[578] See unpublished letter from FW to his parents, October 14, 1938, in DB.
[579] “Recently we have had some good economic experiences. Alma has received a very tidy sum from the Composers’ Guild in Vienna, and Juarez is being bought for a film in America. None of it is splendiferous, but it’ll help us through the coming year without our having to touch our ultimate reserves” (ibid.).
[580] The film, titled Juarez, was produced by Warner Brothers in 1939.
[581] ZOU, pp. 322ff.
[582] FW/Mahler. On his father’s gift of money, see note 428.
[583] See Fischer, Bedroht, bewahrt, op. cit., pp. 173f.
[584] There seems to be a rumor prevalent among German literary scholars that FW felt that Feuchtwanger’s trilogy Der Wartesaal — Erfolg, Die Geschwister Oppermann, and Exil — surpassed his own undertaking both artistically and politically. However, there is no evidence that FW ever thought so. Lion Feuchtwanger’s widow Marta told me, when I asked her about it, “I don’t think that’s true. At least, I never heard anything about it.”
[585] ZOU, p. 744.
[586] In May 1938 Rudolf Werfel had instructed his lawyer to register Werfel & Böhm’s export director, Erich Fürth, as a partner of the firm. On June 16, 1939, Rudolf Werfel, then in Rüschlikon, tried to transfer all his shares in the firm to Fürth. Three days later, the partners Rudolf Werfel and Benedikt Böhm were stripped of all rights to the firm by the occupation authorities; for a short time, Fürth figured as the only partner. On the basis of an edict issued by the Gestapo, Staats-polizeistelle Prague, on September 22, 1939, Fürth was deposed and replaced by Erich Kraft. In an official statement by the circuit civil court of Prague, Kraft was appointed “commissar director” and manager, and in the fall of 1941 a certain Karl Schmachtl, Diplomingenieur, purchased the glove factory in the “Aryanization program” (FK letters).
[587] Robert Neumann (1897-1975), Werfel’s friend from the Vienna years, who had also fled to France, offered the honorary presidency to him in December 1938. Werfel told Neumann that although he had always avoided such positions, he would accept this one, hoping to be able to use it to “ease the tribulations of some” (see unpublished correspondence between FW and Robert Neumann, in the Dokumentations archiv des österreichischen Widerstands, Vienna). In this context it should be mentioned that an organization of Austrian émigré writers and intellectuals, the Liga für das geistige Österreich (League for Intellectual Austria), sponsored a reading by Franz Werfel in January 1939 in the Salle Chopin in Paris as the first event arranged by the group. The full house in the Salle Chopin consisted of Austrian monarchists, communists, Spanish Civil War veterans, and supporters of Schuschnigg. Before reading his poems and sections of his Jeremiah novel, FW delivered a short lecture titled “No Humanity Without Divinity” (“Ohne Divinität keine Humanität,” ZOU, pp. 546ff.). He deplored, as so often before, the godlessness prevalent in Europe and said the world had not experienced a comparable decay of values since the decline of the Roman Empire: most people worshiped “success and power” as their deities and were prey to “every kind of quasiheroic criminality.” In Prussia, a “new paganism” had arisen that strove to “get rid of old Israel, as if this were 600 B.C.,” the era of Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of Jerusalem. Nevertheless Werfel believed that these very refugees, the “expelled ones,” would in their exile contribute to the preparation of a future “new world consciousness” among all nations. Werfel’s speech disappointed primarily the socialists and communists in his audience, who had disapproved of his Christian world view since before the fall of Austria; they also felt that his words were lacking in political commitment. In view of the deadly threat of Hitler’s Germany, his critics found his idealistic philosophizing about a renewal of the world inappropriate. I thank Dr. Elisabeth Freundlich, one of the organizers of the event, for describing it to me.
[588] GBF.
[589] Letter dated April 20 or 29, 1939, GBF.
[590] GBF. In a radio interview with NBC, Los Angeles, on March 16, 1941, FW said: “You ask me if I have woven any particular ‘message’ into this book. I am indeed aware that all my books, realistic as they are, contain a hidden message. The symbolism of Embezzled Heaven is very simple. Old Teta is nothing but the soul of mankind in its naive longing for immortalization, which becomes cheated out of heaven — i.e., out of its metaphysical grounding — by the modern intellect and then regains that heaven after a via dolorosa” (ZOU, p. 612).
