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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  In the garden of the rented summer villa was a fountain with a basin eminently suitable for sailing toy boats. Franz also liked to play cowboys and Indians, and particularly enjoyed being tied to the stake, mocked, and humiliated. One evening, with a thunderstorm in the air, he and Hanna took refuge in a small log cabin where their pet kitten[52] had also found shelter. While bolts of lightning lit up the dusk, Franz tortured the softly meowing cat until it became a lifeless ball of fur in his hands — a cruel and disgusting primal event with which the fifteen-year-old Franz tried to come to terms soon afterward in his first literary prose piece. “The Cat” (“Die Katze”) transforms this revolting act into one of mythical dimensions: “My muscles went into spasms in the voluptuous experience of digging into soft life, and my ears yearned for the sharp outcry of a victim... With treacherous tenderness I finally picked up the kitten’s almost weightless body and obscured its eyes with my thumbs... And I pushed ever deeper until I felt warm liquid run down my fingers and, with unprecedented pleasure, uttered small cries through my clenched teeth... Then I heard myself, whipped into rage by thunder and lightning, cry out fearfully, ‘Dear God, protect me from the Devil, God help us.’“

  During the winter, upper-middle-class German-speaking families in Prague held regular soirées.[53] Franz Werfel and Willy Haas were old enough now to be invited to these gatherings, which were governed by rigid protocol: first came the written reply to the invitation, then a formal visit to the host family’s house, and finally, a week after the party, yet another of these ritual calls. Cutaway and top hat were required dress. Franz took it all in his stride: he was hoping to meet a certain girl again, his first passionate love of some years before, whom he had seen every day in the dining room of a large hotel in the Alps as they both sat at the same table next to their parents. Maria Glaser[54], daughter of an assimilated Jewish chocolate manufacturer, Adolf Glaser, was an exceptionally pretty black-haired girl with dark blue eyes. Wearing a rumpled dress shirt and equally rumpled dinner jacket, Franz now encountered her again at these dances; he felt awkward and hardly said a word. He believed himself to be insincere and unclean, and considered his plumpness repulsive. On the other hand, Maria, who was his own age, seemed to him noble, honest, and kind. The boy who joyfully sang Verdi arias to his friends, sometimes even whole scenes from operas, who had memorized entire acts of plays, was speechless in Fräulein Mitzi’s presence.

  First love: Maria Glaser

  On fine spring days, the Glaser family arranged so-called aesthetic Sunday afternoons[55] in the garden of their villa. All guests were asked to recite either a poem or something else they had written. This was Franz’s first opportunity to present his verses to a wider public, and to impress Maria in particular. But when he met her again alone, he simply could not utter one sensible word. The same thing happened at the tennis court[56], where he sat watching her graceful and energetic play. He listened to her voice as she spoke to her numerous admirers, hardly deigning to glance at him. He grew more attached to her with every wound she inflicted on him.

  Back home in his room he wrote: “You gave me a wicked, wicked word. / Not out of a wicked heart, but I was struck by that wicked word. / I was quite embarrassed, red and mute, / And the others nudged each other and laughed all around us...”[57] And he complained: “You play with many / But do not notice me. / I stand in the background / Close to you every moment / With a mouth frozen shut / And a face of iron.”[58]

  Franz’s performance at school remained disturbingly poor, especially in Latin and mathematics. His parents hired a tutor, but instead of letting this Dr. Holzner[59] prepare him for his math tests, Franz engaged him in philosophical debates.

  His mother kept trying[60] to intervene with the professors on his behalf. His choleric father, on the other hand, told his son to desist from writing those silly verses. He would sometimes present Franz with mathematical test questions, and if the boy did not know the answers, Rudolf Werfel glared at him disdainfully and sent him back to his room. More and more often, he asked his son to accompany him to the factory[61], to watch the tanners, cutters, seamstresses, and packers working on the skins of doe, kid, pig, and calf. Dozens of sewing machines whirred away, thousands of strips of leather were joined and finally stretched, smoothed, and pressed into their definitive shape before being packed in large crates for export. Franz liked the pleasant smell of the piles of men’s and women’s gloves in different colors, and there were moments when he even enjoyed the heartbeat of the big enterprise, the radical opposite of his own word-music. Nevertheless, he found it hard to imagine his future as heir to and director of Werfel & Böhm, a role he was naturally expected to assume.

