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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  “When Werfel died I was still living in London,” says Anna, “and it was I who had to tell his sister Hanna the news that her beloved brother had died. And she had this fit of rage, the most tremendous I’ve ever seen anyone have. And the main target of that rage was God. That God had been able to do this to her! Although she had kept her vow and stopped smoking! God had done this to her! An awful scene. Hanna was thrashing about on her bed. For her, the worst thing was, of course, that she hadn’t been able to see Franz one more time, now that the war was over at long last.

  “I myself came to the United States years later, in 1950, when Mammi was no longer living in California but in a small apartment in New York. And every time I visited her, she would say at least twice, ‘If Mahler walked in that door now, I’d go with him immediately!’ One thing is true, of course: Alma didn’t grow any more with Werfel. She had a strong personality. She was much stronger than he. She needed someone like Mahler to put up enough resistance. With Kokoschka, there was a kind of balance, and that was good for her. Yet she sent him off to war. And Hollnsteiner? When he visited America once, after the war, Alma refused even to see him. When she was eighty-five — that was in 1964, shortly before she died — Alma told me a dream that haunted her: Franz Werfel had come walking down the stairs in the hallway of a building and had passed her without a word, without even looking at her, even though he almost brushed by her as he kept on descending those stairs. It hurt her terribly that he had pretended she didn’t exist. She pondered and pondered why that had happened; and then, three days later, she told me, ‘I’ve got it! I’m sure there’s another woman behind it all!’“

  After my final visit to Anna Mahler and Albrecht Joseph, I return once more to the university library basement in Los Angeles that houses most of Franz Werfel’s literary estate. For weeks the boxes have been piling up on my desk, and I have been going through letters and jottings, notebooks and diaries. Once more I pick up the original manuscript of the “travel novel” — and find, between two of its pages, some dried flowers that Alma had given her husband for good luck more than forty years before, when he resumed work on Star of the Unborn in the middle of summer 1944.

  In an Italian notebook from the year 1932, I find some hastily scribbled sentences that read like a premonition of Star of the Unborn. It seems to me that these words contain Franz Werfel’s credo, the leitmotiv of his oeuvre: “Sometimes I have such a strange feeling in the area of my heart. Be conscious of every second — something says to me — write down everything, if possible. After all, you are not from and of this world but a visitor from distant, ancient centuries.”

  Box 34 contains a plaster cast of Werfel’s right hand. The fingers are thick and short, the thumb uncommonly wide; there is an ugly signet ring. I find a package wrapped in black velvet and open it carefully. It is a moment that could well be in Star of the Unborn. I see Franz Werfel’s death mask in yellow-white plaster — here, in the fluorescent light, deep down under the earth of California. I stare at the calm and gentle features for a long time; then, lightly, I touch the very high, deeply wrinkled forehead. I touch the eyebrows, the strong nose, thick lips, double chin. I run my fingertips over the closed eyelids. Until now I have never realized how much life can emanate from such a mask. Then I quickly wrap it in its velvet covering and close the lid of Box 34.

  Another large collection of Franz Werfel’s papers is preserved on the East Coast, in Philadelphia. It was brought together by his friend and editor of many years, Professor Adolf D. Klarmann, who was a teacher of German language and literature in this city. The attic of the library of the University of Pennsylvania — again, a windowless room, lit by fluorescent lights and air-conditioned, not underground this time but high above the campus — is the last way station on my quest for the story of Franz Werfel’s life.

  My excavations uncover a bluish metal case for eyeglasses, lined with a red fabric with Franz Werfel’s name stamped on it in gold letters; the extremely powerful lenses lie there surrounded by their frame, which has disintegrated into dozens of yellow splinters, as if a thousand years had passed since the death of their owner. Next to a travel alarm clock, notepaper, and calling cards (with the legend DR. H. C. FRANZ WERFEL), I find one of his numerous cigar holders. Even today, after forty years, the smell of smoke and ashes from Werfel’s fat Havana cigars lingers on the small, brownish object.

