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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  Werfel’s friend from the Central, Franz Blei, had an exceptionally large circle of friends and acquaintances that included Gustav Mahler’s widow, a well-known figure in Viennese society. When Blei asked Alma Mahler[214] whether he could introduce her to his friend from the press office, the music fanatic and poet Franz Werfel, she responded favorably: in view of her deep appreciation of Werfel’s work, which had inspired her to set his poem “The Seer” (“Der Erkennende”)[215] to music two years earlier, she would be delighted to make the poet’s personal acquaintance.

  In 1915, after her notoriously stormy affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler had married the German architect Walter Gropius. With her daughters Anna and Manon, she divided her time between a handsome villa in Breitenstein am Semmering and a large apartment in the Inner City of Vienna, not far from the Ringstrasse. While Gropius was at the front, his wife continued her distinguished salon; everyone of rank and name in Central Europe was invited to Frau Alma’s apartment and its red music room. She competed for guests with her friend Berta Zuckerkandl, who also held a salon in Vienna.

  In mid-November[216], a few days before Werfel’s propaganda journey to Italy, Blei took him along to an afternoon reception at Alma Mahler’s. Franz immediately felt very much at ease in his hostess’s presence. During this first meeting he spoke to her nonstop, told her about his passion for Italian opera and the Russian Revolution, for Christianity and socialism, and stayed well into the night.

  The “fat, bow-legged Jew”[217] with his “thick lips,” “liquid slit-eyes,” and nicotine-yellow fingers had not displeased Alma at all, as she confided to her diary; his socialist “affectation”[218] and his “babble” about love for humanity and willingness to sacrifice, however, had irritated her a great deal — she noted that she had never quite been able to believe similar talk from the late Gustav Mahler.

  “Imagine, yesterday Blei took me to see Frau Mahler in the afternoon,” Werfel immediately reported to Gertrud.[219] “It was really wonderful... I learned much about Gustav Mahler — and sensed that he had all my conflicts. They were interesting hours; she is tremendously warm and alive, a woman of quality.”

  On his return from Italy, he soon went back to Frau Mahler’s salon, making the acquaintance of Walter Gropius, who was on a short furlough in Vienna. In the presence of her husband[220] and Franz Blei, Werfel flirted uninhibitedly with his hostess, recited his poems, sang arias in his pleasant tenor voice; on an impulse, Alma sat down at the piano and accompanied the troubadour, immersing herself in music, the basic force in her life.

  In early December 1917 Werfel went on another official trip[221] at the invitation of the governor of Trieste, the main port of the Royal and Imperial Navy. He visited the destroyed war zone of Friuli, saw demolished outposts and towns that had been burned to their foundations; “on the hills,” he told Gertrud in a letter, “there are still many unburied corpses; there are graveyards that are completely torn up, a sight that like some frightful scar will never disappear from the face of the earth.” In Görz, not a single building had been left standing along the Corso Verdi, the main thoroughfare, and rats the size of cats were scurrying about. “It was the spitting image of a medieval plague site.”

  Back in Vienna, Werfel’s visits to Frau Mahler-Gropius grew ever more frequent. He began to share his ideas, wishes, and dreams with her. They often made music together, and hardly a day went by without at least some kind of message from her admirer — her junior by eleven years. True, she did not refrain from making anti-Semitic remarks and others specifically directed at Werfel’s obesity; nonetheless, Werfel had never felt as comfortable, as well understood, as happy in a woman’s presence as he now did with Alma Mahler. She felt the same way; Werfel stimulated her greatly. He was a miraculous miracle, she noted in her diary.

  After each reunion Werfel felt more strongly that their meeting had been fated. He loved Alma’s extremely powerful personality and was overjoyed that she told him what to do and what not to do; he believed that in her he had found everything Gertrud Spirk was not able to give him. She would succeed where Gertrud, because of her weakness, had failed. She would save Franz from that “atmosphere of corruption.” In the Café Central he boasted about his conquest[222] like any playboy, and his friends smiled half mockingly, half in admiration. In reality, however, he saw Alma as his savior, an earth mother, magna mater — indeed, a goddess whom he could worship.

