[257] See ML; FW’s, “Geheimes Tagebuch,” M-W Coll.; and the FW/Mahler correspondence.
[258] FW/Spirk.
[259] Unpublished section of FW, “Geheimes Tagebuch,” M-W Coll.
[260] In an unpublished 1917 letter to Gertrud Spirk, written from the war front in eastern Galicia, FW describes a nightmare: “Children were playing on the steps. When I took a closer look, one of the children was a genuine dwarf — not a cripple, but clearly an evil fairy-tale creature. I think he had red hair on a hydrocephalic head and legs extending up to his waist. Endlessly malevolent, this dwarf tried to unknot the strange rope attached to the bit of my horse. I grabbed him and tore him away a couple of times, but he went on fiddling with the rope. Then I became terribly furious and grabbed his neck with a disgustingly pleasurable feeling in my fingers. I squeezed only a little, but then the dwarf lay there, and the children were dancing around me and shouting, ‘See, see, you murdered him’“ (FW/Spirk).
[261] See Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit.
[262] Anna Mahler-Werfel’s unpublished diary, M-W Coll.
[263] FW/Mahler; many of the details of FW’s life in Breitenstein have been gleaned from this correspondence.
[264] DD, vol. 1. There are obvious Wagnerian influences on this play, sometimes an almost word-for-word convergence. See, for example, Parsifal (Leipzig: Reclam, 1882), p. 59; a mirror also plays an important role in Parsifal. I thank Dr. Lothar Huber of Birkbeck College, London, for the reference.
[265] FW, “Geheimes Tagebuch,” M-W Coll.
[266] EzW, vol. 1, pp. 63ff.
[267] EzW, vol. 1, pp. 131ff. FW wrote to Alma in an unpublished letter: “Yesterday I finished a long dream — fairy tale replete with our life. I don’t know if it is a work of art. But it is full of that mysterious life that lies behind us and so interwoven with a thousand things that I am afraid to look at it now, and I wrote it with a feeling of anxiety as if afraid of betraying myself. I am afraid to show it to you. It will cause you pain. For me it was an enigmatic remembrance offering that I had to bring” (FW/Mahler).
[268] See Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit.
[269] FW wrote to Alma: “That the sweet, sacred Bubi is no longer, I learned... before your telegram. My heart is still completely torn to pieces” (FW/Mahler).
[270] EzW, vol. 1, pp. 79ff.
[271] See Alma Mahler-Werfel’s unpublished diaries, M-W Coll.
[272] ML, pp. 133f.
[273] EzW, vol. 1, pp. 163ff.
[274] BeV, p. 339.
[275] Ibid., p. 333.
[276] ZOU, p. 661. FW had started this “occasional diary” in mid-October 1919, encouraged by Alma, but had made only sporadic entries. See also the entry of October 27, 1919: “Reread Turgenev’s First Love — a masterpiece! The prose has some of my potential. But it is much truer than my Murderer novella, which has entirely unexperienced and yet nonobjective parts, such as the anarchist scenes. Construction!” (ZOU, p. 660).
[277] ZOU, p. 658.
[278] The pertinent passage in her unpublished diary (M-W Coll.) reads: “He is often depressed and afraid of going mad. I do not fear mental aberrations but am, rather, worried about a softening of the brain in his case. He has surely laid waste to himself, to some degree, by insane masturbation up to the time he met me. From the tenth year of his life on, it took place daily, up to three times. That is why he is often tired and listless, and his cells are morbid. Why do the most wonderful examples of the human race persist in working on their own destruction? What this incredible poetic talent could have achieved if he hadn’t wasted himself in such a horrendous manner!”
[279] Author’s conversations with Gina Kaus.
[280] All details of FW’s sojourn in Prague are from FW/Mahler.
[281] ZOU, p. 664.
[282] FW/Mahler.
[283] FW/Mahler. The full text of FW’s letter reads:
“Alma, this morning you have done the following to me, from which I still haven’t quite recovered.
“At a time when I was full of anxiety about Mirror Man, you:
“first of all, objectively deleted things in my work, which is something I may do but which on your part is an act of irreverence, as these after all are lines, verses, work that one wants to regard as sacred even when they are not successful;
“second, you called Ehrenstein’s manufactured talmudic prose better than mine, thus better than ‘Play Yard’ and so on;
“and third, you are right, and that is the worst thing of all.”
