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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  Franz Werfel expressed his approval of Schuschnigg’s appointment in a Viennese weekly[489], saying that the personality of the new chancellor, in addition to his qualities as a statesman and politician, included “three of the noblest human values: religious depth, incorruptible spirituality, great artistic talent and education” — thus a “trinity” that personified the “God-given harmony of the Austrian character... What a gift of fate, and hopeful fate for Austria, that it has found, on the very edge of the abyss, this distinguished and firm hand to guide it.”

  But even in the summer of 1934, Werfel seemed not to have fully realized the dangers that truly lurked in the Nazi abyss: at the end of August, after he had finished the second version of the Bible play, he wrote to the theater critic Julius Bab[490] that although his new work had been written primarily with an American audience in mind, he would regard himself happy if he could “have his say” in Germany with a play that served “Israel and the Bible.”

  Alma Mahler-Werfel’s parties in the festive marble-clad rooms and in the great garden of the villa on Hohe Warte continued unabated. Up to two hundred guests[491] often greeted the dawn here, and the closest friends were served breakfast. After Schuschnigg’s appointment to the chancellorship, Alma invited increasing numbers of ministers, highly placed civil servants, and diplomats, introducing them to representatives of cultural life, in the hope that such connections might be useful to both sides. Schuschnigg himself, who liked Werfel’s work, was a frequent guest at these soirées, being an old admirer of Anna Mahler’s and hoping to see her there.

  Franz Werfel withdrew more and more from this hectic social life. During the last few years, the tumult about his literary success and his person had become a little too intense, and the speed with which political reality was changing a little too rapid. He was forty-four years old and needed time to collect himself, to find himself again; a quarter-century had passed since he had recited a few poems — breathless with excitement — to Max Brod from what was to become the collection The Friend of the World. Now, in 1934, Brod turned fifty, and Werfel’s fame had surpassed that of his erstwhile mentor by far. Ten years ago, his friend Franz Kafka had died; in an elegiac letter[492] to Kafka’s confidant, Dr. Robert Klopstock, Werfel wrote at the end of 1934 that he had always regarded Kafka as a “messenger from the King... who, tragically, had been given too great a share of the supernatural. Franz Kafka is one who was sent down to us, one of the great elect... I was always aware of that distance between him and myself, a mere poet.”

  Werfel spent the beginning of 1935 mostly by himself and in quiet circumstances. He rented a large hotel room in Baden, near Vienna, and wrote — for the first time in years — only poems. In this time of private crisis, memories of childhood offered security and shelter: “When I fetch childhood / Strange and intact, / I do not think it is like coal / Long since burned out, long since consumed. / Where the child’s ghosts are nesting /I go as my own echo / Eternally to the Piarists / Somewhere in God’s universe.”[493]

  A physician had told him a while earlier that there was no hope of recovery for his stepdaughter Manon and that he had to be prepared for the worst.[494] During February and March 1935 he wrote many poems about death. At the end of March he received the news of the death of his nanny Barbara Šimůnková[495]: at the age of eighty, she had passed away in the Prague hospital of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth. “Please wait,” Werfel called out after her, “until I, stricken with silence and coldness, / Come once more to say thanks to you.”[496] And in the poem “The Transfigured Maid” (“Die verklärte Magd”)[497] he wrote: “So heavy a final burden you carried / And faded away so lightly, so lightly, / Now you live again, vivid / Within me, you guardian of the dawn. / I walk through the park of my childhood /... In a glory of consolation / Walk as I once did, holding your hand.”

  Manon Gropius died on April 22, 1935. Her funeral[498], at the Grinzing cemetery, degenerated into a social occasion that everybody wanted to attend. The upper crust of Vienna crowded around the open graveside, at which not Manon’s stepfather but Johannes Hollnsteiner spoke the eulogy. Werfel experienced the days before Manon’s death as “the most difficult time”[499] of his life, and he wrote, on the last page of a notebook he kept during those weeks, “I started this in 1932 when everything was still going well, and I was not yet marked by deep wounds.”[500]

  Soon after Manon’s funeral, the Werfels and Anna Mahler embarked on a grand tour of Italy.[501] A desperate attempt to find distraction, it took them first to Rome and Florence and finally to Viareggio, where they met up with Kurt von Schuschnigg. In a state limousine provided by Benito Mussolini, they made day trips to various places, including Giacomo Puccini’s home by a small Tuscan lake. As the palazzo in Venice was so closely connected with memories of Manon, Alma wanted to sell it as soon as possible, and the Casa Mahler ceased to exist as their household before the end of that summer.

