Werfel sent the “novel of the opera” to Kafka in Kierling, with a big bouquet of red roses.[346] Kafka, hungry for acceptable reading matter, now read nothing but that book, very slowly but regularly. “To Franz Kafka, deeply revered author and friend, with a thousand wishes for a quick recovery” was Werfel’s dedication. Only a few weeks later, on June 3, 1924, Kafka died, in the presence of his beloved Dora Diamant and his friend Robert Klopstock. Verdi was the last book he read.
“I’m sure I don’t have anything to do with that Fischböck,” says Ernst Křenek. Our meeting takes place in Vienna, in the sunny conference room of Universal Edition, the music publishers. The composer, whose works now number more than 230, divides his time between Palm Springs and Mödling, near Vienna, in a house that Arnold Schoenberg inhabited in the early twenties. “At the time I visited Breitenstein, Werfel couldn’t have used me as a model for Fischböck,” Křenek continues. The eighty-five-year-old composer speaks slowly and quietly. “You see, he didn’t really know anything of mine then. In her fairy tale Poetry and Truth (that’s what I call Alma Mahler’s autobiography), she describes how I appeared there on the Semmering as Anna’s, her daughter’s, new lover and proceeded to spread out these enormous sheets of music paper, covering the whole house with them, so that she and poor Werfel had to seek refuge in the attic. All I brought was quite ordinary paper — there wasn’t any other kind to be had — and I don’t think I composed very much that summer.”
Křenek is a curmudgeon with an ironic twinkle. I watch his eyes; they are in constant motion. The features of his face are immobile, determined not to reveal any emotion. In his quiet monotone, he continues, “Those Fischböck descriptions in the Verdi novel — they could fit Webern maybe, or maybe Josef Matthias Hauer. I hadn’t done anything with twelve-tone series at that time. For me, that came much later. I didn’t know anything then about twelve-tone music, that’s simply nonsense — even Schoenberg had hardly published anything yet. He only revealed his invention of the twelve-tone series to his students in 1922. And his own serenade composed in that twelve-tone form came out a year later. I didn’t know that music then, didn’t even know the word for it. And the music that Werfel describes as Fischböck’s — those supposedly horrible chords that bump into one another like drunks — that’s a description of music à la Schoenberg.
“Of course, my feelings about Werfel are colored by the fact that I was a great supporter and admirer of Karl Kraus, and so there was enmity, even though I was politically more of Werfel’s persuasion. Earlier on, he had been much further to the left. He’d been at the barricades, everyone knew that. At the Bankverein building he made speeches and urged people to take it by storm! We all heard those stories. But Alma tried to tame him, little by little. At the time of our meeting, his leftward leanings had already been modified. In any case, I can’t remember any arguments with Werfel. Why would he have worked on the libretto of my opera The Fortress (Die Zwingburg) if everything I did was so repulsive to him? He worked on it in 1922. It certainly was modern music, The Fortress was; in any case it doesn’t sound like Verdi. And it certainly was atonal — that seems to have been enough to arouse his antipathy. But he did work on it, nevertheless — I really can’t understand why.
“Alma and I never really got along. And that terrible book of hers! What a disaster. All those affairs she had — I really don’t think they had anything to do with love. She just wanted to rule. A terrible person! In the thirties, there was a coup attempt by right-wingers, led by a certain Rintelen, with whom Alma was on friendly terms. Werfel accused her of flirting with this Rintelen, but Alma just said, ‘Oh, Franzl, you know a woman can pray in many churches!’ But she did have a certain presence. She was the Brünnhilde type, and I never liked those particularly. Nor did I like her daughter Manon; she had such a sneaky air, as if she were always spying on people. I couldn’t stand it.
“But wait, I just remembered — it must have been the fall of 1923: I visited Breitenstein a second time and started working on my Fourth String Quartet. For Christmas that year, Anna and I went and stayed in Switzerland, in Zurich. And I remember that the Verdi novel must have been finished that fall, because Werfel read to us from the manuscript, a chapter or two. I must say, there was something very warm and lovable about the man. But you have to know one thing: I’m not very good at describing people. That is why I’ve never written anything in the epic mode. No talent for it. It bores me. What else should I tell you about Werfel? He so loved to sing! Alma would sit down at the piano, and he’d perform entire operas from memory. That was really pleasant. And I can’t remember his ever being surly around me.”
Success and Crisis
”Venice — in Alma’s house! Wonderful,” Franz Werfel noted in his “Occasional Diary” in the spring of 1924[347], although he was bothered by the noise around Casa Mahler, even late at night. Carl Moll had added two rooms[348] at the top of the building so he could visit at any time without feeling like a guest in his stepdaughter’s house. “Will I be able to work?” Werfel wondered. “Here? A vital question.”
Inspired by the great success of Verdi, he drafted outlines for two major works of fiction.[349] One was to be a “novel of theosophy,” a fictional biography of Helena P. Blavatsky, the Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society, whose goal was the brotherhood of man without distinctions of class, race, or religion; the other, the history of a Jewish family “from the Toleration Edict up to the present, the so-called world domination by the Jews,” from the ghetto in a small Bohemian town to the Jewish politicians and capitalists of the present, scapegoats of the anti-Semitic hatred that had grown ever more vociferous since the early twenties.
