Werfel left Breitenstein that afternoon. A longer stay might have aroused Frau Redlich’s suspicions. When he parted from his lover, she was in considerable pain and afraid she might lose the baby she had been carrying for seven months. She would hear nothing of Franz’s guilt and tried to reassure him, saying that she was equally responsible for anything that had happened.
While Werfel waited for his train at Breitenstein station, Lieutenant Walter Gropius stepped off a military train. Early that morning Anna had called her stepfather, who had brought a gynecologist from the city. The two men passed close by Werfel without noticing him.
In the days that followed, Werfel wrote conscientiously in his diary, recording practically every moment of his existence and repeating the vow he had made that morning when he feared for his loved one’s life: “To remain always true to Alma... Not to let my eyes dwell on sexually exciting things in the street.”
A telegram notified him that Alma had to be taken to a hospital in Vienna and that her condition remained serious. Werfel decided to fast, hoping to help his beloved by doing penance. He despaired over his own shortcomings: “I’m still not mature, I slide back only too easily into the world of sleaze.” On August 1, four days after the hemorrhage began, he was able to speak to Alma on the telephone. She had been taken to the Löw Sanatorium, the hospital in which Gustav Mahler had died in May 1911. Werfel was told that she was still in serious danger, and the physicians did not hold out much hope for the survival of the unborn child.
When he returned home that evening, he fell asleep for hours, an “undoubtedly hypnotic” and “paralyzed sleep” filled with mortal anxiety. As soon as he woke up, he called the Löw Sanatorium and was told that Alma had been taken to the delivery room at the very same time he had been in that trancelike sleep.
The next morning, he called the hospital again. This time he talked to Walter Gropius, who told him that Alma had had a very difficult night but had given birth to a boy. All things considered, she was doing quite well. “O Lord of Life, never again shall I lose you,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Alma, “and all my doing and not doing shall not cease to praise Thee and sanctify Thee.” And he informed his beloved, “Through you alone I am reborn, sweet holy mother!”
Werfel was still not certain whether the newborn was his or not. As soon as Alma had revived a little, she wrote Werfel and confirmed that he was undoubtedly the child’s father. But in his diary Werfel goes on questioning: “Is it my child?... That it is a boy, makes me feel... Yes! I haven’t been able to imagine that a girl would come from my seed.”
Eight days after his departure from Breitenstein he was able to see Alma again. He visited her in the sanatorium, pretending to be just a friend while the nurses were present. Only when they had a moment alone did he dare to look at the rapidly breathing baby that lay sleeping in a small basket. He noted that the diminutive creature not only resembled him but resembled even more — and this really moved him — his father, Rudolf Werfel, “to a frightening degree.”[238]
Alma, too, had noticed the likeness between the baby and her lover, and every time she had visitors[239] she was afraid that someone would mention it. One day Walter Gropius and his rival stood side by side in the hospital room, admiring the baby. “The deep poignancy of the situation made me tremble,” Werfel confessed in one of his daily letters. He regretted that Alma’s architect-husband, whom he regarded as one of “the most distinguished, most noble of men,” was living “in a state of ignorance,” and he felt guilty about it. True, it had been Alma’s right to choose the father of her child, he wrote to her, “but it wasn’t my right to become the father.” Alma had told Werfel that Gropius was delighted with the boy and anxious that he should survive; she admitted that this caused her heartache. In her letter she asked her lover whether he thought that her husband would ever find out the truth; at the same time, she did not hesitate to sign the letters she wrote from the hospital “Alma Maria Werfel.”
Werfel had permission to visit her room, number 190, at any time, but he always felt embarrassed when he could not be alone with Alma. Thus, when her mother and stepfather, the painter Carl Moll, were present, his gestures became awkward and he hardly dared utter a word or even cast a glance at his own child. As soon as he returned home he would write Alma to lament this almost insupportable situation. The lovers corresponded about a name for their son, vacillating between Martin and Daniel, Lukas and Benvenuto. Werfel declared that the boy would “not be a weakling” and “not a hysteric,” and claimed to perceive traits of maturity, courage, and sensitivity in him at this early stage. “These days,” he wrote to Alma, “I often feel that — even if I am a disaster — he’ll be the perfection of what is only hinted at in me.”
