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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  In November 1915 the leg injury obliged him to undergo an examination in the Prague garrison hospital. During his stay there he saw, if only for a few moments, one of the two assassins of Sarajevo, Čabrinović[173], who was being held in an observation cell at the hospital before being transported back to Theresienstadt to serve his life sentence. Werfel wrote a prose piece about the Serbian anarchist that read like a diary entry but was nevertheless mature and accomplished. Rather than depicting Čabrinović as a fiendish murderer, he made him a reticent and dignified hero, an instrument of God, a plaything of God’s great game plan: “The guilt had been laid on a lamb.”

  One of the surgical nurses who took care of Werfel while he was in the orthopedic ward caught his eye. The two had met briefly, years ago, and she recognized him and reminded him of their first meeting, which he no longer remembered. Her name was Gertrud Spirk.[174] She was thirty years old, unmarried, a Prague German from an Evangelical Lutheran family. Franz was delighted when she appeared in his room at all hours of the day and night, sat down on the edge of his bed and talked to him, or sometimes just took a break from her work, in silence. There was a peculiarity to Gertrud’s appearance that Franz found most attractive: as a result of a mishap at the hairdresser’s, her hair had turned entirely white at an early age. He was charmed by her happy, unspoiled nature and the slightly chaotic life-style[175] she told him about. Her Christian background was not the least of her attractions for Werfel. After his discharge from the hospital, he spent as much time as possible with his new friend. They took long walks together, visited the Café Arco, went to the theater, the opera, the movies. Nevertheless, they tried to keep their relationship as secret as possible. Gertrud’s mother did not tolerate illicit affairs, and it was important not to let other members of the Spirk family know about their liaison either. Franz and Gertrud toyed with the idea of moving to Vienna as soon as the war was over; they began to discuss a shared future.

  Gertrud Spirk

  Werfel did not write much during these months. He felt suddenly estranged from everything he had done so far; it seemed immature and flawed. “Dream of a New Hell,” for which he had held such high hopes only six months before, never got beyond its fifth canto. He wrote occasional poems, and their titles reflected his current mood: “Weariness” (“Müdigkeit”), “Ballad of a Guilt” (“Ballade von einer Schuld”), “Ballad of Madness and Death” (“Ballade von Wahn und Tod”).

  At the beginning of March 1916 he wrote G. H. Meyer to tell him that he was working on a new book of odes and ballads — the first of his works to hold its own “not by chance but by necessity.” Otherwise, he told Meyer, he was “not exactly in wonderful shape,” being once again condemned to lie about in a hospital that was “dirty as well as boring.” At the end of February, all those who had been declared unfit for military service had been ordered to report for another examination. Franz lived in fear of it for weeks, drinking endless cups of black coffee and chain-smoking strong cigars, hoping to present the examining physicians with evidence of a weak heart and poor circulation. As a schoolboy he had often suffered from fainting spells that were heralded by an acute fear of death; half-jokingly, Willy Haas had referred to these as his heart attacks.[176] He had no such luck when he stood in front of the detested draft board: he was found to be somewhat weak but quite capable of light duties as a soldier.

  The weeks before his transfer to Elbe-Kostelec, not far from Prague, passed in a state of deep melancholic anxiety. His parents, sisters, and Barbara worried about him. The impending separation from Gertrud Spirk certainly depressed Werfel at least as much as the prospect of parting from his family.

  Even the news of the wonderfully successful first night[177] of his adaptation of The Trojan Women at the Lessing Theater in Berlin did not console him. A congratulatory letter from Kurt Wolff[178] reached him at the beginning of May, during the first days of his new tour of duty. The publisher, on a short furlough to Leipzig after nearly two years of uninterrupted combat duty, informed Werfel that he regarded both him and his work as the central and most important factors in the existence of his publishing house. Despite his “extremely low spirits,” Werfel responded with gratitude: “Your loyalty to my work is one of those immensely valued reassurances I need in my present state of uncertainty.”[179]

  Serving in the Nineteenth Heavy Field Artillery Regiment in Elbe-Kostelec, Werfel lost the privilege of private accommodations and had to live in the barracks. Even though his duties included the training of recruits, sentry duty, and office chores, he managed to find time to write, among other things the poem “The Blessed Elizabeth” (“Die heilige Elisabeth”)[180], inspired by Gertrud and dedicated to her: “She floats there still, the tall German /... O twilight of her hair, / O step, O gaze, / How she walks, the sister of the fifth hour!” In a letter he tells his beloved that he composed these verses for her: “For me, you are a great measure of abundance and melody, ever growing and sounding.”

