Alma, now a divorcée, visited her lover’s parents for the first time, something she had managed to avoid until then. She was a houseguest on Mariengasse, staying with Franz, his father and mother, Mizzi, and Barbara. That year Albine Werfel turned fifty; thus, she was only nine years older than her son’s mistress. The relationship between Franz and Alma probably became clear to all concerned during those days, but Alma was treated with the utmost respect and great sympathy. She was now regarded as a member of the family.
The lovers in Trahütten, Styria, ca. 1920-21
Werfel and Alma traveled to Venice[297] at the end of 1920, taking lodgings at the Grand Hotel Luna and spending wonderful weeks in the city they both loved more than any other. Finances permitting, they decided to visit Italy and the city on the lagoon much more frequently in coming years.
Werfel began the new year with an extended reading tour of Germany.[298] He wrote Kurt Wolff that the country had become “unspeakably terrifying!... Do you sense this too? Never before have I felt so keenly the question: ‘For whom?’“[299] His many readings were well attended and successful, but he was angered by the lukewarm and to some extent even hostile reactions of German critics to Mirror Man, which had now appeared in book form. In a letter to Alma, he claimed to be “pursued by hatred from all sides” in Germany. “Terrible country, terrible people!” He even feared that his lover might be adversely influenced by the Reich’s prevalent opinion of him.
He did not return to the Semmering until May 1921, to continue work on Goat Song. He had had news from Leipzig that Mirror Man would have its world premiere there in the fall. In an “Autobiographical Note” (“Autobiographische Skizze”)[300], probably intended for a press release by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Werfel confessed, “The consuming art sensation of my youth was the theater,” and said that the most important experience in that context had been “the presentation of Verdi’s operas by visiting Italian companies.” It had been a key experience whose “aesthetic perspectives are still far from exhausted or intellectually charted.” In the note he moved the year of his graduation from the gymnasium back to 1908, thus trying to conceal the embarrassing fact that he had repeated grades. Similarly, the fact that he had served only as a telephone operator on the East Galician front — without a day in the trenches — was buried in the sentence “The war years 1915-17 I spent serving in an artillery regiment.” The note ended with the words: “Since the fall of 1917 I have lived in Vienna. I have found the great happiness for which, unknowingly, I had always been looking.”
After Mirror Man premiered in Leipzig and Stuttgart, not very successfully, there was hardly a cultural page in any German-language paper that did not report on the poet, playwright, and prose writer Franz Werfel. Among these, not a few attacked him as an intellectual con artist, facile and money hungry. Even Karl Kraus succumbed to the temptation of revenge. In his playful operetta Literature, or Let’s See Now (Literatur oder Man wird doch da sehn), the “Werfel family” engaged in stereotypically Jewish literary machinations in a coffeehouse reminiscent of the Café Herrenhof. Kraus accused young “Johann Wolfgang Werfel” of plagiarizing Faust, Peer Gynt, and To Damascus, describing his adversary as a sophisticated businessman who simply served literary fashion. The operetta matched Werfel’s tasteless attacks on Kraus in every way.
When Werfel returned to Prague[301] at the end of October to visit his parents, the city seemed more than ever a “phantom.”[302] Even the apartment of his childhood was more alien than ever. His mother was pained to see her son was turning away from her world and even had a crying fit over it. “I had to remain quite cold,” Franz reported to his “only queen.” He was constantly comparing his mother and father to Alma Mahler and deploring the almost insufferable discrepancy between these two worlds. “I don’t belong anywhere, anywhere at all, to no city, no country, no time — I belong only to you,” he wrote her. “I want to live with my back turned to the world!” This decision was not so easy to realize: about five hundred reviews of Mirror Man were forwarded to him in Prague. He didn’t hear from his beloved for days: “I am quite at a loss. Good God! Why aren’t you writing to me!... My mother keeps asking me why you aren’t writing to me... I swear to you, if you don’t write to me this instant, you’ll get a taste of what it feels like to be disappointed by the mailman.”