[591] In Embezzled Heaven FW says of Cella (without letting the reader know that the subject is that fragment): “The whole plan [seemed] insincere and without meaning... It was a very bulky novel, and I had already written about five hundred pages in the sweat of my brow. I did not possess the moral strength to destroy the stack of sheets that lay upon my table, nor had I the patience to extract the good from the bad and begin afresh. The only true method in art is to assume the labor of Penelope, yet the aspect of the world was changing every few weeks, so that what yesterday seemed to be truth was today revealed as illusion... Nonetheless I tried. Every morning I sat down with a groan to write.”
[592] GBF.
[593] See Hartmut Binder, “Ernst Polak: Literat ohne Werk,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, vol. 23 (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 366-415.
[594] Ludwig Marcuse (1894-1971), Arnold Zweig (1881-1968), Wilhelm Herzog (1884-1960). See Herzog’s Menschen, denen ich begegnete (Berne and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1959). FW and Herzog had been acquainted since 1914, when Herzog arranged a reading for FW in Munich. They had met frequently in Leipzig and Vienna. Herzog was the publisher of März, a well-known literary journal. Friedrich Wolf (1888-1960) was a homeopath and prescribed herbal medications for FW’s cardiac problems.
[595] See unpublished text written for Feuchtwanger’s sixtieth birthday in 1944, UCLA. Looking back, FW muses, “Neither one of us managed to convince the other. I was strident, you were relaxed. I would get excited, you were calmness personified. I became insulting, you were unshakably even-tempered. Had a witness to our protracted arguments been unfamiliar with the language, he would no doubt have considered truth to have been on your side, because not I but you were the very image of superiority, and a charming sort of superiority at that. You never lost your temper, you would smile and laugh even after my worst attacks.”
[596] Quoted in Tilman Zülch, Zeitschrift Pogrom, nos. 72-73 (May 1980), pp. 297f.
[597] See ZOU, p. 744; but see also ML, pp. 297f.
[598] See ZOU, p. 745.
[599] GBF.
[600] GBF.
[601] See unpublished letter from FW to his parents, in DB. After a visit with his parents, he told Wilhelm Herzog that Sanary seemed like paradise compared to Vichy (Herzog, Menschen, denen ich begegnete, op. cit., pp. 438ff.).
[602] “It is of course a good and appropriate idea. I admire Werfel’s work with all my heart and would be happy to see the Swedish Academy reward it, but I do not believe it will do so. I have to refrain from participation in the petition because I have repeatedly voted for Hesse, whose chances are better and in whom a non-Reich Germanness and a higher German tradition would also be honored.” See Herzog, Menschen, denen ich begegnete, op. cit., p. 440; see also Thomas Mann, Briefe 1937-1947, ed. Erika Mann (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1963), p. 133.
[603] GBF.
[604] See Jungk, ed., Das Franz Werfel Buch, op. cit., pp. 202ff. FW originally wanted to call the novella Confusions of a Day in October (Wirrnisse eines Oktobertags) or Confusions of a Day in April (Die Verwirrungen eines Apriltages).
[605] Unpublished notebook, UCLA. My personal guess is that the character of the civil servant Leonidas may have been inspired by a public figure in Vienna: before 1938, FW knew a section chief, Dr. Leodegar Petrin, who was possibly even employed in the Ministry of Education, Leonidas’s workplace. Otherwise he bears characteristics reminiscent of Sebastian in Class Reunion.
[606] See Max Brod in Die Zeit, January 20, 19
55: “Vera Wormser [appears] unique among Werfel’s numerous Jewish characters; she has a nobility of both intellect and feeling, and is determined, selfless, immune to insult... Not a ‘broken Jewish type’ but fully aware of her worth, with a healthy mind; at the same time reticent, modest, mildly forgiving, and above all, beautiful and enchanting.”
[607] ZOU, pp. 555f.
[608] ML, p. 301.
[609] Ibid.
[610] See Lion Feuchtwanger, Unholdes Frankreich: Meine Erlebnisse unter der Regierung Pétain (London, 1942); republished under the title Der Teufel in Frankreich (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1954; Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1982; Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller Verlag, 1983).
[611] See ML, pp. 303ff., on the flight from Sanary to Lourdes.
[612] But see also Jacobowsky und der Oberst, DD, vol. 2, pp. 241-340.