  He outlined a dramatic legend told in twelve dreams, “Man’s Life” (“Das Leben des Menschen”).[181] The fragment, inspired by autobiographical elements, tells of a young man who is far wiser and more famous than his father. Nevertheless, the father constantly demonstrates to him how stupid and inferior he really is. Finally the confused son decides to leave his fatherland and emigrates overseas.

  After about a month in Elbe-Kostelec, Werfel received word that he was considered fit not only for light military duty but for combat as well. He was told to be ready for a transfer to one of the fronts. “It really isn’t clear to me how this has come about,” the desperate Franz wrote to Gertrud, apostrophizing her as his “eternal, most beloved.” “Truly, I had not expected this. I had made plans for work, for Vienna.” Then he consoled her: “I will and must be grateful even for suffering, for it, too, is a rain that spawns fertility.”

  Days of worry[182] and waiting followed. Parents and sisters came to Elbe-Kostelec to say goodbye. Gertrud too came to visit him one more time. His pain at parting and fear of death grew immense.

  Early one morning Werfel’s company received its marching orders. Packed into boxcars like cattle, the men were shipped to Galicia, on the Russian front. Franz’s head was shaved; he wore a scratchy uniform and dog tags around his neck with the address of next of kin to be notified in case of his death. His heavy rucksack contained ammunition, canned goods, a spare pair of boots — and books, many books. After a strenuous journey of several days, interrupted by stops at numerous stations, the company arrived in the ugly, war-damaged township of Hodóv, near Jezierna[183], a forbidding, flat landscape in the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Many of his superior officers[184] treated Werfel with surprising courtesy, and he did his best to establish good relations with them, hoping that this would make life easier for him even at the front. Only a few days after his arrival in Hodóv he was assigned a duty much envied by his comrades: he was to be the telephone operator and dispatch rider at regimental headquarters.[185] “In spite of it all, things are still extraordinarily favorable,” he wrote to Gertrud. “I’ve been incredibly lucky.”

  Dispatch rider Franz Werfel on the East Galician front, 1916-17

  Although this assignment kept him out of the trenches, a few hundred yards behind the lines, the spoiled young man suffered from the dirt in the hut where he slept with seven other men; suffered because he never had a moment to himself even in the daytime; suffered because of the miserable food and the constant fear of battle.

  It did not take him long, however, to rent a fairly decent private room in a peasant family’s house in Hodóv. His parents and Gertrud regularly sent packages containing food and smoking materials. All things considered, Werfel was not doing too badly during the advance of the Russian general Brusilov. He was even getting used to the incessant thunder of heavy artillery. In the middle of August, he told his beloved in a letter that he was doing better than ever — an attempt to reassure Gertrud, who was losing sleep
over him. But he may have been sincere when he stressed that the “Gypsy” in him was content to experience the primitive nature of life in eastern Galicia. He really did enjoy his nocturnal duties, laying miles of telephone line all by himself under a starry sky: “My rudimentary Red Indian strain was well satisfied, and the long-forgotten Old Shatterhand in me said something in typical Karl May English!”

  Here, of all places, at the front in a world war, he was writing more, and more regularly, than ever before.[186] “But I am working! Every day,” he informed Gertrud. “By the phone, with ten thousand barbarians dancing all around me. God knows it doesn’t turn out to be much, as rage tends to interrupt the flow of logic only too often! But sometimes I do believe that a guardian spirit is guiding me, that some of my words are being given to me.” His tour of duty usually lasted from 4:00 A.M. until 10:00 P.M., and he often used the first hours of the morning for his own work: polemical essays, narrative prose, poems, and daily letters to Gertrud came into being while he was transmitting information about ammunition dumps, targets, and burning cities over the field telephone.

