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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  “Back then, we lived in the café,” the eighty-three-year-old gentleman reminisces. “You have to imagine it a bit like the academies of ancient Greece, where they tried to solve all the problems of philosophy. That was the kind of thing we did in the cafés. We discussed everything — religion, sexuality, politics, the gossip of the city. There were times when we really thrashed things out in a very brutal psychoanalytical manner, for instance after the first night of Werfel’s Goat Song — which I attended, at the Raimund Theater. Of course, everybody tried to figure out what Werfel was really talking about in that play. His coffeehouse friends said to themselves and each other, There just has to be some reason why he chose this fascinating but really quite horrendous subject. And Ernst Polak told us that Alma had yelled at Werfel more than once that the deformity of her son was his fault. ‘It’s all because of your degenerate seed!’[324] She really treated him abominably. And in Goat Song he was able to rid himself of all that in writing.

  “I was totally enthralled by Werfel. He was a truly fascinating man. He had exceptionally large eyes and a strong erotic aura. Sometimes, when he was in form, he could go on for hours telling stories, impersonating people, reconstructing situations. One never knew about those stories — how much had his imagination embellished them? We didn’t really care, they were always good stories! When Werfel began to tell them, everybody fell silent. Kuh once said, ‘When Franz is talking, it’s not like hearing a solo instrument but a whole orchestra!’ He would think of five subjects at once — it was tremendous. A splendid person, obsessed by ideas and ways to present them. He was like a fireworks display. One night we were leaving the Herrenhof after all the other places had closed, and Werfel said, ‘Let’s get a hotel room, I’ll pay for it.’ The hotel clerk was quite puzzled: ‘What can I do for you gentlemen?’ Werfel gave him an enormous tip and said, ‘All we need is a bottle of red wine and a lot of coffee.‘ And then we sat listening to him in that little room until dawn. But those weren’t just stories, those monologues of his: they were often well-founded explanations of the world. He was phenomenal. Sometimes we visited Werfel in the apartment on Elisabethstrasse, only if Alma wasn’t there. Or we went to Gina’s, to the grandiose mansion of Kranz, her adoptive father. Or to Polak’s apartment on Lerchenfelderstrasse. And Werfel would start playing the piano and singing Verdi arias. He knew them all by heart. But even when we had stayed up all night, at nine o’clock in the morning at the latest he would be at his desk — he was incredibly industrious; you know the saying ‘Genius is industry.’ In Breitenstein, where he worked often and in total isolation, he had a huge collection of phonograph records. He had practically everything by Verdi. Even though, if I’m not mistaken, his favorite opera wasn’t one of Verdi’s at all, but Bellini’s Norma.

  “He was a cantor at heart, a singer of praises, of God and the world. Religion was very important to him — for instance, he was deeply involved with the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, pondering the compartmentalized world view of Thomism. He knew many priests and was always analyzing Catholic philosophy. That was one of his obsessions. A very different one was his interest in girls who did not appear erotic at all. ‘Strange,’ we used to say, ‘the kind of woman Werfel falls for!’ It was a rather common type, really, apart from Alma. He was capable of starting a conversation with one of these young ladies right there in the street, and then they would vanish into a hotel. Well, in those days between the wars it really wasn’t difficult to have these erotic adventures — and that was due not least to the influence of Otto Gross. His theories were very much alive in the Herrenhof and he was a propagandist of free love. Gross thought that one shouldn’t even have a conversation with a woman before getting to know her sexually.

  “We coffeehouse people strongly condemned the influence Alma Mahler had on Werfel. We used to say, That’s a different Werfel, he’s become a ‘success boy’ [in English in the original]! But he seemed happy. One evening we were sitting there discussing what those present would term the highest happiness on earth. And Werfel said, quite openly, ‘Success! To me, success is practically identical with happiness.’ He had to admit that. ‘What wouldn’t I give,’ he once said, ‘to have been Puccini! To have written Tosca and to live to experience its worldwide success, to conduct it in person at La Scala in Milan, and here comes the thunderous applause from the audience! Well, if not Puccini,’ he added a little wistfully, ‘then I’d be content to have been Caruso.’“

  A Novel of the Opera

  After the premieres of Schweiger in Prague and Stuttgart, Franz Werfel returned once more to Breitenstein, his voluntary exile, at the end of January 1923.[325] Surrounded by snowdrifts many feet high, the house was almost impossible to heat. “Let’s move to Venice, at long last,” he wrote to Alma, who had stayed in Vienna, “to America, even farther away.” But he soon got company on the Semmering: Frau Mahler offered her hospitality to Richard Specht[326], a journalist and music critic, whom she had asked to make a preliminary selection for a projected edition of Gustav Mahler’s letters.