  In addition to Willy Haas, Werfel’s close circle of friends included Paul Kornfeld[62], Ernst Deutsch, Franz Janowitz, Fritz Pollak, and Ernst Popper. Like Franz, Kornfeld, Janowitz, and Popper wrote poetry, prose, and plays, read their works to each other, and criticized each other ruthlessly. Ernst Deutsch was a highly talented actor; for four years, he had been Werfel’s schoolmate at the Piarist monastery, and the two would always try to outdo each other in their impersonations of Rabbi Knöpfelmacher. In addition, the sixteen-year-old Deutsch, an ace tennis player known all over town, was able to boast of great success with the girls.

  Werfel’s classmate Paul Kornfeld seemed somber and introverted. Like Franz, he suffered in school, particularly under the narrow-mindedness of their German teacher, who refused even to look at papers if the writing ran over the red line in the margin and never discussed works that the class found really interesting. Thus, Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen was read instead of Faust, Hoffmann von Fallersleben instead of Heine, Klopstock instead of Hebbel.

  In his seventh year of gymnasium, Werfel started playing hooky[63] with his friends. They boldly spent mornings in the parks, sat in pastry shops and coffeehouses, visited dimly lit beer halls in the suburbs, or flirted with waitresses in garden restaurants under old chestnut trees. Later they presented forged parental excuses to their teachers.

  Evenings were spent in frequent visits to the Neue Deutsche Theater to enjoy performances by Irene Triesch, Alexander Moissi, Rudolph Schildkraut, Adolf Sonnenthal; they saw guest performances[64] by the Deutsche Theater of Berlin, directed by Max Reinhardt, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Merchant of Venice. Maria Immisch[65] was the star of a Schiller festival[66] that ran for several weeks, and in her Franz believed he had found the incarnation of the ideal woman. One evening he wanted to surprise her at the stage door with a huge bouquet of flowers. The plan misfired; overjoyed — because the unattainable had remained unattained — he flung the bouquet into the city park pond.

  Willy Haas continued to be regaled with his friend’s new poems: love songs and complaints dedicated to Maria Glaser, memories of playing in the park, of feeling safe near Barbara, nursery moments, relived riverboat trips, images of sailor suits, shop signs, soccer games, Kakitz the park guard. Haas urged Franz to revise and collect these poems, which were still quite disorganized, in many cases just sketchy fragments. Perhaps, he said, it would even be possible to submit one or two to the editors of some journal.

  Franz agreed, but on one condition: he would have to use Haas’s address, to avoid his father’s renewed ire if a returned manuscript should appear in the Werfel mailbox. Each and every one of the journals did indeed reject the beautifully handwritten poems by return mail. To Willy Haas’s address. Franz kept on writing, his friend kept on sending out manuscripts.

  One sunny winter afternoon in late February 1908, the two friends were sitting in their new favorite café, the Arco, across the street from Willy’s house on Hybernergasse. They were planning a ride out to the Baumgarten, a park in Bubeneč, but Haas wanted to get a clean handkerchief from his room, and Werfel waited for him in the lobby. Moments later, his breathless and suddenly speechless friend handed him the Sunday edition of the Vienna daily Die Zeit[67]: there, on the first pink page of the literary supplement, was the poem “The G
ardens of the City” (“Die Gärten der Stadt”), by Franz Werfel — who promptly had an attack of nausea and palpitations[68] when he saw his name in print for the first time, and not just in print but in a respected newspaper with wide European distribution. The published poem was not, in fact, one of his own favorites; it was a rather ponderous piece of work that began with the lines “Wilted ivy twines around fountains / Which long ago renounced the play of water. / Only the tears of a shower still roll / Down marble hermae in hidden gardens.”[69]

  In the Baumgarten, Werfel walked as if in a trance. He kept staring at the newspaper, proud as never before. He imagined that this was fame, this was what had attracted him so strongly ever since he heard Caruso’s voice for the first time and witnessed the tumultuous applause on that evening of Rigoletto. The hopeful vision of his schooldays had been the dream of one day achieving even a little bit of that fame. From now on, he would have to be counted among those born to be poets...

