At the beginning of April 1925 Werfel returned to Breitenstein, once again separated from his beloved after a long time in her company. He wrote a new scene for Max Reinhardt’s production of Juarez and Maximilian, but as soon as that was done, he was overwhelmed by a serious artistic crisis.[355] After surveying all his creative work to date, he arrived at the conclusion that he had to “make an entirely new start.” He felt that he had never succeeded in “pure creation” — every page he had written now seemed to him, as he wrote to Alma, “crowded with the abominable accidents” of his own ego. He felt paralyzed, perhaps “incapable of working for years!” And he implored Alma to help him — only she would be able to save him from this abyss of depression and anxieties.
Some temporary relief was provided by the first nights of Juarez and Maximilian in Düsseldorf and Dresden. After a rather unsuccessful world premiere in Magdeburg[356], the Dresden performance, at which Werfel was present, was a triumph for the author. Reinhardt’s Vienna production was also very well received: on the first night, there were over sixty curtain calls for the popular company. Only rarely before (and never for a play) had Werfel received more enthusiastic reviews in Germany and Austria; the tragedy of Maximilian of Hapsburg was his first genuine theatrical hit. His plan to achieve, by means of subject matter pleasing to an audience, not only artistic but material success (inflation was now receding) seemed to have worked out perfectly.
Nevertheless, the creative crisis had not been overcome. His extensive readings in the Talmud and Torah had made him an expert in biblical matters, but his creative powers seemed to be in abeyance. His engagement with the doctrine of Israel and the Bible commentaries of Rashi, Maimonides, and Nachmanides had not brought him closer to Judaism, as he had perhaps hoped, but had rather reinforced his rejection of Orthodox Judaism and his sympathy for a Christian world view.
Only at the height of the summer of 1925, four months after his return from Palestine, did he slowly work his way toward the concept of a new play which had surely germinated during his stay in Jerusalem. He wanted to describe the historical moment of the separation of primitive Christianity from the Jewish religion by telling the story of Rabbi Saul, a former student of the high priest Gamaliel, who became transformed into Paul, the first missionary of Jesus, in the Jerusalem of the first century A.D. In the character of this Paul of Tarsus, without whose life’s work Christianity would probably never have become a world religion, Werfel saw a crystallization of the same conflict he had been experiencing ever since he was a child. When he created his dramatic legend Paul Among the Jews[357], it was chiefly to explore his predilection for Catholicism, which had been the source of so much private confusion.
“No one is Israel’s friend, not even Israel” was one of Werfel’s first notes for the play. He decorated the title page of his Paul notebook[358] with a drawing of Mount Sinai, with the two stone tablets of the Law that Moses had received from God enthroned upon it — yet crowned by a mighty crucifix. Christ’s Cross and the Ten Commandments, synagogue and church — these were contrasts that to Franz Werfel had seemed to form a coherent whole ever since he was a child.
“Before embarking on a new work, I always go through a period of terrible despondency,” he wrote to Hugo von Hofmannsthal[359] only a few days before he began the first draft of Paul. Less than a month later, in early September 1925, he had already completed two drafts of the play but was still so dissatisfied with the result that he decided to put it aside for a while, hoping that he would find a new approach to the subject later on. For the first time in his life, he did not pass a completed work on to his publisher the very moment it was finished. Alma Mahler considered this a clear indication[360] that he had matured a great deal during the last few years.
Alma was planning a journey to India[361] with Werfel that fall; it was something she had wanted to do for a long time. Ullstein Verlag in Berlin was willing to pay for everything if Werfel would write travel impressions from India for the newspapers and journals of the large publishing house.[362] But the confusion triggered by his experiences in Egypt and Palestine was still too fresh in Werfel’s memory; he needed time to absorb it. Resisting the idea of having to deal with yet another utterly alien world, he canceled the trip at short notice. Instead, he took the disappointed Alma to Venice and worked on a new treatment and translation of Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino.[363] The Maestro’s oeuvre was still relatively unknown in the German-speaking world, and it was Werfel’s declared goal to bring about a breakthrough and introduce his idol’s works in German-language opera houses. In his adaptation of La Forza del Destino, he clarified motivations, tightened up the action, but also deleted all songs in praise of war.