  In mid-July 1935, after Chancellor Schuschnigg had returned to Austria, he and his wife were involved in a serious automobile accident. Herma von Schuschnigg was killed instantly, while her husband suffered only slight injuries. “A charming, delicate woman was taken from us by some unfathomable decision,” Franz Werfel wrote in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung.[502] “How often must Herma von Schuschnigg have trembled for the life of her husband in the past months... the life of this extraordinary and pure man, who... out of selfless love for the fatherland... shouldered the burden... Who knows whether, in the mysterious net of fate and determination, this death does not have the significance of a sacrifice?” Despite this “terrible blow of fate,” Chancellor Schuschnigg was now obliged to show “no weakness.” “Austrian humanity, the very thing he himself, the spiritual, sensitive, steadfast man, personifies to such a high degree... has to be preserved and fostered for the salvation of Europe.”

  The opponents of the regime reacted to Werfel’s eulogy with wild indignation. While all opposition newspapers had been banned within the borders of Austria, the German-language socialist Arbeiterzeitung published in Czechoslovakia was able to express its rage[503] to its fullest extent, saying that Franz Werfel had celebrated the leader of Austrian fascism as an “incarnation of humanity,” while victims of the dictatorship were on hunger strikes and were abused daily in prison. The paper said that Werfel, in his toadying, had proved to be one of the lowest of scribblers.

  Meyer Weisgal had meanwhile succeeded in finding a great number of Jewish backers in New York for his oratorio. The world premiere of The Eternal Road was originally planned for February 1935, in a tent designed along the lines of the Old Testament tabernacle, 120 feet tall and seating 5,000 spectators. Production costs, however, soon exceeded Weisgal’s budget, and the first night was postponed until the end of the year. Weisgal rented the Manhattan Opera House, a theater that had stood empty for years, and rehearsals were set to begin in September.

  “I’m not exaggerating,” Werfel explained[504] to a journalist who interviewed him about his biblical play in Salzburg’s Café Bazar, “when I say that this will be the creation of an entirely new stage concept, one that has never been tried before.” To give an idea of the special nature of The Eternal Road, Werfel mentioned that the production would require seventy solo musicians, a ninety-piece orchestra, and about a thousand extras.

  Before Max Reinhardt left for the United States, Werfel sent him the final version of the play[505], which incorporated ideas from the conversations they had had in Salzburg. “I have tried to fulfill all your wishes,” he said in the covering letter. “The great scene in the last part and the end have been modified the way you wanted.” The messianic figure that had displeased Weisgal was now, in Werfel’s final version, “the Angel of the Last Days” — but he said that its definitive designation, “to avoid all possible objections,” would have to be chosen during rehearsals or shortly before the first performance.

  At the beginning of November 1935, the Werfels set sail for New York to attend the world prem
iere of The Eternal Road. This was Franz Werfel’s first visit to the United States, but he did not arrive there unknown: in the fall of the previous year, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh had appeared in English translation and had been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club as its most important new book. It was number one on the best-seller list for many weeks, and 150,000 copies of the American edition had been sold. The fact that it had been banned by the Nazis no doubt contributed to its success.

  Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel during their trip to America, 1936

  Armenians living in exile in New York invited their idol, the author of their national epic, to one gala dinner after another.[506] Werfel had never been feted so lavishly; he was even called “a friend God has sent” to the Armenian people, who had succeeded like no one before him in plumbing the depths of the Armenian soul.