Goat Song premiered at the Raimund Theater in Vienna on March 10, 1922. The daily newspapers reacted to the bizarre and unconventional piece approvingly but with confusion. Thus Robert Musil, who knew Werfel well from the Herrenhof, remarked in the Prager Presse that the play reminded him of a successful opera libretto, but as it did not go beyond allegory, it was not a work of great symbolic power.[303] He went on to say that the poet Werfel, as was well known, had been struggling for years to achieve depth and significance without being able to convince his theatrical audience. “My line of credit has been exhausted. How come? I have become too familiar to those snobs and journalists,” Werfel wrote in his diary after the premiere of Goat Song.[304] As he was apparently no longer capable of surprises, he complained, those people were now debunking him. The press needed to discover a new talent every other year, and his “moment” had simply passed. But, he wrote, there was a consolation: “It comes again,” that moment.
* * *
In order to spend time with her daughter Manon, Alma Mahler visited Walter Gropius in Weimar for a fortnight at the end of March.[305] “I can’t live alone!” Werfel pleaded, imploring her, as he had the previous year, not to allow the general German antipathy against him and his work to influence her. The Germans, he insisted, had not understood his passion and longing in the least. There was nothing “more mendacious and hypocritical... than this ‘spiritual’ Germany: Goethe or Bauhaus.” His letter culminated with the statement: “I am (thank God) Goat Song. The primal chaos of insatiable desire.”
“All loneliness is illness”[306] was one of the first notes for a play he was outlining during Alma’s absence. No doubt it arose from the feeling of total lack of meaning and direction that overwhelmed him as soon as his beloved left him to himself. The main character of Mass Murderer (Der Massenmörder), later retitled Schweiger[307], was a well-respected master watchmaker who had once, in a fit of insanity, opened fire on a crowd, undergone psychiatric treatment, and then been released as completely cured. Now, Franz Schweiger was not even able to remember the darkest moment of his life.
Distracted by rehearsals at the Burgtheater for the Austrian premiere of Mirror Man, Werfel interrupted work on the new play. Although the passage against Karl Kraus had been deleted by the play’s director, the theater administration, headed by Anton Wildgans, still feared violent protests by fanatical Kraus supporters. On the first night, police security was provided in the auditorium, but the anticipated scandal did not occur. Apart from a few hisses, the audience reacted with great applause and demanded repeated curtain calls for the author with its shouts of “Bravo!”
In early May Werfel followed Alma to Venice, where she had already stayed several weeks in a small hotel on the Grand Canal. On their first visit to Venice, Alma had decided to purchase a small palazzo[308], and she was now actively looking for one even though her U.S. investments had been sequestered. To actually buy such a house, she would have to rely on the financial assistance of her stepfather, Carl Moll. True, Werfel wanted to contribute — his book and theater royalties were increasing steadily — but the disastrous effect of inflation in both Germany and Austria was rapidly devaluing his income.
After about a month of intense effort, Alma managed the almost impossible: she found the palazzo she coveted, in its own little garden. The three-story building was not far from the Grand Canal on one of the prettiest squares of the city, right next to the Basilica dei Frari in the Campo San Polo district. Repairs were needed, the previous owners were troublesome, but the dream of a house in Venice — Alma immediately called it Casa Mahler — was about to come true.
Casa Mahler, Venice
F
ranz Werfel spent peaceful and happy days in the city on the lagoon. On walks, on vaporetto trips, and in hotel lounges he made notes for a projected large-scale novel[309], based on a notion harking back to his schooldays[310] and visits to the opera: to write, one day, about his idol Giuseppe Verdi. Until now, a vague fear of not being able to do justice to the venerated figure of “the Maestro” had held him back.
With Alma’s help, he even began to compose music himself.[311] For instance, he set Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem “Venice” to a tune in six-eight time, the rhythm of the barcarole. His mentor admittedly regarded the result as “utterly devoid of inspiration and talent,” as he noted in his diary — ”but I often have such a great yearning for notes written by myself.”
On her return to Vienna, Alma Mahler wrote a letter to Kurt Wolff[312], whom she had not yet met. She told him that Werfel was in dire straits: for the 3,500 German marks he received every month (the equivalent of 105,000 Austrian crowns), he was barely able to buy cigarettes and certainly not in a position to defray living expenses, for which he was entirely dependent on her. She asked Wolff to permit her to pay off any debts Werfel had incurred through various advances, saying that her friend felt uneasiness toward his publisher because of these unresolved financial matters. Was not Werfel head and shoulders above most of his colleagues, she asked, and should he not be remunerated accordingly?