During the summer and fall of 1925, Franz Werfel was interviewed extensively by Richard Specht. Paul Zsolnay Verlag had commissioned Specht — the biographer of Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and Richard Strauss — to write the first biography of the thirty-five-year-old Werfel. Worshipful in tone and devoid of any criticism of its subject, Specht’s panegyric Franz Werfel: An Attempt at Mirroring Time (Franz Werfel: Versuch einer Zeitspiegelung) was remarkable mainly for its stylistic excess and bitter invective against Werfel’s contemporaries. When the book came out in 1926, Werfel found himself compelled to apologize to all concerned, among them Fritz von Unruh, Kurt Hiller, and Paul Kornfeld, in each case swearing that he had not seen Specht’s manuscript before publication.
At the end of 1925 Werfel gave readings in some twenty German cities, mostly from three scenes of the unfinished Paul Among the Jews. On occasion he read all of Juarez and Maximilian. He was present at the successful world premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in Berlin in mid-December. In 1922 Alma had helped Berg, a friend of many years, to finance his own publication of a piano score of excerpts from his opera. Werfel had yet another reason for feeling close to the composer: in May 1925 Alban Berg[364] had visited Prague and fallen passionately in love with Werfel’s sister, Hanna von Fuchs-Robetin.
Franz Werfel and Alban Berg, Santa Margherita, ca. 1928-29
Werfel stayed in Berlin[365] until the beginning of February, attending rehearsals of Juarez and Maximilian. Max Reinhardt was now presenting the play to a Berlin audience. Werfel’s friend from his schooldays, Ernst Deutsch, played the part of the Mexican general Porfirio Díaz; they saw a lot of each other during these weeks, meeting with Willy Haas[366], spending time in an artists’ tavern, the Black Tomcat, reminiscing about the old days, imitating their professors, and laughing to the point of tears. Werfel’s favorite and most successful impersonation was that of Karl Kyovsky, their homeroom teacher at the Stefansgymnasium.
Juarez was a big hit in Berlin as well, running more than fifty performances; in addition, in January 1926 it received the coveted Grillparzer Prize from the Vienna Academy of Arts and Sciences. In March Werfel attended the extremely successful world premiere of his adaptation of La Forza del Destino in Dresden — it seemed as if everything he had put his hand to in the last two or three years was gaining him ever greater recognition and fame. Yet his self-doubts did not vanish after these triumphs.
Back in Breitenstein he devoted himself exclusively to Paul Among the Jews, after a hiatus of six months. He wrote to Arthur Schnitzler at the beginning of June that he was working on his play “without concentration and pretty much in despair.”[367] “I revise scenes, characters, words, but do not achieve any clarity. Is it possible to paint a picture anew when the colors have dried? And it’s much worse if the feelings have dried up. And yet it is a subject that closes up, time and again, and then opens up new depths.” He went back to reading the source material and made notes about what elements of suspense, characters, and scenes were still missing from the first two drafts, for instance, “the human element of the Paul character,” as he remarked in his notebook. He also felt that Paul’s acceptance of Christ and the Resurrection had to be made more central, the cowardly outrages perpetrated by the Roman occupation troops more vivid. At this time, on
e of Paul’s reasons for his rejection of the Torah was, according to Werfel: “[It] is my death sentence, and I am obliged to read it, every day, every hour. But who can love his own death sentence?”