  Werfel complained about the houseguest, finding him a constant irritation. He claimed he could hardly concentrate on his work and that Specht was in fact a “terrible old maid,” a cautionary example of “yesterday’s impotent generation.” Werfel soon abandoned a play he had begun, The Rebellion of the Dead (Der Aufruhr der Toten), in which he combined memories of World War I with mythical images of a mysterious mining town. He found himself unable to start anything else and traveled restlessly back and forth between Breitenstein and Vienna.

  Only months later, staying in Alma’s Venetian palazzo, was he able to calm down and concentrate. His plan of the previous year — to dedicate a large prose work to his idol Verdi — assumed more definite outlines, although Werfel still feared the problems he would encounter in combining historical facts with a fictional plot.

  “I have converted A. to Verdi,” Werfel had written in his diary at the end of 1922. “Of Verdi’s lesser-known works, we played Don Carlos, Macbeth, Aroldo, Simon Boccanegra. The others, only cursorily. But the great works, forever... I would like to collaborate with Alma on a new version of Macbeth. Edit, delete, compress.” Alma Mahler’s evident conversion to Giuseppe Verdi’s world — she was an ardent Wagnerian — must have encouraged Werfel to get on with the task of the novel, an adventure upon which he would hardly have embarked without her approval.

  In the spring of 1923 Werfel wrote in the preface to his novel in progress that Verdi “would not have suffered the smallest infringement of the truth concerning himself. But the truth of a life is not to be found in the strictest analysis of its biographical material, nor in the sum of all its doings and sayings.” Hence his book would result in “the purer, essential, mystical truth” of “the Maestro” and thus “the legend of a man.”

  For his leitmotiv he chose a personal conflict between Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, which might theoretically have taken place but for which there is no historical evidence. It is not even known whether the two ever met. Werfel devised a scenario set in Venice only a few weeks before Wagner’s death. Verdi has arranged a secret stay in the city on the lagoon in order finally to meet his adversary, whom he blames for his creative crisis of many years. Time and again Verdi finds himself in Wagner’s immediate vicinity but never musters the courage to speak to him. On the very day when he decides at last to visit the revered and detested rival in his home, the Palazzo Vendramin, he receives the news that Wagner has died that morning. Only after Wagner’s death, in February 1883, does the Maestro in Werfel’s story overcome his creative impasse, find the way back to his true self, and complete masterpieces like Falstaff and Othello.

  Werfel had become acquainted with the music of Richard Wagner as a gymnasium student, during the May Festivals.[327] Wagner was considered the declared enemy of Italian opera, and Werfel had had to defend his own passion for Verdi[328] against the Wagner cult prevalent among Prague Germans of Jewish extraction, often suffering ridicule in th
e process. He had first considered writing a biography of Verdi when he was twenty-one, during his year of military training. In subsequent years, Werfel experienced at first hand the contrast between the German North and the Italian South, and it became a theme of his writing. His disdain for cool stoicism and abstraction, his passion for emotion and ecstasy — these found their ideal reflections in this contradictory pair, Verdi and Wagner. Moreover, it was an ideological conflict of great personal relevance when he compared his own work with the ideas of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus group.

  Drafting the Verdi novel, Werfel now took daily walks through the streets and alleys of Venice, looking, as he had the year before, for sights, colors, smells, and, not least, original “types” to use as models for the characters in the book. He visited the beautiful gardens on the Giudecca, went to the Lido, visited the Palazzo Vendramin where Wagner had died. Studying the history of Italy in the nineteenth century, he read the works of the poets Manzoni and Carducci, as well as the writings of Garibaldi and Mazzini[329], the leaders of the Italian unification movement who had chosen the Freedom Chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco as their anthem. For additional inspiration, he read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

  “Returned mid-June 1923. Cold here, windy, flowering meadows,” Werfel noted in his “Occasional Diary”[330] in Breitenstein as he began his first draft of the novel. In five weeks, six chapters, more than four hundred pages, piled up on his desk. At first, there were diary entries such as “A propos the V. book, doubts, doubts, doubts. I feel strong inhibitions, even a kind of shame, toward this work!” But he kept on writing, day and night, often for twelve hours without interruption, much like Giuseppe Verdi, of whom it was said that he composed like a man pursued by furies, using a metronome to pace himself. Convinced he had failed[331], Werfel once handed the nearly completed manuscript to Alma and asked her to burn it immediately.