  In the meantime the Manhattan Opera House was being totally rebuilt for The Eternal Road. The work devoured large amounts of money and transformed the auditorium as well as the stage into a permanent construction site. Soon it became obvious that the first night could not take place as planned. Weisgal and Reinhardt agreed to postpone it until February 1936. Werfel decided to stay in New York until then: he liked the metropolis and its chaotic liveliness.

  The Werfels stayed at the St. Regis, near Central Park, making frequent visits to the opera and the theaters. They met artists, scholars, and scientists, among them Albert Einstein, who offered his personal assistance in raising funds for the Eternal Road project. Speaking to a Jewish audience in New York, Werfel said that he had not for a moment felt like a stranger in the United States[507], “but here, among you, I feel at home in a deeper sense.” He had not needed “Herr Hitler” to discover his Jewishness, he assured his audience. It was true that he had grown up in an assimilated milieu and had at times become quite estranged from the faith of his fathers, but “through suffering and recognition” his Jewishness had grown very strong over the years. He believed that he “could no longer be expelled... from this Jewishness, not by Christians or even by Jews.”

  In a Jewish environment, far away from the recently proclaimed Nuremberg race laws and just as far from the influence of the anti-Semitic café atmosphere of Vienna, taken to the bosom of New York intellectuals, Werfel finally spoke out about the “new persecution” afflicting Jewry, hastening to express, almost proudly, his conviction “that Israel cannot be destroyed by any persecution.”

  The Werfels’ stay in America was overshadowed by another death: in December of this year of grief[508], 1935, their friend and confidant Alban Berg had died[509] of blood poisoning. The composer was only fifty years old at the time of his death; his last work, a violin concerto completed in the summer of 1935, had been dedicated to Manon Gropius — ”To the memory of an angel.”

  The rehearsals of The Eternal Road had to be broken off in their final stages, in early February 1936, and the opening postponed indefinitely. About $400,000[510] had been spent on the production, and Weisgal’s funds were exhausted. Hundreds of people — actors, extras, dancers, musicians — became unemployed; the producer, whose private life had long since fallen apart in this extended disaster, had to start raising funds again. At least another $175,000 was needed to stage the play. Rehearsals would probably not be resumed before the fall of 1936.

  The Werfels returned to Europe on the luxury liner SS Champlain. When they arrived in Paris[511] from Le Havre, they were received by a large and excited crowd at the Gare du Nord: these were exiled Armenians, and, like their brothers and sisters in New York, they celebrated Werfel as their national hero for days on end. One of the numerous dinners given in his honor was graced by the presence of the French rear admiral Dartige du Fournet, who, as the commander of the flagship Jeanne d’Arc, had led the rescue operation off the coast of the Musa Dagh range and saved the lives of more than four thousand men, women, and children.

  In early March 1936 the Werfels returned to Hohe Warte, to “a Vienna that was like a cemetery.”[512] He was trying to “find his way back into life here,” Werfel wrote to Rudolf Kommer, Max Reinhardt’s secretary, who had stayed in New York. And he added, “Funnily enough, despite all the bad experiences and disappointments there, I feel a kind of homesickness for New York.”

  Not far from Leopoldskron Castle in Salzburg, once the residence of Max Reinhardt, lies Klesheim Castle, surrounded by extensive parklands. At the end of a wide gravel road, tucked away in a dale, is the small castle of Hoyos, home of Max Reinhardt’s son Gottfried Reinhardt. The screenwriter, director, and movie producer is a massive, ponderous man who divides his time between Salzburg and Los Angeles. Following the stream of his memories, he strides back and forth in his large study.