“Second draft of Paul gotten rid of, June 1926” was his note on completion of the third manuscript. “Gotten rid of” — thus a play he had almost consigned to the desk drawer and had completed only at the urging and encouragement of a few friends like Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler. After many revisions in both galley and page proofs, the play came out in late August, published by Paul Zsolnay Verlag. “This is not a depiction of religion,” Werfel says in an afterword, “but of the people who have to suffer it... Nothing else is shown here except for the great tragic moment of Judaism... No caprice. This is how it is! This is how it was!” A few weeks after the publication of the play, it began to be rumored that Franz Werfel had converted to Catholicism.[368]
Hugo von Hofmannsthal shortly before his death, Breitenstein, 1929
Sigmund Freud[369] was extremely cool in his reaction to the play. He wrote Werfel a letter that set forth his reservations. The two had met briefly in September 1926, and Werfel had given Freud a copy of Paul Among the Jews. He now penned a desperate defense of his position, saying that contrary to Freud’s assumption, his intention had not been to glorify Christianity but to write the play “as a Jew” to whom the “catastrophic moment” when Paul parted ways with Judaism seemed a particularly tragic and hence interesting subject. “My intention was only to describe that moment, the cause of endless consequences, the decisive point at which both possibilities still existed.”
Freud surprised Werfel by replying to his reply, and Werfel wrote back to the “deeply revered Herr Professor,” begging him to “throw away these lines unread,” without a qualm, should the continuation of their debate cause the great man’s “rightful wrath.” A passage in the afterword to the play, one that Freud had found particularly offensive, suddenly seemed “unbecoming” to Werfel himself, who said that the “unpleasantly arrogant tone of those words” was now “doubly embarrassing” to him. However, it was not true that he was attached to a “pious child’s faith,” as Freud had conjectured. “May I confess to you,” he wrote (a confession that did not entirely correspond with the facts), “that I grew up in an areligious milieu, never suffered from scruples and religious emotional catastrophes as long as I can remember, did not have to outgrow cult residua, and lived until I was almost twenty in a state of indifferent atheism.” Apart from that, he entirely agreed with Freud’s definition that God was really nothing but an “exonerating fantasy” of mankind. Nevertheless, he had to admit “that I do suffer a great deal from these exonerating fantasies, particularly of the metaphysical sort... When I say that I ‘suffer’ from them, that is a lie, because the feeling of pleasure that accompanies them is indescribable.” Then, a little fearfully: “Now I have revealed myself to you, most revered Herr Professor, as an incurable mystic and illusionist.” On the other hand, Werfel said, Freud’s work often impressed him “with a... demonic power... It is the power that otherwise emanates only from truly great works of art!... As Aristotle the logician became a forefather of the church, Freud will become the forefather of the time and — religion — to come!”
Stefan Zweig, in thanking Werfel for sending him Paul Among the Jews, expressed his utmost approval.[370] He not only regarded the piece as a work of genius and predicted its great success on the stage but also felt that it proved once again that Werfel really was the only author of this generation who already had an entire oeuvre to present to the world.
In any case, his popularity reached another high point in 1926. The German journal Die schöne Literatur had polled its readers on their favorite contemporary German-language author, and Franz Werfel received the great majority of votes, many more than Gerhart Hauptmann, Stefan Zweig, or Rainer Maria Rilke. That summer he was the talk of the town in New York[371] after Goat Song premiered there in English translation. In response to great public interest, the Theatre Guild arranged several Sunday afternoons of lectures and discussions about the play, and these were attended by audiences of more than two thousand people. In the fall the founding members of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences — among them Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Jakob Wassermann — bestowed membership on Franz Werfel.
Ca. 1926
With the completion of Paul Among the Jews, Werfel’s creative block seemed to have passed. He now devoted himself with renewed energy to a whole series of simultaneous projects. In collaboration with the musicologist Paul Stefan, he prepared an edition of Verdi’s letters, prefaced by a long essay, “A Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi” (“Ein Bildnis Giuseppe Verdis”).[372] He started a large-scale prose text, Pogrom[373], dealing with the question of the assimilation of the Jews, but it remained a fragment. The first draft of a new play was completed: The Kingdom of God in Bohemia (Das Reich Gottes in Böhmen)[374] was to deal with the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century. In addition, Werfel was working on a long novella that he finished in October 1926. The Man Who Conquered Death (Der Tod des Kleinbürgers)[375] was based on the lives of Alma Mahler’s caretakers at Breitenstein, the Gubsches and their assistant Klara. In letters to Alma and in his diary he had often noted the peculiarities and eccentricities[376] of those three, particularly the mendacity and meanness of Klara, Frau Gubsch’s sister. When Werfel returned from his trip to the Near East in the spring of 1925, he was informed of the death of old Herr Gubsch after a long illness in a Vienna hospital. The idea of creating a literary memorial to the Gubsches, those incarnations of the Austrian ethos, may have occurred to him even then. Werfel placed his novella about the former doorman Karl Fiala in the Vienna of postwar misery and inflation. Fiala has an insurance policy that will provide for his family after his death as long as he lives past sixty-five. Two weeks before that date, Fiala becomes seriously ill. Providing his physicians with “a genuine case, almost a sensation,” he valiantly struggles with death until he has survived his sixty-fifth birthday by forty-eight hours. “His insides were now only one wound, one raging suppurative focus... Then the figure collapses, a pile of bones.”