Wolff defended himself vehemently[313], declaring that Werfel was his favorite author and that he was more than willing to discuss modifications of their contracts. On the other hand, he pointed out, Werfel had received three times as much money in the past year as Frau Mahler quoted in her letter. Besides — and here the publisher attempted to justify himself in a somewhat curious manner — Werfel had repeatedly assured him that his father was making considerable contributions to his finances on a regular basis.
Werfel spent the summer of 1922 in Breitenstein, working on the first draft of Schweiger. Franz Schweiger, a mass murderer, has been released from an insane asylum, as completely cured. Professor Viereck, director of the asylum, suddenly appears in Schweiger’s workshop, after learning that his former model patient is going to become active as a speaker and candidate for the Socialist Party. The psychiatrist, a German nationalist, reminds the murderer of his deed, destroys his marriage to Anna (who is pregnant), and generally transforms the good watchmaker’s newly idyllic life into a living hell. But then Dr. Ottokar Grund, a university instructor, somnambulist medium, and slave of the evil professor, shoots and kills his master. “We shall never, never stop hating!” he shouts at Schweiger. “Down with the human race! We, you and I, shall organize the boundless hatred of the diseased millions!” The character was modeled on Otto Gross, Werfel’s friend from Café Central days, and drawn as a “singularly unpleasant person,” a dangerous psychopath and anarchist.
Dr. Grund is Schweiger’s alter ego, just as the Mirror Man personified Thamal’s split personality. Looking back, Werfel probably saw Otto Gross as his own antiego: if Alma had not saved him from the coffeehouse milieu, his life might have followed the pattern set by the passionate father-hater and brilliant disciple of Freud, who had died a painful death at the beginning of 1920 in the wake of withdrawal from his drug addiction.
The first draft of the play was finished in two months. In October, when the second draft had been completed, Werfel wrote in his diary, which he kept sporadically: “Generally speaking less confident than last year, after Goat Song.”[314] He seemed more content with a number of new poems written in 1922 and due to be published under the title Incantations (Beschwörungen). “And yet writing poems often makes me unhappy, fills me with suspicion,” he wrote to his friend in Prague, the poet and translator Rudolf Fuchs.[315] “If one used this kind of careless intensity and vague suppression of inner voices in the construction of a physical apparatus, one would really be in trouble.”
“It’s just not possible anymore for you to go to Weimar,” he clamored in a letter from Prague when Alma and Manon once again visited Walter Gropius. After — once again — hearing nothing from her for days on end, he wrote, “I am Schweiger [the Silent One]. A paralyzing indifference crawls through my entire being. I don’t care for anybody... And I love you.” He pleaded with Alma to come to Prague, even tried a little blackmail, saying that he had been asked to give a reading for 2,000 crowns but would refuse to give it unless his beloved came to attend. “I can’t read without you. (And it would be a shame to lose the money.)” His father, by the way, had guaranteed him a private monthly income of 1,500 Czech crowns — a lifesaver at a time when inflation in Germany was assuming ever more frightening proportions.
Arthur Schnitzler came to give a lecture in Prague at the end of October[316] and met Werfel several times. They saw each other quite often in Vienna and Breitenstein; on these occasions, Schnitzler discussed his own work with the much younger man, whom he regarded as a friend. In Prague he was the guest of Werfel’s parents and spent a particularly pleasant evening on Mariengasse. Franz Werfel, however, felt a need to apologize to Alma for having invited Schnitzler. “I just couldn’t help it,” he wrote, “because I felt that he expected it. Don’t be angry with me.” Alma had become estranged from Schnitzler after he divorced his wife Olga in 1921. In the Schnitzlers’ continuous marital battles, Alma had taken Olga’s side.
Surprisingly enough, Alma did come to Prague to attend Werfel’s reading, but she did not stay long. Soon after the reading, she returned to Weimar. She had become the main subject of conversation in the Werfel home. “You’ve made an incredible impression,” Franz informed her. Mizzi was constantly bothering her brother to tell her more about Alma. His mother was happy to have become much closer to her son’s friend. According to Werfel, his mother had said that she now understood Frau Mahler and recognized her “nature” as it had been depicted in The Midday Goddess. And he thanked Alma for her efforts: “You made a great sacrifice for me.”