[284] See Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit.: “[Alma Mahler’s] first reaction to [Walter Gropius’s] demand for a divorce had been an astonishing offer — she declared herself willing to spend the first half of every year with him and the second half with Franz Werfel. Walter Gropius immediately... rejected the strange proposal” (p. 225). “In ingratiating terms [Alma Mahler] wrote to him, her ‘beloved Walter,’ in November 1919 about her ‘only wish’ to be reunited with him: ‘Since the fall... I have been straining to return totally to you... Never have I considered what you call a true divorce — I come to you as a gift, and who knows what wonderful form we may be able to crystallize.’... [Alma] wrote a letter at the beginning of December [1919] in which she spoke of remorse and asked for sympathy: ‘Love me — I deserve it despite everything! I am the guilty one... Leave me the possibility to come to you — when I long for you... Werfel visits, lives down in Breitenstein — works there. We are strictly separated by a vow. In the fall he wants to visit you for a while — if you want him to’“ (pp. 237f.). See also FW’s premonitory dream of Alma in ZOU, pp. 746ff.
[285] FW/Mahler.
[286] “At the beginning of April 1920 Alma and Franz Werfel arrived in Berlin, went to cafés and theaters together, visited Max Reinhardt together. Now Walter Gropius’s mother [Manon Gropius] no longer went along with her son’s prettified versions of the affair: she wrote Alma an angry letter in which she accused her of infidelity” (Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit., p. 240).
[287] ML, pp. 145ff.
[288] See Hermann Hesse’s review: “Werfel stands constantly between two poles, between chaos and form, between total surrender to the unconscious and sophisticated artistic delight in the personally shaped. Many have regarded, and still regard, him as a revolutionary and a destroyer of form. But one need only look at these songs to see this deep joy in giving form, even in the desire to find the character that deviates from the norm, to destroy the formal schema... Time and again he closes his wise eyes, time and again he becomes a child, becomes unself-conscious, becomes pious, and time and again this piety turns into art for him, into word, into form, and he wakes up and throws it on the floor with a curse” (Hermann Hesse, Eine Literaturgeschichte in Rezensionen und Aufsätzen [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975]; I thank Heiner Hesse of Ticino for the reference). After the publication of The Last Judgment, FW wrote to Alma in the fall of 1919: “I’m full of mistrust of myself. Want to produce something decisive, at long last... It is terrible! I still haven’t written my Op[us] I” (FW/Mahler).
[289] ZOU, pp. 591f.
[290] See FW’s diaries, ZOU, pp. 667ff.: “The Relative. [Der Verwandte]. Idea for a novel.”
[291] Alma Mahler-Werfel describes the genesis of Goat Song in ML: “One day an elegant lady paid us a visit. This lady was very much against my attachment to Franz Werfel. She never really understood him, and like everybody else, she wanted to ‘protect my good name.’ Franz Werfel flew into a rage and went to lie down on the couch in my bedroom, while I sat there looking bored and enduring her not entirely inane conversation. After a while I went back to my room, but Franz Werfel seemed totally lost in thought, and I tiptoed out again. When the lady finally left, I found Franz Werfel in a greatly refreshed and pleasant mood. During the lady’s visit he had come up with the idea for Goat Song. The ‘repressed’ had suddenly become an event for him. He had seen the horrendous indigenous shape of the play clearly in his mind... He went to the Semmering for a
short while and wrote the whole play down as if it had been dictated to him by some unfathomable force” (pp. 141f.).
[292] DD, vol. 1, pp. 251-317. An unpublished letter to her daughter Sylvia from the painter Broncia Koller, the mother of Rupert Koller, whom Anna Mahler married in 1919, shows that FW made Anna the model for Stanja, the main female character: “Anna is Stanja, but Rupert, thank God, is no Mirko!” I thank E. Locker for referring me to this correspondence.
[293] In an unpublished letter of January 25, 1922, to the playwright Julius Berstl, FW writes: “In Berlin they are acceding to urgent demand and putting on scores of Shakespeare plays. Do you really believe that the public makes head or tail of the incredibly confused and vastly boring family history of Richard III — or of any of the other royal dramas or those inane and affected comedies? But Shakespeare is long dead, and the cities are teeming with culture vultures. Goat Song is much more lucid than your average royal drama, which really does not mean anything to anyone living today. Goat Song symbolizes the theme of our time, the sense of destruction.”
