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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  “Please note that I am a Czechoslovak citizen,” he wrote in the petition (which, of course, was never answered), “and a resident of Vienna. At the same time, I wish to declare that I have always kept my distance from any political organization or activity. As a member of the German minority in Czechoslovakia” — he could not resist this reference to his pro-German airs — ”resident in Austria, I am subject to the laws and regulations of these states.” Should these data “not appear sufficient” for his acceptance, he asked the directorate to obtain further information from Frau Grete von Urbanitzky[473] and Dr. Hanns Martin Elster, who had both declared themselves willing to “vouch for” him. Both these writers were long-time supporters of Nazism. Soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Dr. Elster had been appointed to the Civil Service Press Bureau, and not long thereafter he became editor of the NS-Beamtenzeitung, the newspaper published for the civil service.

  At a press conference organized by Hungarian journalists, Werfel — who had come to Budapest to give his Verdi lecture at the Innerstädter Theater — stated his views on recent events in the Third Reich. He compared the political upheavals of the present to religious disagreements during the Thirty Years’ War: then, he said, the Catholic Mediterranean principle collided with the Nordic neopagan, and now the unbounded will to power of the Nazis could start a new war over Christianity. He did not mention any immediate danger to the Jews but repeated his — by now well-known — opinion that he did not find Bolshevism a viable alternative and that he rejected that dictatorial and hopelessly antiquated way of governing as strongly as he rejected the German variety of fascism.

  Werfel spent the end of the year 1933 in Rüschlikon, near Zurich, as the guest of his sister Mizzi. He went to Italy early in 1934 to begin work on a new project. After accompanying Alma to Venice, he went to Santa Margherita by himself. This time the town seemed dismal to him, which was probably due to the absence of tourists and particularly poor weather: it rained incessantly, for days and weeks. Financial considerations prevented him from taking his spacious favorite room; he had to be content with the cheapest accommodations in the Imperial Palace.

  Gerhart Hauptmann, whom he met frequently, seemed intent on proving his anti-Nazi attitude to his friend.[474] Hauptmann assured him of his total rejection of the currently dominant German world view, adding that it caused him personal pain. He said that he had not identified with the new wielders of power for even a moment, although Hitler had assured him of his veneration and Goebbels had wanted to appoint him councillor of state. “In spite of all that,” Werfel wrote to Alma, “(in contrast to Strauss, Furtwängler, etc.), he said no. For the rest, he tacks along, as befits his noncombative nature, trying to avoid all risks... I get the impression (as so often with him) of a deep-seated indecisiveness and dependence on mood.” Werfel could hardly have bettered this as a description of his own attitude during those fateful months after Hitler’s ascension to power.

  In the meantime there were moves afoot to have The Forty Days of Musa Dagh banned in Germany.[475] Among others, a Turkish journalist and author appealed to the German authorities for an official determination that the novel was an insult and act of aggression against Turkey, a country that had been Germany’s ally during World War I.

  In early February 1934, two months after the novel was published, it was indeed confiscated and prohibited nationwide, according to paragraph 7 of the Reich’s presidential ordinance for the protection of the German people. The official proclamation claimed that the book was of a nature liable to endanger public order and safety. The decision was met with loud approval by the German press, brought into line by the Nazis. “In the so-called best years of my life and after working without pause, I now stand on the ruins of myself,” Franz Werfel wrote to his mother-in-law, Anna Moll, from Santa Margherita.[476] “In Germany I have been deleted from the book, and the books, of the living, and since I am, after all, a German author, I am now suspended in empty space.”

  In dense fog, the vaporetto — with me as its only passenger — arrives at the terminal: San Lazzaro, Isola degli Armeni. Father Beszdikian, whose grandfather fought on Musa Dagh, lives in the great Venetian monastery of the Mekhitarist congregation. At the time, his mother was seven years old; now eighty, she lives close to her son in the city on the lagoon.

