. Cyr, right next to Sanary, had been the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe; Heinrich and Thomas Mann, René Schickele, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Arthur Koestler, and others followed. After a brief search, Alma, assisted by her friend Anne Marie Meier-Graefe, the art historian’s wife, located what she felt was a suitable place: an old Saracen tower with a little garden behind it, situated high above Sanary. Le Moulin Gris towered above the lovely bay like a lighthouse.