  In the midst of this inferno of national hatred, he also wrote an introduction to the German-language edition of the Silesian Songs (Schlesische Lieder)[187] of the famous Czech poet Petr Bezruč. He knew the work from his Café Arco days. “Petr Bezruč is the... last outcry of a destroyed tribe,” Werfel wrote in his declaration of solidarity with the Czech people and their language. “Our heart feels that it belongs to the same people as the oppressed of all nations. Our spirit hates the might and arrogance of all nations.”

  In the fall of 1916 Werfel sent the Berlin journal Die Neue Rundschau a full-page open letter to Kurt Hiller, a cultural critic and pamphleteer. Titled “The Mission of Christianity” (“Die christliche Sendung”)[188], the letter attacked the “activism” advocated by Hiller and the doctrine of the saving grace of the deed. Werfel defended the idea of Christianity, claiming that it was “entirely accepting” of the “I.” According to Werfel, Christianity was the most sensible of all philosophies, and he opposed what he took to be Hiller’s hostility to individualism: “The mission of Christianity completes its work in the I, in the consciousness of man, because it recognizes in its wisdom that one cannot bring about transformation, ‘change,’ from outside.”

  It seemed important to Werfel not just to confess his adherence to Christianity to Max Brod in private, but to present himself to the public as a Christian writer. This was the true motive for his open letter. His letters to Gertrud Spirk bear further evidence of how deeply committed he had become to his newfound faith: “My love, there is only one way in which we will be able to endure life,” he wrote at about the same time he was writing “The Mission of Christianity.” “Indestructible greatness, imitation of Christ, the greatest degree of incorruptibility. I shall bind you to me more deeply than any worldly bond.”

  Werfel was assailed by severe self-doubt[189] about his work so far; true, many were hailing him as the spokesman of his generation, a pioneer of literary expressionism — and yet, he wrote plaintively to Gertrud, he himself saw his work as only a weak reflection of what other young poets were creating. He asked himself why he was regarded as a representative of his generation when he had really written “so little” and such “minor, ephemeral” things.

  Werfel’s evaluation of his work seemed to find confirmation in a satirical poem Karl Kraus published in Die Fackel in November 1916. Titled “Elysian Matters, Melancholia: To Kurt Wolff” (“Elysisches, Melancholie an Kurt Wolff”)[190], it imitated Werfel’s bathetic style, deriding all the authors whose work had appeared in the Day of Judgment series. Kraus called them copyists and plagiarists, a gang whose headquarters was the Café Arco, their leader “the other Schiller.”

  Kraus’s verses served to “humiliate the man and declare the artist bankrupt,” Werfel wrote to Gertrud; nevertheless, he found time to sit down in his telephone hut and compose a personal letter to his new enemy. As if unaware that Kraus had quite deliberately used some remarkably clumsy turns of phrase and Prague-German allusions in his poem, Werfel proceeded to point out grave violations of style and grammar: “Is this truly the language of someone who wants to avenge language on all who speak it?”[191] In addition, he severely chastised Kraus for denigrating Wolff, “our common host,” and finally reminded him that it had been he, Werfel, who had urged Wolff to publish Kraus.

  At the end of the year, Werfel had been promised a short leave for a lecture he was to give in Berlin. Overjoyed, he had told his parents and Gertrud that he would also visit them in Prague. But only a few days before his departure, his leave was canceled. The telephone operator had forgotten to salute a colonel on horseback; this omission was reported to his regimental commander, who instantly revoked his leave.

  Winter was coming on; the freezing cold became a problem. The small stove in Werfel’s hut did not provide enough heat, though it belched smoke “like the stage in Götterdämmerung.“ But General Brusilov had halted his offensive, and it was a little quieter on the front. Werfel was able to spend almost the entire day reading books his father, Kurt Wolff, and others had sent him. He read the memoirs of the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen; he devoured Strindberg and Tolstoy, Swedenborg and Kierkegaard, Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac. Max Brod sent him works on Judaism, such as Martin Buber’s latest book and a Talmud anthology published by the Universal Jewish Library.