  Sporadically at first, then with increasing courage, Werfel, Haas, Deutsch, and the rest caroused their way through the city’s nightclubs[70] — the Hamlet, the Montmartre, the Napoleon, the Eldorado. The Gogo[71], on Gemsengasse by the city market, was Prague’s oldest and most expensive brothel. Well-to-do businessmen, high-ranking civil servants, artists, academics, and military men could be seen in its parlor with the red wallpaper, velvet curtains, and mirrors in gilded frames. For the gymnasium students, the brothel was first and foremost an inspiring venue for discussion, and the exciting atmosphere of the Gogo’s parlor heightened their sense of joining the adult world — with wine, liqueurs, and cigarettes providing an additional boost.

  Musical entertainment was provided by an aged piano player who used to mark the entrance of young Werfel with the first bars of some Italian opera; Franz was known at the nightspots for his ad hoc performances, in a pleasant tenor voice, of practically every vocal piece in the vast opera repertoire. “Caruso” was his nickname, and the better-educated ladies of the night were given to enthusiastic shouts of “Carousseau!”[72] — they believed their idol’s name sounded more correct in this French pronunciation.

  The girls liked their youngest visitors and bantered with them, sometimes allowing them to share their communal early-morning breakfasts and possibly even granting further intimacies free of charge. Then the friends staggered home and to bed, where they remained until late morning, hours after their classmates arrived at school. Incredibly enough, both Franz’s teachers and his parents let him get away with this behavior.

  More excitement was provided by spiritualist séances in which the boys huddled around a small table calling up the souls of the dead. Paul Kornfeld was regarded as a talented medium, and the sessions were frequently held in his apartment. Often they waited for hours before the table leapt into the air and started dancing jerkily across the floor. The spirits communicated by knocking on or tilting the table; they described life in the beyond and made predictions about the future. Once, a woman who said she was freezing to death called for help: she was about to give birth, would someone please save her, she was in Semlin, on a bank of the Danube! In a panic, the friends rushed to the main post office through empty streets at 3:00 A.M. and sent a telegram to the police station in Semlin, demanding that the unfortunate woman be rescued.

  By 1908 twenty-four-year-old Max Brod had laid his first claim to literary fame, and the young writers of Prague regarded him as their leader. After Werfel’s poem appeared in Die Zeit, Willy Haas contacted Brod and gave him a manuscript collection of his friend’s verses. Brod, himself an alumnus of the Piarist school and the Stefansgymnasium, had also taken his first literary steps as an adolescent; he found Franz’s work exceptional and immediately asked to be introduced to the eighteen-year-old, defying the common belief that an age difference of six years was too great a gap to bridge.

  Franz was very anxious when he met Brod for the first time, but when he started reciting his favorite poems by heart — tentatively at first, then with increasing bravura and assurance — he quickly won over the influential writer. Brod was enthusiastic and promised that he would do his best to ensure further publication of Werfel’s work. Only once before had he given anyone such an accolade: Franz Kafka, the twenty-five-year-old insurance company employee whose eight prose pieces — his first publication — had appeared not long before in the Munich journal Hyperion.

  Brod began to participate[73] in the séances and sometimes brought his friends Franz Kafka and Felix Weltsch along. “I have been in such a state of confusion the last three days,” Werfel told Brod in one of his letters of invitation[74], “that I’m surprised to find myself able to write.” He went on to say that the new series of experiments had yielded “such striking phenomena” that he was now expecting, particularly because of Brod’s presence, “some very special things.” Sometimes these séances took place in Werfel’s favorite café on Hybernergasse: “For tonight [we have] reserved the cellar in the Café Arko [sic] and would be most grateful to you if you could come and notify the other gentlemen as well.”

  The graduate, 1909

  The triumvirate Brod-Kafka-Weltsch was unanimous in its approval of Werfel, the chubby student. They liked his poems, they particularly appreciated his musical accomplishments, and they invited him to join them in their weekly excursions to the outskirts of Prague.[75] Usually on Sundays, they hiked through the Bohemian forests and went skinny-dipping in the rivers. Tall, thin, and olive-skinned, Franz Kafka was the strongest and bravest swimmer among them. Werfel, however, was not up to strenuous hikes and hours of swimming; after one such weekend in early summer 1909, he returned home exhausted and severely sunburned, and took to his bed for several days with a high fever. His mother was furious and took Brod to task; it had been irresponsible of him, she scolded, not to have taken better care of his younger friend, especially at this critical juncture when Werfel, a weak scholar at best, was just about to take his graduation exams.