  At the height of summer in 1923, while Werfel was still working on the first draft, Alma’s nineteen-year-old daughter Anna Mahler[332] came to Breitenstein for a visit and brought her friend, the composer Ernst Křenek[333] — an admirer of Karl Kraus. In letters to Vienna, Werfel complained about the houseguest: “K. is an idolater of Nothing!” he wrote, claiming that if the twenty-three-year-old Křenek represented “the youth of our time — then heaven help us!” In any case, this fellow was “one of the most horrible types” imaginable, “conceited as a Ludendorff, presumptuous as an officer.” “Only the devil could see the world” the way the young composer did.

  However, after Anna and her friend had left, Werfel gave one of the characters in the novel, the ultramodern composer Mathias Fischböck (diametrically opposed to both Verdi and Wagner) certain traits of Ernst Křenek’s. “Yesterday, I started writing about K.,” he wrote to Alma. “I judged him harshly. But my nerves had been... outraged... by his mechanistic Satanism!”

  Fischböck owed his character to yet another Austrian composer, Josef Matthias Hauer, the man who had invented a twelve-tone system years before (and independently of) Arnold Schoenberg.[334] As he told Alma, Werfel used Hauer’s book on musical theory, Interpretation of the Melos (Deutung des Melos), to “rewrite the Fischböck scenes.”

  “The end. Thank God! Praised be! On September 25, 1923, at 4 in the morning,” he noted below the final line of the first draft of Verdi.[335] The week before, he had informed Max Brod that the book had become far longer than originally planned and that it had caused him “more anxiety, doubt, and trouble than all my previous ones put together.” While writing, he had often thought of Brod’s Tycho Brahe[336] — he even believed that a sentence from that novel had “snuck” into his book.

  Werfel began to rewrite without a break, and the second draft was finished in six weeks. “The book is suspenseful, moving, and important,” he wrote to Kurt Wolff[337], but to Alma he admitted that there were flaws, “partly because of the genre, partly because of the subject, and partly because of me.” After five months in Breitenstein, he was “starved for the city,” as he confessed to his diary. “I’ve been so faithful to this novel, yet it’s not enough, still not enough!!!!” In addition, “this business” had “cost him [his] eyes.” From now on, he claimed, he would never again be able to read or write without glasses.

  Jakob Wassermann, whose work Werfel admired and whom he valued as a friend, read the second draft of the novel.[338] He liked it but made numerous suggestions for changes, and Werfel accepted his advice with gratitude. He revised the whole book one more time, making particularly radical changes in the ending.

  Verdi was a turning point in Werfel’s literary development. It was the first clear demonstration of his abilities as a novelist. He seemed to find this form of fiction as easy to write as he had found poetry or drama. But his prose was still too purple, the “hymnodic” quality of his style unmistakable. A typical sentence from the novel reads: “Then, lest their [the violins’] fragile forms should crumble in his mortal grasp, Claudio Monteverdi laid the lovely sisters reverently by and tore himself away, whimpering and weeping in an unbearable ecstasy of pain and pleasure.”

  Side by side with arresting and effective scenes were glaring disasters, deeply embarrassing passages next to writing that could sweep readers off their feet. Venice, the fascinating stage on which the characters act out their joys and sorrows, was captured very convincingly in all its dreamlike uniqueness. And yet, this “novel of the opera” (that was now its subtitle) was its author’s first move into, or close to, the realm of light popular literature — precisely the sphere to which Karl Kraus had contemptuously consigned him years before.

  “I know for certain,” Werfel declared triumphantly in a letter to Kurt Wolff[339], on completion of the book, “that I, for one, have surmounted the crisis that has destroyed the entire production of so-called expressionism (all the Unruhs, Bechers, etc., e tutti quanti) so far.”