[294] “At last, on October 11, 1920, the divorce had become final... To speed up... the proceedings, Walter Gropius had agreed that Alma would be the petitioner and he would assume the guilt. To this end, a marital transgression was carefully constructed... It was a bizarre maneuver, even more so since Alma’s marital infidelity was general knowledge... For Walter Gropius, the separation from Alma was a deliverance” (Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit., pp. 248f.).
[295] ZOU, pp. 222ff.
[296] Unpublished letter from FW to Kurt Wolff, KW Archive.
[297] Unpublished letter from FW to Kurt Wolff, KW Archive.
[298] The German tour, on which Alma Mahler accompanied FW in part, took him to Munich, Nuremberg, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and elsewhere.
[299] Unpublished letter from FW to Kurt Wolff, KW Archive.
[300] ZOU, pp. 701ff.
[301] The unpublished FW/Mahler correspondence shows that he feared another world war after Karl I, the former emperor of Austria-Hungary, tried to seize power in Hungary: “Mobilization has been decreed and it almost got me, too. That idiot Karl and his... gang of criminals are calling up another world war.”
[302] See FW’s reply to the question posed by a Prague newspaper, “Why have you left Prague?” (ZOU, p. 592): “My life instinct rebelled against Prague. For the non-Czech, it seems to me, this city is unreal; for him it is a daydream that provides no experience, a paralyzing ghetto... For the healthy, robust race that now rules the land, Prague means life, capital, culture, culmination — the homeless one understands the secret of the city better, at home and abroad.”
[303] In his review Musil (1880-1942) wrote: “For years Werfel has been struggling energetically for a deeper meaning; to my mind, he conducts this struggle too cleverly, and not enough against himself — which may not prevent success from perhaps proving him right this time” (Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9 [Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1978], p. 1561). See also Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, in ibid., vol. 3. The character Feuermaul is Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler is Frau Professor Drangsal. “The young poet Friedel Feuermaul — also known to his intimates as Pepi, as he was nostalgic for Old Vienna and tried to look like the young Schubert — simply believed in the mission of Austria, and he also believed in humanity... Thus Feuermaul was a busy young man, able to be quite vicious in the struggle for advantage but wholly enamored of ‘the human being’ — and as soon as he thought about humanity in general, he was quite beside himself with frustrated kindness” (p. 1032).
[304] ZOU, p. 672.
[305] According to Arthur Schnitzler’s unpublished diaries, which Peter Michael Braunwarth permitted me to see, Alma told Schnitzler that Gropius was writing her letters in bad taste concerning their daughter Manon, in which he referred to the child as “the fruit of my Stamm [stem, trunk, tribe].” Schnitzler notes that Alma was sending these letters, with passages underlined in red, to Werfel in Breitenstein (January 26, 1922).
[306] From an unpublished FW notebook concerning Schweiger, UCLA.
[307] DD, vol. 1, pp. 319-83. It is interesting to look at this play next to Robert Wiene’s 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: the screenplay for this expressionist film was written by Carl Mayer and FW’s former Stefansgymnasium classmate Hans Janowitz (brother of the poet Franz Janowitz, FW’s friend, who died in World War I). “Caligari is a hypnotist who orders his somnambulist medium Cesare to kill a friend of the hero and abduct his girl. After the hero has uncovered Caligari’s machinations, he is revealed to be an inmate of a mental institution whose director is Dr. Caligari” (Filmlexikon, vol. 2, ed. Liz-Anne Bawden; German edition ed. Wolfram Tichy [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978]). For suggesting a kinship between the material of Schweiger and the Caligari film, I thank Christoph Tölg of Vienna.
[308] ML, p. 162.
[309] From FW’s unpublished notebooks, UCLA.
[310] See Willy Haas in Die Kritik (Prague, 1934-35), p. 15: “Werfel’s epic work began very early on in terms of thought but was realized relatively late. He had already told me at the gymnasium, before 1910, the outline of his Verdi novel, which he did not complete until 1924, giving me his sketches for the characters of Verdi, Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, and Arigo Boito.” See also FW’s preface to Verdi: Roman der Oper: “It is twelve years now since this book was first planned, but the writing of it has always been deferred. There were artistic reasons for hesitation — the hesitation that a historical theme always awakens.”