  I read, in a typescript by Willy Haas[754]: “Franz Werfel surely knew my address in the small village in the Himalayas, and there was a post office in that village. But he never wrote to me. Now and again, rarely enough, I received a letter from his wife, Alma, in her gigantic Gothic letters, three lines of them per page. I wrote to her, ‘Of course I cherish your letters just as much as I do those from Franz, but I can’t understand why he hasn’t written to me for years.’ I received my answer a couple of months later, as usual. Alma wrote, ‘You’ll find out why when you read Franz’s posthumous novel.’ I received the posthumous novel, Star of the Unborn, a year later. I read a couple of pages and had to stop, because I had realized something that I found impossible to imagine: it appeared that Franz Werfel, in the last years of his life, had been thinking about me more than about any other person in the world. He had written a novel about our friendship. I had to overcome a slight state of shock before I was able to read on, with flushed cheeks, day and night, in my little room at the edge of the jungle. Outside, hyenas were laughing, jackals howling. There were many dozens of people in this novel, but really only two characters: Franz and myself, and for more than seven hundred pages we conducted a conversation we had conducted hundreds of times, more or less, as boys, a conversation without end.”

  I turn the pages of a thin school notebook with a black-and-white checkered cover. It is dated 1918 and bears the inscription SECRET DIARY. On the first page I read: “Whosoever happens to come upon this book is implored to close it again — no noble eye will want to read private disclosures that are not meant for the public — nor for itself. Even a mother’s eye will desist here.” This little secret book — after some hesitation, I disregard Werfel’s plea — contains diary entries from the summer of 1918, the time when Alma gave birth to Martin Johannes. There are no surprises in the text: Frau Mahler-Werfel had made her husband’s most intimate notations public a long time ago, incorporating them verbatim in her autobiography, Mein Leben, published in 1960.

  Adolf D. Klarmann’s own notes, essays, and university lectures on Werfel’s life and work are also preserved here in the library attic. Immediately after the death of his idol, Klarmann interviewed Werfel’s friends and relatives, his mother, his sisters, Kurt Wolff, and Friedrich Torberg. Alma confided to him in October 1945 that her husband had been baptized very soon after his death; thanks to the efforts of the Jesuit Georg Moenius and the archbishop of Los Angeles, a so-called baptism by desire had been performed. This was a secret that Professor Klarmann had to keep to himself under all circumstances. Alma’s devoted admirer underscored the word secret twice and kept that promise all his life.

  “Of course Werfel was not baptized,” Alma lied to her friend Friedrich Torberg, who had not been able to rid himself of his suspicions ten years after Werfel’s death. “I could have had an emergency baptism when I found him — but I would never have dared to do that!” she insisted. “Werfel was accessible to all true mysticism, but he would have told me, in one word, if he had wanted that. He told me once while he was working on Star of the Unborn that he wanted to be buried that way, interdenominationally. And there were no symbols, no Talmud, no Cross. He was provisionally placed in a mausoleum (as you know), because I wanted him to have a grave of honor. But since the gentlemen of Vienna are now punishing me for my Jewish interrelations...”

  Alma Mahler had her man-child buried in tails and a silk shirt, just the way Werfel had described his burial in California soil. “I had probably been buried in this ceremonial costume,” he says in Star of the Unborn, “more than a hundred thousand years ago, and even
then this tailcoat had been... nearly twenty years old... My fingernails gleamed and even showed a rosy tint; the California mortician had had me manicured.” However, only thirty years after his death, in July 1975[755], Franz Werfel’s mortal remains — in clear disregard of his last will but in accordance with Alma Mahler’s (she, too, was now buried in Vienna) — were exhumed from the soil of Hollywood’s Rosedale Mortuary & Cemetery, packed in a wooden crate, and sent on a regular TWA flight to the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The shipping label read: PLEASE HANDLE CAREFULLY, and the crate was addressed to the Palais Wilczek, the location of the Austrian Society for Literature. This palace in Vienna’s Inner City stands at one end of Herrengasse, only a few steps from the two places that were home to Franz Werfel during his time in Vienna: the Central and Herrenhof cafés.