Werfel described Austrian petit-bourgeois existence with remarkably loving empathy. Beyond that, he strove for a profound analysis of the social injustices that made it possible, for instance, for the novella’s hero, Fiala the proud doorman, to be dismissed from his post before he reached retirement age. Werfel combined his memory of socialist ideals with concepts provided by his friend Dr. Julius Tandler, the Viennese city councillor who had made extensive proposals for social change to the authorities, aiming at a reorganization of the city’s entire public welfare system.
Free of the stylistic floridity of Verdi in its concentration on a vivid description of the milieu in which Fiala and his family live, Werfel’s novella is a remarkable work of prose that will stand the test of time as a compellingly candid portrait of a truncated Austria at that moment of its post-World War I history.
“I can still see it quite clearly: it was in Cologne, I was about eighteen, so it must have been at the end of 1925. Werfel came and gave a reading at a matinée at the city theater. He read for more than two hours, Juarez and Maximilian, without a break, it was incredible!” Hans Mayer is reminiscing. A professor of literary history for many years, first at the University of Leipzig and later in Hanover, this cultural philosopher now lives in Tübingen. His home by the Neckar is quite close to Hölderlin’s tower.
“Maybe one-sixth of the seats of the big Cologne theater were occupied. It was quite dark, and there was a table with a lamp — and then appeared this small, fat fellow, Werfel, but he had the voice of a giant. I remember the end of the reading in particular — that’s where everything falls apart. Maximilian has been executed, and from backstage there comes the shout of the people: ‘Juarez!’ And how Werfel read that ‘Juarez!’ The victor!... Of course his distortions of history showed; you could sense the dramaturgic elements clattering away.
But at the end the audience was totally enchanted. Werfel was a tremendous reader. Apart from Thomas Mann, there have really been only three writers who were able to read their own works so magnificently: Kraus, Canetti, and Werfel.
“A few years later, perhaps in 1927, he gave another reading in Cologne, but this time to a packed house in town. He read The Man Who Conquered Death, one of his masterpieces. Not too long ago I was talking to Canetti, whose views of Werfel are quite ambivalent but at the same time very precise — I told him that the novella made an indelible impression on me and that it is, to my mind, the best thing by Werfel that I know. Canetti’s face lit up, and he said, ‘I’m so pleased to hear you say that — it’s what I expected you to say.’ Then he pointed out, correctly, that The Man Who Conquered Death wouldn’t exist without its model, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich. ‘But,’ he added, ‘Werfel’s novella is really his own, and it’s not run-of-the-mill.’ Canetti has the greatest respect for Werfel as a propagandist for Verdi. It was Werfel who made operas like La Forza del Destino and Don Carlos part of the permanent repertory of the world’s great opera houses. Simon Boccanegra too, of course. He was a powerful force in the Verdi renaissance. On the other hand, Werfel always regarded Verdi’s absolute masterpiece — that’s Falstaff, of course — as less important than works such as Forza del Destino, an opera that’s just a string of ideas, ‘notions.’ And that was because Werfel himself was still a believer in the romantic theory of ’inspired ideas’ — that’s why he makes Verdi’s wonderful idea of an opera based on Othello the centerpiece of his Verdi novel.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 16