  His relationship with his beloved in Prague grew ever more burdensome. In her letters, to which Werfel replied less and less frequently, Gertrud for the first time voiced suspicions, frightening dreams, and premonitions that had reinforced her worst fears. “There is so much pain and anxiety in all those dream images you tell me about,” Werfel wrote to her at the end of 1917. “You see, this melancholy of yours frightens me... Your disposition for pain, which is really so much in your nature,... always makes me fear that I’m mistreating you.” In the future, he continued, Gertrud would have to find a way to tolerate the character of her friend “without immediately becoming unhappy.” To attach herself to him meant “stepping onto the ice; like being a rider on Lake Constance.”

  At the turn of 1917-18, Walter Gropius spent another short leave in Vienna and found his wife rather frosty.[223] A projected cycle of Mahler’s works, which Willem Mengelberg was rehearsing in the concert hall of the Vienna Music Society, and her interest in Werfel and his work seemed to take up Alma’s entire strength and powers of concentration. A few hours after his departure, Gropius sent his wife a telegram from a border station: “Break the ice in our faces!” This was a quotation from a poem in Werfel’s Each Other collection, “Veni Creator Spiritus.”[224]

  While Mengelberg conducted Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, Alma and Franz exchanged passionate glances from their respective boxes. After the concert, Alma took her young admirer home to her apartment on Elisabethstrasse. Had she been twenty years younger, Alma admitted to herself the following morning, she would immediately have disregarded everything else and followed Franz Werfel, her “beloved of the gods,” to the ends of the earth.

  “I feel that I want to kill all that is evil in me, and want nothing but to have you be happy, rid of all difficult things,” he now wrote to Gertrud in a letter that contained a coded confession: he said that “many signs of change” had occurred in the last few days. The ambiguous phrase referred primarily to a sudden order from his superiors to leave for Switzerland in January on a tour of Zurich and six other cities. Shortly before that tour, he visited Prague for a few days and saw Gertrud and his family. In mid-January 1918 he traveled to Zurich, via Vienna and Feldkirch.

  He wrote to Alma from Feldkirch: “Homesickness, homesickness all the way on this trip, you my giver of life, keeper of the flame!!!”[225] He told her he was constantly humming the theme of a trio of Pfitzner’s, the one she played so beautifully by heart. “If you don’t see me for a long time,” he asked anxiously, “will you forget me?”

  Gertrud, too, received a letter from Feldkirch: “I am with you very, very much,” he reassured her. That night on the train she had appeared in the strangest dreams, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since his time at the front. “I believe my heart gives only what it has and cannot lie... You are with me and walk hand in hand with me.”

  In Zurich the poet, no doubt inspired by his amorous Viennese adventures, experienced the greatest public success of his life to that date.[226] In the Tonhallesaal, an auditorium with a thousand seats, he read to a full house from his own works. Two days later, the Zurich Stadt theater presented the Swiss premiere of his translation of The Trojan Women. Both events were highly praised in the daily press[227], and every Zurich newspaper carried long articles and reports about him. Most of his free time was spent in the Café Odéon, the meeting place of the dadaists and numerous other colleagues. He met Else Lasker-Schüler, whom he had known well in Leipzig, again, and saw Annette Kolb and Frank Wedekind, Leonhard Frank and Albert Ehrenstein, and,
above all, his friend Stefan Zweig. Zweig, too, had been sent to Zurich by the Military Press Bureau and was impatiently awaiting the premiere of his play Jeremiah.