Werfel never embarked on either of these projects: he was not one of those writers who map out their oeuvre in their youth and then feel compelled to realize it, piece by piece, driven by the fear of not having reached the self-imposed goal. Moreover, Alma probably did not approve of either one of the projects, and that was reason enough for Werfel to abandon them.
In Venice, ca. 1924
He was now in his mid-thirties and better known than ever. “How short, the moment given to a man. But there is one consolation — it comes again,” he had noted in his diary two years earlier, after the premiere of Goat Song. Now that this prediction had come true, Werfel wanted to prove both to himself and to Alma, who kept pushing him, that he was capable of holding on to his success — as long as he was able to find subjects the public would like. Financial security was not the least consideration in these plans. Alma expected her lover to take care of her material needs and to become independent at last of his family. At the end of June 1924 she sent him away from Venice to Breitenstein, where he was to begin a new work.
“No plan this time! What now?” was the first entry on his return to the Semmering, but it took only twenty-four hours for an idea to come to the rescue: “As I was reading books I had brought with me, the idea came to me like a flash of lightning: the historical tragedy Juarez and Maximilian of Mexico.”[350] The subject seemed without visible connection to anything Werfel had written so far; but hope that it might be best-seller material must have played a decisive role. It was also a factual and realistic subject, and by dealing with it he hoped to put an even greater distance between himself and literary expressionism, a movement he now detested. The final break with the avant-garde was to be sealed with a story about the tragic fate of the Austrian archduke Maximilian.
It did not take Werfel long to finish the first, technically very conventional draft of the play that told of that Hapsburg scion’s adventure and downfall: Napoleon III cajoled Maximilian into going to Mexico, but the French troops soon abandoned him, and he was executed by firing squad on the orders of the Mexican revolutionary and President of the People Benito Juarez.
As in Verdi, Werfel again combined historical fact with intuitive insight, and the method is noticeable in the way he treats the main characters and key events. In his very first notes, Werfel s
till considered Maximilian’s adversary the main character of the play, but later he remarked, “He is too colossal a figure and would lose his effect by becoming visible.”[351] As with the Pan-like monster in Goat Song, the President of the People, also the incarnation of a revolution, never appears on stage in person. Juarez remains the powerful commander of fate, untouchable, godlike.
Werfel described Maximilian’s downfall with great sympathy for the politically naive Austrian, characterizing him not as a man with a desire to rule but as a good-natured idealist. The play does not criticize the gullibility that led him to become an accomplice in the murder of thousands of Mexicans, nor does it consider his blindness toward the power politics of Napoleon III and Mexico’s reactionary princes of church and finance. This is surprising — the more so considering Werfel’s own attacks on the house of Hapsburg and his infatuation with the ideas of the Red Guard only six years earlier. In his notebook we read that he did not doubt that it had indeed been Maximilian’s noble intention to improve the lot of the Indian proletariat. Inspired by “mystical love of the enemy,” he had vied for Juarez’s favor: “I bowed down to him,” Werfel has Maximilian cry out. “For what am I, by myself? But he is as great as this country.”
Werfel told Alma that a woman would have the last word in this “play about men.” Princess Salm, who played a part in Maximilian’s passion reminiscent of the biblical Mary Magdalene, was to speak the final sentence. “But no,” he then corrected himself — the end would be marked by a rousing revolutionary marching tune: “Boom, Boom, Boom! Vulgar but nice! I hope you’ll agree.”
One day before his thirty-fourth birthday, in early September 1924, Werfel completed the second draft of the historical drama. “An aloof play,” he noted in his diary, adding that he felt it “wasn’t bad, generally speaking,” although he was aware of “many flaws, mistakes, dilettantisms. The drama is well constructed. Its scenes are intense and pointed.” When he read Juarez and Maximilian to his friend Julius Tandler, who came to visit him in Breitenstein, the latter called the play Shakespearean, and Dr. Bien, Tandler’s mistress, burst into tears.
Rehearsals for the world premiere of the play were to begin at the Volkstheater in Vienna in mid-September, and thus Werfel did not have time to revise it again. To have his “wonderful manuscript” typed, he traveled to Vienna, where “these stinky female typist animals” of Paul Zsolnay Verlag did their work “in a bestially cretinous fashion,” as Werfel wrote to Alma, who was residing in Venice. The typescript was then rushed to the printer, as the publication of the book was scheduled for the beginning of October. As soon as the galleys were ready, Werfel had to read them in a great hurry. “I’m afraid, so afraid,” he whined to Alma. “I’ll never write another play.”
When he heard that Max Reinhardt was interested in producing the play in Vienna the following spring, he quickly withdrew it from the Volkstheater, only a few days before rehearsals were to start.
In mid-January 1925, after months in Venice, Werfel and Alma embarked on their first long trip outside Germany and Italy.[352] The initiative for this trip had been entirely Alma’s, as Werfel was loath to leave familiar surroundings: he had to be presented with a fait accompli.[353] But as soon as preparations had been made, tickets and reservations acquired, he enjoyed the project immensely and became the enthusiastic world traveler. They embarked on the steamship Vienna in Trieste, and the first leg of their journey took them via Brindisi to the Egyptian port of Alexandria.