  Paul von Zsolnay, the scion of a well-to-do Jewish family in the tobacco import business, had almost finished his university studies when he decided to start an Austrian publishing house specializing in belles lettres.[340] Zsolnay knew Alma Mahler’s stepfather, Carl Moll, and asked him to act as mediator with Werfel, to whom he wanted to make a serious offer. He also contacted many other authors, including Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Saiten, and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.

  At their first meeting Werfel and Zsolnay discussed a subject that had made the headlines practically every day for many months — inflation, which had assumed almost unbelievable dimensions in both Germany and Austria. One American dollar was now worth 4 trillion marks. A one-pound loaf of bread cost 260 billion marks. Postage stamps no longer carried a denomination, since the rate changed daily. During this time of hourly devaluation, Werfel’s book and theater royalties hardly paid for the bare necessities: even the sensational success of Schweiger did not change that, although the play was being performed on twenty-odd German provincial stages and was in the repertory of one of the largest theaters in Berlin.[341] In the autumn of 1923 Werfel wrote to Max Brod that his treatment at the hands of Kurt Wolff had been “disgraceful.” “This year, I have been cheated out of three-quarters of my income.” For the new editions of his works, Werfel claimed, Wolff had “fraudulently paid me a ridiculously low advance.”

  Zsolnay, on the other hand, offered[342] an advance of 5,000 Swiss francs for the Verdi novel, provided that Werfel left Kurt Wolff Verlag and took the risk of entrusting his work to an entirely unknown and inexperienced publisher. At the end of 1923, that sum represented a small fortune, as the Swiss franc — like the U.S. dollar — was a stable currency. With regrets about Kurt Wolff but strongly encouraged by Alma Mahler, Werfel accepted Zsolnay’s offer. The young publisher, for his part, decided to make Verdi: A Novel of the Opera (Verdi: Roman der Oper) the cornerstone of his enterprise. He still hadn’t come up with a name for his publishing house; he was vacillating between Verlag der Autoren (House of the Authors) and Hohe Warte (Lofty Point).

  In a letter full of excuses and
explanations, Werfel asked Wolff, his friend and publisher for eleven years, for advice regarding this delicate situation, and he also tried to clarify his own motives. Wolff reacted with great understanding: right then, he said, he would have been unable to come up with 1,000 francs, let alone 5,000, and he could understand why Werfel wanted to accept Zsolnay’s proposal. Wolff must have been expecting news of this sort for some time, ever since Alma Mahler’s letter the previous year in which she demanded money and paid off Werfel’s debts. In August 1923 another author had announced his separation from Kurt Wolff: Karl Kraus, whose main complaint against Wolff was that he had published Werfel’s Mirror Man without insisting that Werfel delete the satirical passage against Kraus.

  Only a few days after its publication in early April 1924, Verdi became a best-seller: its first printing of twenty thousand copies sold out in no time, and a second edition followed immediately. This audience reaction by far exceeded Werfel’s expectations. His work had not been received with comparable enthusiasm since his success with The Friend of the World twelve years earlier. Now he could sense it again — that whiff of fame and power that had attracted him so strongly since the fourteenth year of his life.

  In April 1924 Franz Kafka was admitted to the ward for diseases of the throat and larynx at the University Clinic in Vienna.[343] Dr. Markus Hajek, the director of the clinic, Arthur Schnitzler’s brother-in-law, diagnosed tuberculosis of the larynx. For the first time in his life, Kafka slept in a room with several others, and when one of his fellow patients died, he found life in the ward almost unbearable. Max Brod asked Werfel to use his and Alma’s influence to secure a private room for Kafka. Werfel wrote to Dr. Hajek and also pleaded with Vienna’s city councillor in charge of public health, his friend Dr. Julius Tandler[344], and Tandler’s lover, Frau Dr. Bien, to use their influence in the matter. The director of the clinic, however, was not impressed by any of these interventions, and Kafka remained in the open ward. Mortally ill, he left the hospital and moved to a recommended private sanatorium in the country, at Kierling, near Klosterneuburg, where he was able to get a private room. Only six months earlier, Werfel had written to Max Brod, “Can’t anything be done to save this rare human being? He will write the most wonderful things, but they’ll become ever further removed from life, and thus perishable. The dream alone can’t sustain a man past forty. No hunger artist can go hungry for that long.”[345]