At the end of August, while Alma Mahler was still in the sanatorium, Walter Gropius overheard his wife in a very intimate telephone conversation. When he asked her who had been at the other end of this ardent discourse, Alma remained silent “... and he knew everything,” Werfel noted in his diary. That same afternoon the betrayed husband made his way to his rival’s apartment, but Werfel did not answer the door. Their confrontation took place the next day, in a calm and reasonable atmosphere; Gropius even felt sympathy for his rival. However, the architect could not imagine giving up the woman he adored as a goddess; his plan was to take her and the children to Germany after the war, to begin a new life. Nevertheless, he also discussed matters with Alma’s mother and consulted lawyers. Then he received sudden marching orders: he had to get back to his unit. During the past few weeks, the Allies had forced the Germans to retreat from all their defensive positions on the Western front. The last great decisive battles of World War I had begun.
Gropius wrote to Werfel[240] from the front and said that now they both had a duty to support the “divine woman” who had come so close to dying. He mentioned that he had started reading Werfel’s works and was extraordinarily moved by them. “I love him and feel friendship for him,” Franz told Alma, and asked her if she thought it possible “that we do not have to be jealous!? That there can be a brotherhood of love for the divine being Alma?”
In his next letter, Gropius went one step further: after reading everything Werfel had published so far, he recognized in his rival a “genius of fate,” sent to scourge him so that he, Gropius, could become better. He paid tribute to Werfel and hoped that Alma’s wisdom would now find the right word and the right road for both men.
In the meantime, Alma had returned to the city apartment on Elisabethstrasse, together with the baby, which was still extremely sickly. Werfel was working on a fairy-tale drama in which he tried to incorporate the events in Breitenstein and their prehistory in allegorical form. So that he could write without distraction, he prevailed on the Military Press Bureau’s doctor now and then to put him on the sick list for several days, and in a short time he finished the first act of the play The Midday Goddess (Die Mittagsgöttin).[241] Werfel had to rush because he absolutely wanted to include the play in his book The Last Judgment, which had already been set in proof and about which he felt very differently now than he had in the spring. The volume now seemed to him, he wrote in his diary, “sterile down to the bones, barren, even deficient in music... Coquettish fluff. But I have to let them do it. For Kurt Wolff’s sake.” He felt too weak to “suppress... this evidence of my existence after two or three years of silence.”
The Midday Goddess had as its main character Mara, the earth goddess, the primary pagan principle, who manages to attract to herself the aimless, decadent vagabond Laurentin. Mara shows him the way out of the “chaos of the I,” making a new man of him. She bears a child, Laurentin’s son, whose birth causes the vagabond to feel reborn, this time with the strength and maturity to choose his own path in life, in sincerity and purity.
The three-act play was completed by the end of September 1918. Werfel sent it to his publisher with a note stating that The Last Judgment had been lacking this particular element of male-female relationship:
thus the play would truly complete the large volume. Now, he wrote to Georg Heinrich Meyer, he was praying “to the gods that a few insightful people will understand what I have concealed within this book.”[242] (Financial and contractual matters were still in the hands of Rudolf Werfel, who acted as his son’s agent in all negotiations with Kurt Wolff Verlag.)[243]
In October 1918, Walter Gropius received a medical release[244] from frontline duty and traveled to Berlin to prepare for the reopening of his architectural office. At the very beginning of November — the German Reich was in the initial throes of revolution — he came to Vienna. He had decided to ask Alma for custody of Manon, their two-year-old daughter, and to suggest that Alma start a family of her own with Anna, the new baby, and Franz Werfel.
The three protagonists of this real-life drama talked things over.[245] Alma announced her decision to bid farewell to both men: she said that this was irrevocable and that she wanted to raise her three children by herself. On bended knee Gropius begged his wife to forgive him for his threat to deprive her of Manon. Werfel managed to calm the other two down with a few carefully chosen words. However, they did not make any progress toward a resolution of their triangular problem that day in November 1918.