  “My father was very fond of Werfel, and he directed many of his plays. I can still remember Juarez in detail,” Gottfried Reinhardt tells me. His voice is nasal and rasping; the floorboards creak under his feet. “In Vienna and Berlin, Juarez was one of my father’s very best productions ever. I think he really loved that play. The last play he ever directed in Vienna was also one of Werfel’s: One Night (In einer Nacht). That was in 1937, at the Josefstadt Theater. Then, of course, he directed The Eternal Road in New York — a grotesque business! Meyer Weisgal had read in the paper that Max Reinhardt had been expelled from Germany, and he immediately sent my father a telegram: ‘If Hitler doesn’t need you, I do!’ During the World Exposition of 1933 in Chicago, Weisgal had put on a small biblical show in the so-called Palestinian Pavilion, and now he wanted something similar, only on a much larger scale. He kept knocking on my father’s door, but Max didn’t want to have anything to do with it. In private, he was an observant Jew; he even fasted on Yom Kippur, but at the same time he was a completely assimilated German. And he wore those blinkers that kept him from seeing what things were really like. It took him years to grasp the fact that he was regarded as a Jew and an immigrant, politically. Anyway, Max Reinhardt tried to keep his distance from the Jewish question for as long as possible. Probably not least because his father-in-law, Hugo Thimig had always been an anti-Semite. (My father married Helene Thimig after he divorced my mother.) We often had big arguments, my father and I, about his suppressed Jewishness — I couldn’t stand his attitude. After he turned Weisgal down, I wrote to him from New York that he had made a great mistake. If he had any future at all, it would be in America. ‘You must be insane,’ I wrote to him, ‘not to accept Weisgal’s offer to direct this play, here in this city with three million Jews.’ And I received a rather disgruntled reply: ‘Don’t be childish, I’m not going to deny my Jewishness — but I can’t put on a biblical variety show! Not even Cecil B. DeMille could get me to do that!’

  “After prolonged vacillation, he asked Werfel to think it over. In some demonic way, he had managed to pick someone who would try to create a biblical play that was as un-Jewish as possible. So he proposed a playwright who was fundamentally a pious Catholic; a composer who was a Communist — Kurt Weill had collaborated with Brecht: one could hardly imagine a greater contrast than that between Brecht and Werfel — and finally, a stage designer of genius who was a notorious anti-Semite: Norman Bel Geddes.

  “But my father underestimated Weisgal’s tremendous energy. In New York practically every Jew had to pay a kind of head tax to make it possible to stage this monstrosity. Then, when Werfel came to Salzburg with his first version of The Eternal Road, it was really a tremendous blow for Weisgal to realize that the author of the play felt and wrote like a Catholic! So Weisgal tried to convert Werfel back to Judaism, in a crash course, as it were — I can just imagine what it must have been like!

  “Then, when my father came to New York in the fall of 1935 to start rehearsals, it turned out that the stage designer had omitted the synagogue, where the rabbi is consoling his congregation. Mr. Bel Geddes wasn’t interested in it, and the two had awful arguments. Werfel, who had also come to New York, said, ‘My play is being ruined here!’ But where to put the little synagogue? There was no room
left on the stage. Someone suggested the orchestra pit, but Kurt Weill protested. ‘If you take the orchestra away, I quit!’ But that’s where they finally put it, and the musicians had to sit in a separate room — which created enormous problems of synchronization between onstage events and orchestral music.

  “Indescribable things happened during those rehearsals. The whole theater had to be rebuilt — the front boxes were torn down, new dressing rooms had to be constructed. While tunneling into the bedrock under Manhattan, workers accidentally drilled into a spring, so all the rooms below the stage were flooded. And that was just one of the more harmless incidents!

  “When the play was performed at long last — the first night was in January 1937 — the audience witnessed a splendid and seamless production, up to the intermission. In the fourth and final act, everything fell apart and the whole thing ended in chaos. My father, Weisgal, and the hundreds of people involved were preparing themselves for terrible reviews. But that night, when the first morning papers appeared, almost all the reviews were raves! The Eternal Road was praised to the heavens. What had happened, of course, was that many critics had left during the intermission to meet their deadline and hadn’t witnessed the catastrophic last part. Well, no one ever got to see that fourth act again — it was simply cut.

  “The production ran for five or six months, steadily losing money, even though the Manhattan Opera House was sold out every night. But Weisgal lost thousands of dollars every week: in the two top balconies, there was a rebellion every night because no one up there was able to see the synagogue scene down in the orchestra pit. Many members of the audience asked for their money back. The entire production became so costly that it was a catastrophe for my father: people held him personally responsible for the enormous losses. I suppose he had had the right intuition at first, when he refused to have anything to do with the project.”