[311] See Hermann Fähnrich, “Fünf Kompositionsskizzen von Franz Werfel,” unpublished typescript, DL. The five composition sketches by FW that Fähnrich discusses can be found in M-W Coll.
[312] KW Archive. From then on, Alma Mahler-Werfel wrote all of FW’s business letters to Wolff and, later, those to Paul Zsolnay.
[313] See BeV, p. 345ff.
[314] See ZOU, p. 677.
[315] Unpublished letter from FW to Rudolf Fuchs in the Prague Literatur-Archiv; I thank Rotraut Hackermüller of Vienna for the reference.
[316] See Arthur Schnitzler’s unpublished diaries, which Peter Michael Braunwarth permitted me to see.
[317] See Unseld, Franz Kafka, op. cit., pp. 182, 281.
[318] See Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen, rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), p. 185.
[319] Kafka wrote to Max Brod in mid-November 1917: “In a recent dream of mine I gave Werfel a kiss” (Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York: Schocken Books, 1977], p. 167). On Kafka’s relationship with FW, see also his letter to Milena Jesenská, May 30, 1920: “How about your knowledge of human nature, Milena? I’ve doubted it several times already, when you wrote about Werfel for instance, and though it does show love and perhaps only love, it’s nevertheless erroneous and if one leaves out all that Werfel really is and harps only on the reproach of fatness (which to me, incidentally, seems unjustified. In my eyes Werfel appears every year more beautiful and lovable, though it’s true I see him only fleetingly) don’t you know that only fat people are trustworthy?” (Kafka, Letters to Milena, ed. Willy Haas, trans. Tania and James Stern [New York: Schocken Books, 1953], p. 49).
[320] After the two had fallen out over Schweiger, Kafka wrote a letter to FW in December 1922 that was probably never mailed (Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, op. cit., pp. 365-66):
“Dear Werfel, After the way I behaved at your last visit, you could not come again. I realized that. And I would surely have written to you before this were it not that letter-writing has gradually become as hard for me as talking, and that even mailing letters is troublesome, for I already had a letter all written for you. But it is useless to go over old things. Where would it end, if one were never to stop defending all one’s old wretched mistakes and apologizing for them. So let me only say this, Werfel, which you yourself must know: If what was involved here was
only an ordinary dislike, then it might possibly have been easier to formulate and moreover might have been so unimportant that I might well have been able to keep it to myself. But it was a horror, and justifying that is difficult: One seems stubborn and tough and cross-grained, where one is only unhappy. You are surely one of the leaders of this generation, which is not meant as flattery and cannot serve as flattery of anyone, for many a man can lead this society, so lost in its bogs. Hence you are not only a leader but something more (you yourself have said something similar in the fine introduction to Brand’s posthumous works, fine right down to the phrase ‘joyous will to deception’) and one follows your course with burning suspense. And now this play. It may have every possible merit, from the theatrical to the highest, but it is a retreat from leadership; there is not even leadership there, rather a betrayal of the generation, a glossing over, a trivializing, and therefore a cheapening of their sufferings.
“But now I am prattling on, as I did before, am incapable of thinking out and expressing the crux of the matter. Let it be so. Were it not that my sympathy with you, my deeply selfish sympathy with you, is so great, I would not even be prattling.
“And now the invitation: in written form, it assumes an even realer and more magnificent appearance. Obstacles are my illness, the doctor (he definitely rules out Semmering once again, though he is not so definite about Venice in the early spring), and I suppose money too (I would have to manage on a thousand crowns a month). But these are not the chief obstacles. Between lying stretched out on my Prague bed and strolling erect in the Piazza San Marco, the distance is so great that only imagination can barely span it. But these are only generalizations. Beyond that, to imagine that for example I might go to dinner with other people in Venice (I can only eat alone) — even the imagination is staggered. But nonetheless I cling to the invitation, and thank you for it many times.
“Perhaps I will see you in January. Be well. Yours, Kafka”
Kafka also wrote to Max Brod in December 1922, “The play means a great deal to me; it hits me hard, affects me horribly on the most horrible level” (ibid., p. 365).
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 37