  Werfel gave a total of twelve lectures in Switzerland.[228] Their subjects included Ferdinand Raimund’s drama King of the Alps and Misanthrope (Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind) and the history of psychology in Austria. In Davos, at an adult-education institute, he read poems that he introduced to his audience of mostly workers with a short speech.[229] “Comrades!” he cried. “That which today calls itself art is just an iridescent blob of fat floating on top of the capitalist broth.” Time and again, only those in bourgeois circles heard the artists’ “outcry,” not the working classes who had sunk to being “slaves of militarism,” numbed by phrasemongering and obedience to the state. Werfel, who had obviously graduated to socialism under the tutelage of Egon Erwin Kisch and was impressed by the success of the Russian Revolution, contrasted this state of affairs with the model of the Soviet Union, where great authors like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had been able to reach the people to make them “move forward.” “Spirituality and socialism,” he said, had happily “merged into one” in the new Russia, and he hoped that his own verses, which he was about to read, would also contribute “to the dissolution of the bourgeois world... to the renewal of socialism.”

  It took a good deal of courage in early 1918 to give a public lecture portraying the archenemy of the Austrian Empire, Bolshevik Russia, as a paragon — the more so if you had been sent abroad to propagandize for the Austrian cause. The Austrian military attaché in Bern received immediate word of Werfel’s allegedly treasonous words. It was also becoming public knowledge that the press office emissary had frequently made unequivocally pacifist remarks before, during, and after his lectures, thus quite consciously undermining his propaganda mission.

  Ca. 1918

  In mid-March Werfel wrote to Alma from Davos that as soon as his final lectures were over he would immediately return to her — that he was, in fact, cutting his tour short. “Only because of you! Do you hear?” He feared that Alma would treat him unkindly on his return, would be unable to understand how he had been able to endure life without her for so long. Why else had she hardly written him during the past two months? “You hate me and will no longer be glad to suddenly hear my voice on the telephone.”

  As soon as Werfel arrived back in Zurich[230], the Austrian military attaché presented him with an order from the Military Press Bureau to break off his Swiss tour immediately. Well-publicized readings in Zurich, Winterthur, and Chur had to be canceled. Three days later Werfel arrived in Vienna and reported to the press office. He was immediately told of a rumor according to which his Swiss lectures had roused the ire of certain gentlemen in the Foreign Office and that he could expect severe punishment.

  Alma Mahler-Gropius was in her third month of pregnancy when Franz Werfel returned to Vienna in the second half of March. She wasn’t sure whether her lover was the child’s father but assumed that it had been conceived in January, before Werfel’s departure, not in December, when Walter Gropius had spent a few days in Vienna. In any case, she left Werfel in a state of doubt but insisted on spending as much time as possible with him. She visited him at the Hotel Bristol[231], his new domicile across from the opera house, where he had moved from the Graben Hotel, and also invited him quite openly to her apartment, introducing him to her friends and acquaintances in the red music room. He regaled the members of her salon with entertainingly hyperbolic reports of his Swiss adventures.

  As the anticipated reprisals for his antimilitarist behavior were not forthcoming, at least for the time being, he could devote himself to his own work for the first time in a long while. At the end of his working day, rather than visit the Café Central, he went home to his hotel room on the Kärntnerring to work on The Last Judgment, a book of poems he had begun years ago, added to at the front, and wanted to finish at last. He told Kurt Wolff in late April 1918 that he regarded this book as his most important to date. He compared it to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and expected it to find a large readership.

  Gertrud Spirk, still in the dark about the changed circumstances of her lover’s life but amazed at his long absence from Prague, told Werfel that she wanted to visit him in Vienna. Franz assured her that he longed greatly for her company: “All the things we’ll have to tell each other when we meet again!” He continued, “I have to learn how to muster my interior powers. And you’ll help me with that!”

  When Gertrud arrived in Vienna, Alma Mahler was at a health spa. Alma had invited her lover to accompany her, but, as he was expecting Gertrud’s arrival, he declined. “I did not want to go to Göding,” he explained later, because it took him “a long time to get used to strange surroundings.”

  The reunion with Gertrud, who stayed with her sister and brother-in-law, was totally overshadowed by Werfel’s doubly bad conscience. He was impatient in the company of his former lover and tortured her with his irritability during her entire visit. Only when he was certain of her imminent departure did he write to her, at her sister’s address. “Do not curse these days too much. I am such a nervous wreck myself that I can no longer be used as medicine.”