“If you were thinking of using my mother’s memoirs as a basis for your research, you’d better forget it,” says Anna Mahler. I am visiting the sculptor[246] in her home in the medieval town of Spoleto, near Rome. “There was an original manuscript of the autobiography,” she continues. “It was nine hundred pages long, but out of consideration for certain people — and for Mammi herself — most of it was toned down a lot and even drastically changed before the book was published. For instance, practically all of her horrendous anti-Semitism was edited out. And also what she really thought of Mahler, Gropius, Kokoschka, and Werfel.”
Alma Mahler-Werfel with her daughter Anna, ca. 1930
Alma Mahler’s daughter spends six months of the year in Los Angeles, the other six in Italy. Her two-story house on the narrow Via degli Eremiti is sparsely furnished. The rooms have stone floors. In the front yard, surrounded by dry clumps of grass, lies the white sculpture of a nude male under large, semi-opaque sheets of plastic. The atmosphere of the high-ceilinged rooms is cool and spare, but the kitchen and study are a little warmer.
There is a long wooden table covered with piles of books, newspapers, correspondence. “Alma kept calling Kokoschka a coward until he finally ‘volunteered’ for military service in the war,” Anna relates in her deep, slightly hoarse voice. “Well, she couldn’t tell the world that, could she? Kokoschka really did not want to go to war, but she was already fed up with him by then. He was too demanding for her. Then, when he was hospitalized in Vienna with a severe head wound, she refused to go and see him. But she really did fall in love with Werfel, even physically, absolutely. He did have a beautiful head... I made a bust of him, in the thirties in Vienna. And he had a wonderful forehead, light blue eyes... But he was very stout and muscle-bound. A large mouth, muscular, typical for a man who likes to talk a lot. But terrible teeth! And his chin looked very weak when he was talking.”
There is an album of photographs, inherited from Alma Mahler. The book looks full to bursting — it contains hundreds of images of long-gone life stories. They parade before my eyes like fragments of dreams. Alma’s father, the famous landscape painter Emil Schindler; her mother; her stepfather Carl Moll; her siblings and her daughters; her husbands, lovers, and friends. “See here, that’s the Haus Mahler in Breitenstein,” says Anna, pointing at a slightly yellowed photograph. “Not really a very handsome building, is it? But it was lovely inside. Paneling everywhere — and, at first, no electric light at all. It was so lovely at night in the room with the fireplace: only the flickering fire and many, many candles. Above the fireplace there was a fresco by Kokoschka that continued the flames upward, with Kokoschka himself sitting in their midst. To the right, some monsters, very dark. To the left, a figure of light, pointing — as it were — to the way out. And that figure, of course, was Alma.
Anna Mahler and her mother, ca. 1928
“I always liked Werfel, from the very beginning. Of course I remember that terrible episode with the hemorrhage. I’m sure that much of that was due to poor nutrition — we had hardly anything to eat during the war. Our cook[247] — her name was Agnes — used to prepare a kind of ersatz meat for us, a concoction of mushrooms and tree bark, with polenta and potatoes on the side. That was more or less it — surely not enough nutrition for the fetus. And after the hemorrhage, until the birth, there were three days during which the baby hardly got any oxygen. No wonder it became so ill later. Those weeks of anxiety about Alma and the child preoccupied Werfel to the end of his life. He hardly ever spoke of them, but that period keeps cropping up in his work. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t all that good for him to fall under Mammi’s influence. She made him into a novelist, that’s for sure. Without her — I’m pretty sure of this — he would have remained a poet and a bohemian to the end of his life. I don’t think he would have been too concerned about making money.”
Anna’s husband, Albrecht Joseph, a writer, theater director, and film editor in his time, has joined us at the big table. After listening to his wife for a while, he comments, “Werfel told a friend in later years: ‘If I hadn’t met Alma, I would have written a few more good poems and gone to the dogs, happily.’“
“But you mustn’t imagine that Alma was some kind of monster — that wouldn’t be right at all,” Anna says. “If you don’t know both sides of her, you can’t understand her; she was an incredibly passionate woman who was able to give an incredible amount. When she entered a room, or just stopped in the doorway, you could immediately feel an electric charge. There was a glow when she came into a room.”