  “My mother’s father was one of those heroic men who died fighting the Turkish soldiers,” Beszdikian tells me. He is a strong, tall, priestly figure in his late forties, his beard neatly trimmed and whitish gray. “He has a hero’s tomb now, on top of Mount Musa. My grandfather even appears in Franz Werfel’s book! He is the man who lies on a rock and holds out until the last cartridge. And my mother was one of the maybe five hundred girls, and of the four thousand survivors altogether, who made that stand on the mountain. She can tell you all about it herself one day; she is not feeling well right now, but we’ll go and see her when you come to Venice again.”

  The priest, who wears a black robe down to his ankles, tells me about his childhood. He was born in Vakifli, at the foot of Musa Dagh. After the end of World War I the region was under a French mandate, and many of the survivors of the tragedy decided to return to their old homeland from Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese refugee camps. “But later, not long after I was born,” Beszdikian continues, “the French had to cede the territory back to the Turks, and all those families had to flee again, mine among them. They settled in Anjar, near Beirut, in the Bekaa valley, where they have stayed to this day. As a result of the Lebanese war of 1982, the area is now under Syrian occupation. The Syrian forces are stationed very prominently in the Armenian settlements — they know Israel won’t attack them there, since the Armenians are friends with the Jews because of the historical similarities of our fates. The similarities between the two people, the Armenians and the Jews, existed even before the incredible Holocaust: there is a legend, for instance, according to which the people living around Musa Dagh were descendants of an Israelite tribe.”

  We tour the large library of the monastery. It shelters precious documents of the spiritual history of the Armenian people, including very early handwritten copies of the Bible and prayer books from the second and third centuries A.D. Young men in black robes pass us in silence; they come here from the countries of the Armenian diaspora to learn the language and the script so they can become priests. “Did you know that Moses Der-Kaloustian, who was Franz Werfel’s model for his hero Gabriel Bagradian, died only a month ago, at the age of ninety-nine?” Beszdikian goes on: “But a French wife, like Bagradian’s unfaithful Juliette — they would never have accepted that around Yoghonoluk, that was purely a product of Werfel’s imagination. In the provincial world of the villages around Musa Dagh, it would have been impossible for them to pick an ‘assimilated’ man like that for their leader!”

  The priest takes down a large tome from one of the library’s tall shelves: the thousand-page book describes in meticulous detail all the historical events on the Mountain of Moses and traces the lives of many survivors and their descendants. “In the Viennese monastery of the Mekhitarists, where Werfel did his research under the guidance and encouragement of Abbot Habozian,” Beszdikian translates from the reference work, “he met a pastor by the name of Katshazan who had survived the weeks on Musa Dagh. And he pointed out various small mistakes to Werfel. But Werfel replied, ‘My goal is not to give an absolutely exact historical account of what happened but to create an epic work.’“ Beszdikian turns the pages. “Here: in this section, he discusses the particular dialect spoken in the Musa Dagh region, which is quite different from classical Armenian. Or here: the description of a feast we celebrate every year, worldwide, to remind ourselves of the heroic weeks on Musa Dagh — always in September, we make a big lamb stew, because that was practically our daily fare up there on the mountain.”

  Father Beszdikian excuses himself for a moment; he has to change clothes for a visit to the city. He returns a little later in street clothes, wearing dark sunglasses despite
the foggy winter weather. In his left hand he carries a slim briefcase with a gold-colored combination lock. We walk down a few stone steps beside the vacant pier of the island of San Lazzaro. A black Venetian boat is waiting for us, and a cross-eyed ferryman, kin to the Charon of myth, steers the boat across the lagoon. I have trouble retaining my balance on the narrow, swaying floorboards of the vessel.