[613] Letter from the Kahlers to FW and Alma Mahler-Werfel, May 12, 1945, M-W Coll.: “The times when the rooms of a United States consulate seemed as fascinating as the Venusberg are long past, and there is some fading even of such impressions as the merciless orgiastic rain of Biarritz, the nocturnal figures in Hendaye, the ‘Jessas, jetzt ham’s uns’ [“Jeez, they’ve got us now”] on the road to Pau.”
[614] See ML, and FW’s preface to Das Lied von Bernadette, pp. 7ff.
[615] See unpublished letter from FW to his parents, in DB.
[616] FW to Prince Löwenstein, in the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands, Vienna. I am grateful to Dr. Ulrich Weinzierl of Vienna for this information.
[617] See unpublished letter from FW to his parents, in DB.
[618] See FW’s preface to Das Lied von Bernadette, p. 8: “One day in my great distress I made a vow. I vowed that if I escaped from this desperate situation and reached the saving shores of America, I would put off all other tasks and sing, as best I could, the song of Bernadette.” Father Georg Moenius, a close friend of the Werfels in exile in California, gave the following account in a radio broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1952: “One evening in the summer of 1939 I had come from Lourdes to Paris to visit Werfel in his small hotel behind the Madeleine. On the way, I had been reading Zola’s novel about Lourdes, in which so little attention is paid to the religious experience. Werfel was most eager to learn my impressions of Lourdes. Still in a quandary between my actual experiences and my reading of Zola, I told him that he ought to write a book about Lourdes one day. Neither one of us could have imagined how soon and under what circumstances this would indeed happen” (manuscript of talk in M-L Coll.). In this connection, see also Schalom Ben-Chorin in Aufbau (New York): “Not hesitant and doubtful, but noisy and irreverently ridiculing the miracle,... Egon Erwin Kisch walked the streets of Lourdes in 1934, shortly after Bernadette’s canonization. ‘Ich bade im wundertätigen Wasser’ [‘I Bathe in the Miracle-working Water’] is the title of his report... Kisch does not see the miracle as Werfel does. He does not see the touching figure of little innocent Bernadette... He sees the negative, and it, too, should be seen. He notes, ‘The Holy Virgin has been rather ungracious to her village of grace. The victims of certain processions lie in mass graves. And over there on the road of the Stations of the Cross is a memorial for the Catholics from Bourbon who lost their lives on August 1, 1922, in a train collision on their pilgrimage to Lourdes. Even the holy grotto was not spared: in June 1875 a flood entered it and destroyed the altar, the image of Mary, and all entrances.’“
[619] Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (New York: Random House, 1945); German edition Auslieferung auf Verlangen (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1986), p. 16. See also Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940 (New York: Doubleday, 1980). In an ironic turn of fate, other refugees approached FW in his desperate straits: see Ivan George Heilbut, “Franz Werfel in Marseille,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, August 27, 1955: “In the afternoon I stood in front of the Hôtel Louvre & Paix on the Canebière... Then I entered the foyer, which was teeming with German officers.” Heilbut needed to give Werfel’s name as a guarantor to the U.S. Consulate and was hoping that Werfel could help him and his family to escape. “I presented my request. He remained silent. He hesitated. Then, in a muted voice: ‘I can’t do it; my name has been used up here... No, I can’t do any more. I can’t even receive visitors. I run the danger of surveillance everywhere.’... I shall never forget Werfel’s tense expression, his compressed lips, his big blue eyes staring straight ahead as he moved through the crowd of German officers... ‘We’re trapped,’ he said quietly.”
[620] See unpublished letter from FW to his parents, August 10, 1940, in DB. Evidently FW’s sister Mizzi and the American publisher Ben Huebsch also played a role: “Mizzerl and my American friends did tremendously good work.”
[621] “We are in a terrible situation — we are practically prisoners... If you possibly can: Help us!” Louis Gillet (1876-1943) was an art historian and critic.
[622] See Fry, Auslieferung auf Verlangen, op. cit. Untenable and definitely untrue is Alma Mahler-Werfel’s claim that Fry undertook his rescue mission halfheartedly: “The Americans had sent a man, Mr. Fry, who was supposed to help all of us. He did so but was quite rude and morose... The only thing Mr. Fry really did for us was to transport the luggage of the five of us across the border” (ML, pp. 314f.). FW wrote his mother on January 19, 1941, “I owe him a great deal.”
[623] See Stefan Jaeger and Volker Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag, 1984); but see also Marta Feuchtwanger, “Die Flucht,” in Lion Feuchtwanger, Der Teufel in Frankreich (1983), op. cit., pp. 255ff.