  Werfel worked in a room nine feet wide, its space almost completely taken up by the stove, a table, and a cot. The telephone, liable to ring at any moment of the day or night, seemed to him a sinister, hateful creature, a large insect that kept buzzing aggressively.[192] The view from his window was a clump of dying trees, piles of garbage, latrines. “When I have to work,” he wrote to Gertrud, “I am in such a foul mood that I have become the holy telephone terror of this entire sector. I don’t believe the most hysterical lady operator in Prague is my match in delivering threats, insults, and libelous remarks.”

  After six months at the front, Werfel was close to despair, only somewhat relieved by the photographs of herself that Gertrud occasionally enclosed in her daily letters. He wrote back by return mail, adopting a tone both boyish and magisterial. His days and nights seemed to him like a “long prison sentence with few privileges,” he felt “half crazed,” his apathy was increasing: “This is an existence of slow atrophy.” Yet he tried to convince himself that the years this war was stealing from him were a kind of “surrogate time” that did not really age him: they would be returned to him, miraculously, at a later date.

  Shortly before Christmas, his longed-for leave was reinstated, and he spent deliriously happy days on Mariengasse and with Gertrud before traveling to Berlin with his sister Hanna in early January to give a reading. They spent a week in the capital of the Reich. Werfel again saw Martin Buber, who tried in the course of long conversations to lead the renegade back to the path of Jewish ethics and philosophy. Werfel’s “Mission of Christianity” had just been published, and its message had shocked Buber just as Max Brod had once been shocked in Prague when the two young men debated Werfel’s fundamentally Christian view of life. Buber, however, treated Werfel far more gently, and when the apostate returned to Hodóv, he in turn tried to reassure Buber[193] by mail that his feelings as a Jew were “completely nationalistic,” even if he was vehemently opposed to certain “Zionists of Prague.” Two months earlier, he had expressed similar views to Max Brod, with whom he kept up a friendly correspondence in spite of their occasional disagreements. He told Brod that he had reconsidered his theory of assimilation and now agreed with the idea of Zionism. Indeed, it now struck him as “the only Jewish form” in which he found himself able to believe. In a later letter to Brod he justified his dislike of Theodor Herzl by saying that the latter was Viennese, and worse, a journalist in the pay of Die Neue Freie Presse. Werfel concluded: “Our Ahasuerian fate really only began with emancipation: it forced us to become two-faced until Weininger’s death fina
lly happened almost as a symbol.”

  Brod, in turn, published a response to “The Mission of Christianity” in Buber’s monthly Der Jude at the beginning of 1917. In it he tried to demonstrate that his friend’s theories were really marked by an unChristian attitude, and sounded the warning that Werfel’s ideology was harmful to the already endangered Jewish community. Werfel wrote to Gertrud that Brod’s essay was written “from an entirely partisan Zionist viewpoint” and said that he did not feel like replying to it, even though Buber had invited him to do so: “I really have no desire to discuss these things when there is no inner need to do so.” At the same time, however, he reassured Buber that he would try his very best to get his position on Judaism down in writing. “What I call Christianity consists of conducting one’s life according to Christ’s example, as an imitatio Christi,” he stated in a letter promising Buber an essay on the subject.[194] “It would seem to be historically accurate that Christianity is an ancient and vital form of Judaism, perhaps even more, its own polarization, the eternal protest, the revolution against the Law.”

  At the beginning of 1917, Werfel found his monotonous and, to him, entirely absurd existence at the front even harder to endure than it had been before his short leave. He had made a large calendar, out of which he snipped every day he had survived.[195] On the brief visit to Prague, his relationship with Gertrud had become closer, and the tone of his letters was much warmer than before. They contained increasingly frequent hints that he wanted to marry Gertrud as soon as the war was over. However, he told her that the most important thing was to achieve financial security before the wedding: he wanted to complete several books in order to get as much money as possible in advances from Kurt Wolff, and he was also contemplating a return to his job as an editor with the publishing house. The next step — Werfel referred to this as a “step-by-step policy” — would be to present his parents and Gertrud’s family with a fait accompli, in which case, or so he hoped, his father would not entirely abandon him financially. He was determined to leave Prague and move to Munich, Leipzig, or Berlin after their marriage and then he fantasized about the appearance of their future living room, the select books that would adorn their library shelves, the exact spot for the large peasant chest Gertrud had acquired: “We’ll be together for a lifetime. Do you feel that?”