  West Berlin, seventy-five years later: Knesebeckstrasse, at the corner of Kurfürstendamm. Anuschka Deutsch[76] from Prague lives here, on the second floor of a town house. Very slowly, the delicate, fragile lady moves through the light of the drawing room. “You know, in my normal state I probably could have told you some things of importance to your project,” says the eighty-seven-year-old woman in a deep, very hoarse voice, “but at the moment, I’m afraid, I’m just too weak.”

  In 1922 Fräulein Fuchs married Ernst Deutsch, by then a very famous actor. “I’m afraid you’ve come just a little too late,” she says, “because I am not well now.” She sinks into an easy chair. Her eyes are alert. “Well, this photograph here, I can show you this: it’s my husband and Werfel on their trip after passing their exams. My husband passed his at the German gymnasium on the Graben at the same time that Werfel sat for his on Stefansgasse. They used to argue about who had gone to the better school, and of course they did have the same religious instructor, and both of them were good at imitating him. Each one would claim some story as his, and they would get into huge arguments about it, many, many years later. Since both of them were such good children, their families paid the way of an indigent classmate to go with them on that trip as a chaperone. They had all sorts of adventures. For instance, they wanted to get into the Tivoli in Copenhagen, even though their money had run out — they just tried to sneak in for free! If you ask me, both of them look really dissipated in that picture.

  “I knew Werfel’s sisters well,” Frau Deutsch continues after shaking her head one more time over the photograph. “Both of them were pretty girls, really, Marianne and Hanna. But their mother, Werfel’s mother, I’m sorry to say, didn’t have much character. The younger sister, Marianne — she was four years younger than I — we went to the same school, but she was a modern girl, one who ran around with men. We didn’t do that. Not that we wouldn’t have liked to; it just didn’t happen. I think it was a musician Marianne was going with, but I have no idea what his name was. If I’m not mistaken,
she left gymnasium after her fourth year. The other one, Hanna, was a schoolmate of my older sister’s. She looked a lot like Werfel. Later she married a cousin of mine, Fuchs-Robetin, but my family wanted nothing to do with him. I mostly knew the Werfel sisters from parties; I went to a lot of dances and garden parties from the time I was ten years old. And I knew one of Werfel’s great loves really well — she was pretty as a picture, Mitzi Glaser. She always looked down her nose at me. I knew her family, too — her sister Freda and their four brothers. You know, my husband had a big crush on Freda, he confessed to me much later. But we all knew that Werfel was very much in love with Mitzi. Of course it was all platonic! What else? You have to realize, this was before World War I; no one paid any attention to provocative girls, although there were some of those too. To make a date with a girl to go to some coffeehouse — that was as impossible as... as crawling up these walls would be. In our circles all encounters took place in people’s homes, at parties. Werfel grew up in this bourgeois society, and that’s why he started going to the Arco and so on, as a sort of protest. And started writing poems. Everybody thought that was very amusing. The very idea of writing poetry was totally alien to anyone from that part of society. I remember, when his first volume of poems came out, our family physician, who was also the Werfels’ doctor — a real scandalmonger he was — came to see my mother and said, ‘Can you imagine the nerve of that Franz, he has gone and published a book, The Friend of the World [Der Weltfreund]!’ He then went on to read it to us, to demonstrate how terrible it was. A little later I got a copy of the book and liked it a great deal. I was still so incredibly young. But to my mind Franzl was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known — except for his looks, which really weren’t too great. So they all sat in the coffeehouses then, my husband and Werfel and Kafka, Brod, Kisch. I knew Kisch really well. Mitzi Glaser became Mitzi Bondy, poor thing. Her husband, of the Bohemian copper dynasty, only shaved every other day, and on the unshaven days Herbert refused to go out, so Mitzi, too, could only go out every other day. She died fairly young, I think. Breast cancer, was it? I’m not sure... Just ten minutes of talking makes me tired, it’s ridiculous. I have to go lie down again. You should have come sooner, when my husband was still alive. The things he could have told you about Werfel and everything!...”