[624] Unpublished letter from FW to his parents, August 29, 1940, in DB.
[625] See Fry, Auslieferung auf Verlangen, op. cit., p. 70.
[626] Author’s conversation with Professor Golo Mann, Kilchberg/Zurich.
[627] On details of the escape, see above all ML, pp. 316-18. Alma Mahler-Werfel’s narrative of the escape is mostly reliable, as Golo Mann confirmed to me; but see also Fry, Auslieferung auf Verlangen, op. cit., pp. 79ff., and Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940, op. cit.
[628] Varian Fry claims that German agents were sighted in Port Bou the very next day. Two weeks after the Werfels crossed the Pyrénées, Walter Benjamin arrived in Port Bou, where Spanish officials threatened to deliver him to the Gestapo. By the time the decision was made to let Benjamin cross the border, he had committed suicide; see Jaeger and Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger, op. cit., p. 210. The philosopher Carl Einstein and the writer Ernst Weiss also committed suicide at about the same time in the Pyrénées region.
[629] Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer told me: “Alma was so weak during the crossing of the Pyrénées that these sturdy students sent out by President Roosevelt had to carry her across... That wasn’t so easy.”
[630] Unpublished letter from FW to his parents, October 12, 1940, in DB.
[631] See the American daily newspapers for October 14, 1940, and Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1940-1943 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982), p. 165.
[632] In his interviews with American journalists, Lion Feuchtwanger had been less cautious. When he arrived in New York ten days earlier on the American passenger ship Excalibur, he described to the reporters the possible routes across the passes of the Pyrénées and thus greatly endangered the rescue committee’s work: the Gestapo took note and sent additional agents to the region between Cerbère and Port Bou.
[633] FW also met Meyer Weisgal again, who tried to persuade him to revive the Eternal Road project. According to Thomas Quinn Curtiss of Paris, the Werfels attended the premiere of The Wedding March, Erich von Stroheim’s film about Vienna, which displeased Alma in particular.
[634] Author’s conversation with Gottfried Reinhardt; and see Jacobowsky und der Oberst, DD, vol. 2, pp. 241-340.
[635] Unpublished letter from FW to his parents, December 5, 1940, in DB.
[636] Ibid.
[637] See Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1940-1943, op. cit., pp. 172f. (October 13, 1940).
[638] ZOU, pp. 333-37.
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[639] Author’s conversations with Albrecht Joseph, Los Angeles; but see also John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983).
[640] The composer was born in Brünn in 1897 and died in Hollywood in 1957.
[641] Unpublished letter from FW to his parents, December 6, 1940, in DB.
[642] See ML, pp. 246, 322; see also Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1940-1943, op. cit., pp. 887f.
[643] The house is still there, essentially unchanged.
[644] Author’s conversations with Albrecht Joseph, Los Angeles.
[645] Author’s conversations with Albrecht Joseph and Professor Gustave O. Arlt, Los Angeles.
[646] Unpublished letter from FW to his parents, end of February 1941, in DB.
[647] Ibid. See also SU, p. 66.
[648] FW also thought of The Beautiful Song of Bernadette (Das schöne Lied von Bernadette); see the manuscript of the first version, begun January 14, 1941, finished May 18, 1941, M-W Coll. On Bernadette, see also the legends about saints written after Manon Gropius’s death, ZOU, pp. 755-73, and ZOU, pp. 773ff.
[649] Unpublished notebook, UCLA.
[650] The correspondences between this book and Werfel’s novel are extraordinary — great possible thesis material! Belleney’s book can be found in Box 28, UCLA.
[651] Author’s conversations with Albrecht Joseph, Los Angeles.
[652] Unpublished letters from FW to his parents and to his sister Hanna von Fuchs-Robetin, in DB.
[653] ZOU, pp. 611ff.; the typescript of the radio program is at UCLA. See also FW’s vehemently anti-American speeches from the 1930s in ZOU, pp. 16-109.
[654] “Declaration of Intention,” Document 108819, UCLA. The entry under “race” is “Hebrew.”
[655] Author’s conversations with Albrecht Joseph, Los Angeles.
[656] GBF.
[657] Unpublished letter from FW to Hanna von Fuchs-Robetin, July 21, 1941, in DB.
[658] See the poem “Eine Prager Ballade,” DlW, pp. 488f.: “Dreamt on the train from the state of Missouri to the state of Texas... ‘Not to worry, my young sir, via Königsaal and Eule / I’ll drive you directly across the Atlantic.’“
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 41