  Nevertheless, when she returned to Prague, she sent him new photographs of herself, and he replied, “Don’t believe that I’ll vanish from your life — that is impossible.” On the contrary, he would visit her soon in Prague, he dreamed of her so often... Such language at a time when he was also having “hot, sweet, and painful” dreams of Alma Mahler. In one of these, he saw himself as a child, dressed up in a stage costume and playing with other children while Alma, an adult, was sitting in an adjoining room with the other adults. “You are to me what I felt as home when I was a boy,” he wrote her. “I adore you — you are the greatest rapture I have ever experienced — I am yours in wonderful humility.”

  At the beginning of July 1918, Gina Kranz, a friend from the Café Central, found him an apartment[232] on Boltzmanngasse, in the ninth district of Vienna. It had housed the editorial offices of a short-lived journal, Summa, financed by Gina’s adoptive father. A large, light studio space with a view of Boltzmann Park and Maria de Mercedes Church, it became Werfel’s home — the first apartment he had had to himself in his life. Gina even provided a cleaning woman, and Franz immediately sent his mother a telegram asking for bed linen. However, he claimed he would stay in the mansard apartment only if Alma agreed to it. To live there without her permission pained him, and he asked her to let him know as soon as possible what he should do. To his delight, Alma agreed to the move.

  When his sister Hanna gave birth to a son[233] at the end of June, the family insisted that Franz try to get a few days’ leave to come to Prague. At a time when Alma Mahler-Gropius was in her sixth month of pregnancy, Werfel wrote Gertrud Spirk that he wanted to make plans for their future while he was in Prague. He suggested that they try to figure out a way to live together in his new and really lovely apartment on Boltzmanngasse. This letter was written in a particularly messy scrawl and splattered with ink. “Beloved, come to me soon!” he exhorted. “We won’t ever have to leave the house. We’ll talk about it all in Prague.”

  But during his short stay in the city of his birth, at the height of summer 1918, he confessed that he had given his heart to another woman some eight months before. He admitted that he had been lying to and cheating Gertrud all that time. He denounced himself, described himself as a good-for-nothing, a monster, yet begged for her forgiveness like a repentant schoolboy. After this meeting, their correspondence came to an abrupt end.

  Two hours from Vienna by train, Alma Mahler had a second home, acquired in 1914. The villa, Haus Mahler, stood on a plot that Gustav Mahler himself had chosen for it, in a magnificent mountain landscape about a thousand meters above sea level. Franz visited Alma there at the end of July.[234] Freed from his oppressive relationship with Gertrud, he was able to treat Alma with newly won confidence. She was very pleased to see him, and ev
en her fourteen-year-old daughter Anna Mahler liked her mother’s new friend. In the company of a lady of Viennese society who was visiting Breitenstein, the three had to engage in a bit of play-acting in order to conceal Alma’s adultery. First of all, they took Emmy Redlich[235] on a strenuous walk up the Kreuzberg, and in the evening Alma fulfilled Frau Redlich’s dearest wish by playing the entire second movement of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on the harmonium. “When bedtime came,” Werfel wrote a few days later in his “Secret Diary” (“Geheimes Tagebuch”)[236], “Frau R. didn’t budge from Alma’s room for almost two hours.” Only then was Werfel able to appear in Alma’s bedroom: “We made love! I did not go easy on her. In the small hours, I returned to my room.”

  Haus Mahler, Breitenstein

  He had hardly fallen asleep, at dawn, when Alma’s English maid, Maude, woke him to say that her mistress was suddenly feeling very ill. Would Herr Werfel please get a doctor; Madame Mahler had just had a severe hemorrhage. Panic-stricken, he ran[237] across meadows and fields still damp from the rain on that Sunday morning, fearing the worst for his beloved, blaming himself as the cause of the hemorrhage. He lost his way in the fields and woods, ran on, shouting, praying — ”Let Alma live!” — fell down a hill, made a vow on his mad run never again to desire any other woman but Alma. At last he reached a road leading to a nearby sanatorium, where he roused the physician on duty. As this man was a tuberculosis patient himself, he took his time climbing the steep path to Haus Mahler.