On board the Vienna were also a great many Jewish emigrants en route to Palestine to settle their old — and new — homeland. True, that homeland was under a British mandate, as was Egypt, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917 allowed Jews to start their own settlements in Palestine and thus move considerably closer to Theodor Herzl’s dream of the return to Israel. Still aboard the Vienna, Werfel noted in his “Egyptian Diary” (“Ägyptisches Tagebuch”) that the Zionists were regrettably repeating the anachronistic mistake of nationalism: the Jews believed, Werfel wrote, that they were compelled to prove that they, too, could “do the same thing they have so despised and mocked in other nations.”
Werfel and Alma spent three weeks in Upper and Lower Egypt. They visited the royal tombs at Thebes, went to Heliopolis, Memphis, Karnak, and Luxor, on to Cairo and the pyramids at Giza. They saw a performance of Verdi’s Aida on the stage of its world premiere, the Italian Opera House in Cairo. The palm trees, orange groves, and fellahin villages along the Nile enchanted Werfel, and he found the quality of the light and the exotic landscape inspiring. An idea for a play that had preoccupied him years before resurfaced in Egypt: a play with Akhenaton, the pharaoh who embraced the Sun God, as its central character. Werfel also pondered the Islamic religion, about which he did not know much: “What is the nature of the Muslim’s fanaticism?” he wrote in the diary. The Muslim “has to observe more prayers, rules, laws, and formulas than the devout person of any other religion!!” He became preoccupied with the figure of the mahdi, the Muslims’ messianic renewer of the world, thinking that it might provide material for a novel. In a small suburban mosque in Cairo he witnessed the ancient, ecstatic dance of the dervishes[354] and was fascinated: “The noble form of the sheik of the dervishes in his blue cape shakes with a sudden convulsion... And suddenly the sheik glides away from his spot with an unspeakably holy grace... Effortlessly the blue one has gained the center. And now he bobs up and down, as if he were not supported by the floorboards but by the waves of a magical sea.”
After a few days, Werfel found the contrast between the upper-class hotel in Luxor, mostly inhabited by British and German tourists, and the alien and mysterious land surrounding it, with its “pitch-black people” and horrifying poverty, hard to endure. Furthermore, he found “this rushing through temples and landscapes boorish and soul-killing.” More and more he disliked being a tourist among other tourists.
After he and Alma had returned once more to Cairo, they took the train to Palestine. For Werfel, the two weeks that followed were characterized by extreme anxiety and a tumult of emotions, a seesaw of feelings the likes of which he had hardly ever experienced. “From the very first moment, I felt torn,” he noted. “My hand is no longer free. My mind is no longer at peace.” While he had not sympathized much with Zionism in his youth, he now found himself, due to Alma’s anti-Semitism — which she made particularly plain on this trip — as well as her virulent hatred of communism, defending a cause that really was not his. “Those were days of deep anxiety,” he later wrote.
Apart from side trips to the northern part of the country and to the Dead Sea, Werfel spent most of the time in Jerusalem. He visited the church of Christ’s grave and the Wailing Wall, as well as the Islamic Temple Mount, Mount Moriah of the Old Testament, where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, the site of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple. He took daily walks through the narrow streets of the Old City, returning over and over again to the places of worship of the world’s three monotheistic religions. He met the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem; talked to physicians, architects, and philosophers, arguing with them about the pros and cons of Zionism; and visited numerous agricultural schools and cooperatives in the countryside surrounding Jerusalem.
“Today I lost my interest in the Jews,” Werfel had noted on board the Vienna, with its passengers bound for Palestine. In reality his alienation from his own Jewishness had begun years ago, long before he met Alma Mahler — who indeed approved of it wholeheartedly. Bar mitzvah notwithstanding, Werfel had long seen himself as a believer in Christ to whom Judaism had become an alien world, one that even embarrassed him. “What did I have to do with these people,” he argued in an unpublished essay written in 1920, “with this alien world? My world was the great European artists with all their contradictions, from Dostoyevsky to Verdi.”
In Jerusalem, at the source of all theology, Werfel searched his memory for the point at which he had become conscious of turning away from the religion of his forefathers. He saw himself
at four or five years old, walking to Sunday morning mass with Barbara Šimůnková; he heard again the solo soprano voice in the choir of the Maisel synagogue in Prague — which had struck him as “mortally indecent” when he was ten, so that the entire Jewish service suddenly made him “uncomfortable” and would henceforth seem an embarrassment. He remembered his religious instructors, his later arguments with Max Brod, his meetings with Martin Buber.
The journey through Old Testament lands shocked Werfel into an intense preoccupation with his Jewish origins that went far beyond his admitted interest in Israel’s religion and history. In the months following his return from the Near East, he spent time almost every day reading about Jewish history, customs, and rituals; he relearned Hebrew, written and spoken, and studied German translations of the books of the Old Testament and the Talmud.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 15