“Yes, she had this amazing magnetic energy, and it served her hunger for power,” Albrecht agrees. “At first sight, she looked like a successful opera singer, a Wagnerian. She always wore these gowns shaped like potato sacks so that you couldn’t see her figure at all, only her imposing head.”
“Still, she had magic,” Anna Mahler insists. “You can’t deny that! And her enthusiasm for everything in the arts — she was like a volcano! And she really paid attention to everyone she spoke to. And encouraged them. Gave people courage to be themselves and to pursue their art. You experienced it yourself: she really had a great personality, she was able to enchant people in a matter of seconds.”
“Your father, Gustav Mahler, was a remarkable man even before he met Alma,” Albrecht says. “Kokoschka would have become Kokoschka, Alma or no Alma. And Gropius would have founded the Bauhaus even without Alma. Speaking of Gropius — when reminiscing, she used to say, ‘Oh, but he was so boring!’“
Breitenstein am Semmering
“Today, against the superior force of these mounted police, we are still too weak!”[248] Franz Werfel shouted to the crowd surrounding him. But soon, the twenty-eight-year-old assured his audience, waving his hat in operatic fashion, soon, like an avalanche, the proletariat would crush the rulers who were still exploiting it: “Then we’ll own these palaces of money!” he shouted, and pointed at the massive Bankverein building behind him. It was the beginning of November 1918, near the Schottentor in the Inner City of Vienna. Werfel sympathized with the Red Guard, called into life a short while before by Egon Erwin Kisch and modeled on the Bolshevik example. With his friend, its leader, he roamed the streets in great excitement, staying away from his post in the Military Press Bureau more and more. In military barracks[249], exercise yards, newspaper offices, he participated in heated discussions, attended gatherings of soldiers and workers, and went to illegal meetings to plan the overthrow of the monarchy by the dispossessed classes. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing on all fronts, and the greatest slaughter humanity had yet seen was drawing to a close.
Some of the agitators in the Red Guard had participated in the Russian Revolution. They pushed through a resolution procl
aiming that blood would have to flow in future clashes with the state. When Werfel voiced his strong opposition to the resolution, he was threatened with expulsion from the military committee. The threat did not seem to faze him — he had other worries.[250] His call to storm the banks had quickly reached the ears of the authorities, and he was summoned to a hearing. Werfel said that he was a supporter of Tolstoy and of primitive Christianity, and was therefore strictly opposed to any use of violence; his brief speech, he claimed, had simply served to calm the excited mob — and in particular to stop it from marching on the Rossauer Barracks. Police Commissioner Johann Presser countered that the accused was hardly in a position to gauge the dangerous effect of his incendiary words and pointed out that Werfel had lost his right to reside in Austria: his permanent domicile was in Prague, the city that a fortnight ago had become the capital of a new and independent Czech state. Werfel replied that he was a well-known poet and that any restrictions on his freedom would lead to a furor in the press all over Austria and Germany — surely Commissioner Presser did not want to risk such a scandal?
On November 12, 1918[251], one day after the abdication of Emperor Karl I, the Austrian Republic was proclaimed on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, in front of Parliament. Hundreds of thousands streamed in from all districts of the city and gathered between City Hall and the opera house. Only the members of the Red Guard, whom the crowd took to be security forces, were still wearing their field gray uniforms. During a speech by the president of Parliament, the Guard unfurled red flags: they had simply torn the white strips of fabric off their newly manufactured red-and-white Republican flags. A sudden commotion broke out when it was rumored that a machine-gun post had been set up on the roof of Parliament to open fire on the Red Guard. A few Guard members tried to enter the building, firing their weapons at random. In the ensuing panic, two people were killed and several demonstrators seriously wounded by small-arms fire.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 10