  The director of the Austrian Society for Literature[756] was able, at the very last moment, to prevent the delivery of the wooden crate from Hollywood — ultimately destined for an honorary grave in Vienna’s Central Cemetery — to the rather plush offices of the society. He rushed out to the airport. In his presence, the gentlemen of the Austrian Customs Service opened the top of the crate. For seconds, deeply shocked, the director stared down at some whitish bone fragments tightly wrapped in a sheet of plastic.

  Chronology

  1890 Born September 10, the son of Rudolf and Albine Werfel (née Kussi).

  1896 Attends private elementary school of the Piarist order.

  1900 Enters the Royal and Imperial German Gymnasium in the New Town of Prague.

  1903 Bar mitzvah, Maisel synagogue, Prague.

  1904 Transfers to the Royal and Imperial German Gymnasium, Stefansgasse; goes to the Neue Deutsche Theater, attends May Festival with performances by Enrico Caruso.

  1905 First poems; in love with Maria Glaser.

  1908 First meeting with Max Brod; on February 23, FW’s poem “The Gardens of the City” appears in Die Zeit, Vienna; spiritualist séances.

  1909 Graduates; friendship with Max Brod and Franz Kafka; Café Arco; audits lectures at the Karlsuniversität.

  1910 From October, works for the shipping agency Brasch & Rothenstein; The Visit from Elysium.

  1911 Hamburg; poems from The Friend of the World previewed in Die Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus; The Friend of the World published mid-December by Axel Juncker in Berlin; from October, military service as a one-year volunteer at Hradčany Castle.

  1912 Prague; one-year volunteer service; writes The Temptation on maneuvers; from October, an editor at Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig.

  1913 Leipzig; Malcesine on Lake Garda; We Are; meets Rainer Maria Rilke in Hellerau; begins translation of The Trojan Women; gives numerous readings; first quarrel with Karl Kraus.

  1914 Leipzig; readings; meetings with Martin Buber; called up for service at the beginning of the war but soon discharged.

  1915 Called up again, posted to Bozen; discharged once again; injured in Bozen; unfit for military service; called up again in September: Elbe-Kostelec and Trebnitz; first meets Gertrud Spirk; discharged again; Each Other published; The Trojan Women published.

  1916 Prague; called up again in May: Elbe-Kostelec; quarrel with Karl Kraus worsens; sent to the front in eastern Galicia; Hodóv; serves as a messenger, never in the trenches; writes numerous polemical essays.

  1917 On the front, Hodóv and Jezierna; Stockleinen; August: transfer to Vienna, Military Press Bureau; first meets Alma Maria Mahler-Gropius in mid-November.

  1918 Military Press Bureau sponsors trip to Switzerland; lectures, readings; FW accused of antiwar propaganda, trip interrupted; continues work in press office; relationship with Alma Mahler grows more intimate; birth of his and Alma’s son Martin Carl Johannes; The Midday Goddess; end of the war, revolt in Vienna, FW participates in the storming of Parliament, sympathizes with Red Guard.

  1919 Begins writing Mirror Man in Breitenstein am Semmering; death of son, Martin Johannes; The Last Judgment appears; Not the Murderer.

  1920 Mirror Man; works on Goat Song.

  1921 Reading tour through Germany; mid-October: world premiere of Mirror Man.

  1922 Mid-March: world premiere of Goat Song in Vienna; Venice; writes Schweiger; first notes for Verdi: A Novel of the Opera; quarrels with Franz Kafka over Schweiger.

  1923 Venice; Alma Mahler purchases the palazzo Casa Mahler; FW works on Verdi; mostly in Breitenstein.

  1924 Verdi appears; Kafka dies, June 3; from July, FW works in Breitenstein on Juarez and Maximilian; leaves Kurt Wolff Verlag, goes to Paul Zsolnay Verlag.

  1925 January and February: trip to Near East; summer: begins work on Paul Among the Jews; translates Verdi’s Forza del Destino with Alma.