He stayed in Prague for two more weeks, spending time with Max Brod, Otto Pick, and, first and foremost, Franz Kafka. Kafka’s tuberculosis was now in an advanced stage. Werfel invited Kafka to visit him, either in the bracing mountain air of Breitenstein or in Alma’s house in Venice, if he was well enough to come. Werfel had long since revised his initial mistaken view[317] that Kafka’s work would never get beyond Tetschen-Bodenbach: after the publication of “A Report to the Academy” in 1917, he even wrote to Max Brod that he considered Franz Kafka “the greatest German author.” Kafka had not changed his estimation of Werfel and defended him against anyone who dared question his significance. He praised Mirror Man, and Goat Song[318], and later recalled one of his dreams[319] in which he gave Werfel a kiss.
But when the two met again at the end of 1922, Kafka’s disapproval of Schweiger[320] cast a pall over the reunion. The play had just appeared in book form and was to have its world premiere in a few weeks at the Neue Deutsche Theater in Prague. Kafka told Werfel that he found the main characters entirely inhuman and the invented story of Schweiger’s psychosis utterly unbelievable. He was particularly offended by Werfel’s characterization of a man he had once revered and befriended — who had, after all, had some influence on his own work: Otto Gross. Kafka identified with Gross’s desperate battle against his father[321], the professor of criminology Hans Gross of Graz; he identified with Gross’s vehement rejection of the patriarchal world order and agreed in some respects with his anarchic desire for political and private license. All the more reason for him to be outraged by Werfel’s decision to make the revolting Dr. Ottokar Grund the spokesman of these ideas in his play.
Werfel tried to defend himself, arguing as well as he could, without being able to change Kafka’s mind. On the verge of tears, Werfel ran out of the house. Kafka spent a bad evening and a sleepless night, and then wrote a long explanatory letter — which he never mailed. In it he said that he had always seen his younger friend as the leader of his generation but was now compelled to realize that Werfel had betrayed this cal
ling; what was more, the tragedy of Franz Schweiger had offended him, and he considered the play an outright “cheapening” of a whole generation’s suffering. Kafka added that he would not have expressed his anger so clearly if he hadn’t regarded Werfel as a close friend. On a conciliatory note, he finished by saying that he was grateful for the invitation to Italy but doubtful that his condition would allow him to accept.
Schweiger also met with rejection from Arthur Schnitzler.[322] He called it “a tortured, confused play — socialistic, occultist, religious, psychiatric,” and told Werfel how little he liked it when he saw him again in Vienna that December. He noted that Alma Mahler had been glad to hear someone speak honestly to Werfel about the play, which she, too, regarded as a failure.
The play premiered in Prague on January 6, 1923[323], in a well-staged production at the Neue Deutsche Theater, and opened a few nights later in Stuttgart. Although the critics generally dismissed Schweiger as a slick fantasy with sensationalistic overtones, the tragedy was a big hit with the public.
“I met Ernst Polak in the Café Herrenhof when I was about eighteen,” says Milan Dubrovic, a retired journalist and embassy counselor, once a habitué of the cafés Central and Herrenhof “Polak probably was the very best friend of my whole life, and he was Franz Werfel’s best friend. Incredibly smart and well read, Polak had a lot of charisma, and that made me venerate him. In the Herrenhof, I even became a member of ‘his’ booth, with — among others — Anton Kuh and Gustl Grüner. Alfred Polgar visited occasionally, and Robert Musil quite often. And Werfel, not every day but quite frequently. As soon as Alma took off, he really relished it; he became an instant recidivist.”
I am visiting Milan Dubrovic in his large apartment on Minoritenplatz in Vienna, only a minute away from Herrengasse, only a minute away from Dubrovic’s memories. The Café Central is still there today, but Dubrovic takes pains to avoid it. The notorious smoke-filled netherworld of yesteryear has been transformed into a tourist trap: brightly lit and squeaky clean, it now sports a life-size papier-mâché figure of Peter Altenberg reading the newspaper at his table. The only remaining fragment of the once spacious Herrenhof is a small espresso bar with plastic and Plexiglas decor.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 13