  “The Armenian people find it incomprehensible that the government of Turkey to this day refuses to admit that it ever committed that genocide!” Beszdikian says. We are slowly approaching the Lido. “I do condemn the Armenian terrorist acts of recent years, but all they want to achieve is one thing: to have Turkey admit to the world at large that it committed those atrocities of 1915-17. Not only were Turkish officials busy trying to get Werfel’s novel suppressed in the thirties, they have also stopped MGM from making a film of the novel. Turkish diplomats and high government officials have managed to thwart the project time and again. You have to understand one thing: Franz Werfel is the national hero of the Armenian people. He wrote our national epic. His great book is a kind of consolation to us — no, not a consolation, there is no such thing, but it is of eminent importance to us that this book exists. It guarantees — and any Armenian anywhere in the world, in Los Angeles, in Paris, in Jerusalem, or in Beirut, will confirm what I say — it guarantees that it can never be forgotten, never, what happened to our people!”

  Bad Tidings

  Four days of civil strife in February 1934 transformed the Republic of Austria under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss into a clerical-fascist dictatorship. The Austrian army, in concert with Prince Starhemberg’s fascist Heimwehr militia, put down a workers’ rebellion[477]: at least three hundred people were killed, at least eight hundred wounded.[478] The government (Chancellor Dollfuss had disbanded Parliament in March 1933) declared martial law, dissolved the labor unions, and banned the Social Democratic Party.

  Karl-Marx-Hof, the citadel of proletarian resistance, was situated in the immediate vicinity of the Werfels’ villa, where Alma and her daughter Manon were staying, and battles were raging right outside on Steinfeldgasse. Kurt von Schuschnigg[479], minister of justice and education, a friend of Alma Mahler-Werfel’s and Johannes Hollnsteiner’s, invited Alma to come and stay with him for the duration of the troubles. She thanked him but declined, maintaining her position at Hohe Warte.

  Due to the general strike, telephone communications between Santa Margherita and Vienna were interrupted for days. Franz Werfel was tormented by worries that something had happened to his wife and stepdaughter. “Bolshevism is the worst, that’s for sure,”[480] he wrote to Alma after “the days of trembling” were finally over. “But the next worst,” he added, was the radicalism of the right, which he considered a kind of Bolshevism of the petite bourgeoisie. He said he was hardly able to breathe anymore in this world of brute force and “enslavement of the individual.” It seemed as if Adolf Hitler, the true beneficiary of the Austrian crisis, had a “lucky star.” Werfel wrote that the history of mankind seemed to him, to an ever increasing degree, a “dark intervention of the supernatural in the natural.” After all, even Attila, king of the Huns, was just a “belching savage,” yet at the same time he had been “God’s scourge.” After Dollfuss’s brutal suppression of the rebellion with the use of heavy artillery, Austria’s outraged workers would now join the Nazis in ever greater numbers, and the Dollfuss government faced the future “covered in blood.” Hitler (and in this respect he had acted like a “true man of the people”) had at least seen to it that there were new organizations ready to accept the workers after the dissolution of the old unions. Dollfuss, on the other hand, had left the proletariat in a state of rage and grief. “Nevertheless, one has to declare one’s instant and unqualified support for Dollfuss.” Only a truly strong Austrian government would be able to prevent a takeover attempt by the Nazis.

  The political events in Austria, the situation in the Third Reich, the ban of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and the hate campaign mounted by the German press against him and his works — all these plunged Werfel into deep depression during the winter weeks of 1934. He found it very hard to work with any concentration. He hoped that the world would come to an end “radically, quickly, and definitively,” as he wrote to an employee of Zsolnay Verlag.[481] “Then we’re rid of it. (I smell war.)” The only pleasing news Werfel received in these dark days came from Hollywood: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had acquired the rights to The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and this coup brightened Werfel’s mood a little. The twenty thousand dollars MGM paid for the option eased his increasingly acute financial worries, at least for now. In his Santa Margherita hotel room, he pulled himself together to work on a commission he had accepted at the end of 1933 but had not yet done anything about.