  1926 April: resumes work on Paul; first draft of The Kingdom of God in Bohemia; meets Sigmund Freud, corresponds with him about Paul; autumn: writes The Man Who Conquered Death.

  1927 Hotel Imperial, Santa Margherita Ligure; novella cycle: Poor People, Severio’s Secret, Estrangement; The House of Mourning; begins work on Class Reunion.

  1928 Santa Margherita, Vienna, Breitenstein; begins work on The Pure in Heart.

  1929 Santa Margherita; continues work on The Pure in Heart; July 6: marriage to Alma Mahler; July 15: death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal; idea for The Pascarella Family, conceived in Santa Margherita; new German version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.

  1930 January, February: second trip to Near East; idea for The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, works on The Kingdom of God in Bohemia, premiere in December at the Burgtheater, Vienna.

  1931 Santa Margherita; writes The Pascarella Family; continues in Breitenstein; October 21: death of Arthur Schnitzler.

  1932 Breitenstein, Venice; begins work on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh; new German version of Verdi’s Don Carlos.

  1933 January: Hitler rises to power in Germany; FW works in Santa Margherita on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh; March: signs declaration of loyalty; May 10: book burnings in Germany; expelled from Prussian Academy of the Arts; November: Musa Dagh published; December: tries to become a member of the Reich Association of German Writers.

  1934 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh banned in Germany; FW in Venice and Santa Margherita; February: unrest in Vienna, FW not there; works in Santa Margherita on The Eternal Road; July 25: Dollfuss murdered, Schuschnigg (friend of FW’s and Alma Mahler-Werfel’s) chancellor as of July 30; Manon Gropius contracts polio.

  1935 Eternal Road collaboration with Max Reinhardt and Kurt Weill; writes poems; April 22: death of Manon Gropius; sale of Casa Mahler; November: trip to New York; December 24: death of Alban Berg; volume of poems Sleep and Awakening (Schlaf und Erwachen) published.

  1936 New York until mid-February; via Paris to Vienna; Locarno; idea for Jeremiah novel; summer: works on Hearken Unto the Voice in Breitenstein; outbreak of Spanish Civil War.

  1937 Finishes Hearken Unto the Voice; writes One Night; Breitenstein, Vienna.

  1938 Capri; FW not in Vienna when Hitler occupies Austria in mid-March; Milan, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Paris; St.-Germain-en-Laye; first heart attack; Sanary-sur-Mer, begins work on Cella, or Those Who Overcome; back and forth between Sanary and Paris; after the Anschluss, Gottfried Bermann Fischer (Stockholm) becomes FW’s new publisher.

  1939 St. Germain-en-Laye; abandons Cella; Sanary; works on Embezzled Heaven; outbreak of World War II.

  1940 Sanary; April in October; Paris; flight; Lourdes, Marseilles; crosses Pyrénées on foot; Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon; October 13: arrival in New York; end of December: move to Los Angeles.

  1941 The Song of Bernadette; Hollywood; July 31: death of Rudolf Werfel in Marseilles.

  1942 New York, Los Angeles; The Song of Bernadette becomes a best-seller; Santa Barbara; works on Jacobowsky and the Colonel; quarrels with sister Marianne Rieser; friendship with Friedrich Torberg.

  1943 New York; Los Angeles; Jacobowsky and the Colonel; Santa Barbara; begins Star of the Unborn; June: honorary doctorate from UCLA; September 12: severe heart attack; December 14: a
nother severe heart attack; unable to work.

  1944 Los Angeles; mostly unable to work until the summer; dictates “Theologumena”; from July, in Santa Barbara, works on Star of the Unborn; Between Heaven and Earth published.

  1945 Santa Barbara and Los Angeles: works on Star of the Unborn; finishes the book in August, only a few days before his death on August 26.

  Select Bibliography: Works by Franz Werfel

  GERMAN EDITIONS:

  Der Abituriententag: Die Geschichte einer Jugendschuld [Class Reunion]. Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1928.

  Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit [The Pure in Heart]. Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1929.

  Die Dramen. Edited by Adolf D. Klarmann. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1959.