  Meyer W. Weisgal, an American theatrical producer born in Poland, was the initiator of this project.[482] In the fall of the preceding year, Weisgal had traveled to Paris and Salzburg in order to enlist Max Reinhardt, now in exile from Germany, in the production of a biblical drama. This era of an imminent threat to the Jewish people, Weisgal felt, called for a theatrically effective adaptation and retelling of the Old Testament. Weisgal wanted to premiere the play in New York and then send it on a worldwide tour, and he was hoping that the famous director would be willing to stage it. Reinhardt turned down the offer, but Weisgal insisted and kept insisting until he finally softened, telling the impresario that he would on some suitable occasion discuss the project with his friend Franz Werfel, who just might be interested in the creation of such an oratorio (Weisgal was thinking of vocal and orchestral interludes).

  Reinhardt found to his surprise that Werfel was indeed interested in Weisgal’s proposal. Werfel’s plan[483] was to use the Books of Moses, Kings, and the Prophets without adding a single word of his own, except for a modest framing device. He intended to cut and rearrange dramatically only in those places where the laws of the stage demanded quick transitions and emphases. He did not, however, find the work easy. It was “a terrible affliction,” he told his wife in a letter. “I find anything truly creative a hundred times easier... It’s a grotesque idea to think that these gigantic world tragedies, of Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, could be thrown together in a hurry. Something in me really resists the idea. I’m still not certain if I want to take it on.” In any case, he was “back at one of the greatest tasks, fraught with the greatest responsibility” of his life.

  The frame action, a brief prelude, was to take place in a small synagogue where a venerable old rabbi tells his frightened flock — fleeing from a pogrom — the story of Israel, from Abraham up to the prophet Jeremiah. “I would have forgotten you long ago, congregation of my birth,” whispers one of the persecuted people, no doubt reflecting Werfel’s own feelings about Jewry. “I would not have returned here if the crowd outside hadn’t recognized my face.” And the thirteen-year-old son of this alienated man asks his father, “Why are they persecuting us? Why have you never spoken out? Why have I not known anything?”

  Werfel had finished about half of the biblical play’s first draft by early April 1934. He went to visit his wife in Venice, then traveled with her to Milan and back to Vienna in the middle of the month. There they received word by telephone that Manon, who had wanted to stay on in Venice, was suddenly very ill.[484] Alma took a plane to Venice the next morning, and Werfel, Anna Mahler, and Paul Zsolnay followed her on the afternoon plane. A rapidly convened council of physicians immediately decided on a spinal tap and made the frightening diagnosis that the eighteen-year-old had fallen victim to polio. A polio epidemic in Venice had been kept secret by Italy’s censored newspapers, and the virus had attacked Manon Gropius.

  After only two days paralysis set in in her legs and soon thereafter in her whole body.[485] Manon was taken to Vienna, in an ambulance railway carriage provided by the Austrian government. She was unable to leave her bed and was in great pain for several months. Now and again she was able to distract herself by memoriz
ing long theatrical parts.[486] Her passion for the theater had become more pronounced in recent times, and before her illness she had frequently expressed the wish to attend the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna to be trained as an actress.

  Anxiety about his stepdaughter overshadowed Werfel’s work on the biblical drama, but he finished the first draft in the spring of 1934. He visited Max Reinhardt in Leopoldskron Castle[487] in Salzburg and recited The Eternal Road (Der Weg der Verheissung) to him. Kurt Weill was present as well. Reinhardt wanted to commission him to write the songs and orchestral parts of the oratorio.

  Meyer Weisgal, too, had come from New York to attend this reading, but he seemed rather disappointed by the first version of the play.[488] He felt particularly doubtful about the end, in which a messianic, Christlike figure appears out of the smoking ruins of the Temple to speak words of consolation to the people of Israel. With that for a finale, it would be difficult to persuade the Jewish community of New York to lend its financial support to the gigantic project, the impresario warned. Weisgal asked Werfel to try to avoid Christian associations in his next version of The Eternal Road.

  In the summer of 1934, while Werfel was working on the second version, Austrian Nazis staged an abortive coup d’état in Vienna. Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated, but the government crisis the German planners had hoped for did not occur. Although he declined the offer at first, Kurt von Schuschnigg, until then the minister of justice and education, became chancellor and continued on the dominant clerical-authoritarian course set by his predecessor.