The tower in Sanary-sur-Mer, where the Werfels spent most of 1938-40
“I feel more ill than ever,” Werfel wrote in his diary on July 1, 1938, in St. Germain.[565] “My head feels as if it were full of water. It threatens to explode from interior pressure.” A hastily summoned physician diagnosed a mild heart attack. Alma left Sanary immediately and had Werfel transported from St. Germain to Paris. During the next few days he suffered from weakness, acute fear of death, nausea, and depression. Every few hours he was given injections to lower his extremely high blood pressure. “My God, what is going to happen?!” he wrote, but he recovered more quickly than expected, due to Alma’s energy and self-sacrifice.
Four weeks after the attack[566], the Werfels moved to Sanary-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. Werfel particularly liked the circular room on the second floor of Le Moulin Gris. It had twelve large windows that rattled in the wind, and Werfel loved the view of the open sea from his desk. He began to have hopes for the future again as he wrote sketches and short dramatic texts as well as poems, among them “Ballad of Illness” (“Ballade von der Krankheit”)[567] and a poem against Hitler, “The Greatest Man of All Time” (“Der grösste Mann aller Zeiten”).[568] The events of two of the dramatic sketches[569], “The Physician of Vienna” (“Der Arzt von Wien”) and “The Actress” (“Die Schauspielerin”), take place on the day the German army entered Austria.
The tower room in Sanary-sur-Mer today
“When I manage to get some work done, which I do now and then,” Werfel wrote to his father-in-law, Carl Moll, “I still feel the great fundamental problems of mankind as ever, but desperately little politics and partisan rage and hatred, even though there are many who expect those feelings from me now.”[570] Moll, influenced by his daughter Maria and her husband, the lawyer Dr. Richard Eberstaller, had been a Nazi sympathizer long before the Anschluss but nevertheless kept up his close friendship with Werfel. In the meantime, the villa on Steinfeldgasse and the house in Breitenstein had become the property of the Molls and the Eberstallers; the onetime Haus Mahler had been festively decorated with swastika flags and renamed Haus Eberstaller. “The enemy can hurt my freedom of choice and my creature comforts, but he can’t hurt me where I truly exist, he can’t even reach me there,” Werfel claimed in his letter to Moll. “Even when I try to assist him in the endeavor, he does not manage to intrude into my creative realm. In my true thoughts and talents, he does not exist.”
A few days after his forty-eighth birthday, Franz Werfel began a big new project. Despite his protestations to Carl Moll that he did not want to deal with political questions, he now planned a novel trilogy in which he would expose the Nazi terror. His first title for it was Illness That Leads to Life (Krankheit, die zum Leben führt).[571] It was the story of Cella Bodenheim, a half-Jewish young woman who must leave Austria after the Anschluss and lead the life of an emigrant, first in Paris, then in New York. “Danger: echoes of Musa Dagh” reads one of his first notes for the novel.[572] “Avoid the word Jew if possible.” But Cella’s father, the Jewish lawyer Hans Bodenheim, became — perhaps against Werfel’s original intention — the real protagonist of the first part of the trilogy.
Werfel chose Burgenland, the easternmost province of Austria, as the main setting for the novel. He liked the harsh, flat landscape[573] around Lake Neusiedler, liked Eisenstadt and the vineyard villages along the Hungarian border. But what had once seemed light and joyful now seemed ominous and dark, enveloped in a mood of wintry grief[574] — not a region of peace, not a land of security.
With great precision, Werfel described all layers of Austrian society, from the unemployed to the aristocrats to the clerics, from teenagers inflamed by Nazism to dreamwalking old monarchists to assimilated Jews; he drew the milieu of Austria between the fall of 1937 and the spring of 1938 in concise, unsentimental language that made the work read, in places, like a documentary: “Suddenly, the mass of people was ready, the operatic chorus of a first night in history. Now it broke loose, the song of murder that consists of only two notes: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Like the braying of an automatic donkey as big as a mountain! Like a Stone Age war cry, mechanized in the Industrial Age.” And he characterized, with all the incisiveness he could muster, the kind of people who had sold their souls to Nazism: “There was, in the faces of these men, a grandiose emptiness and absence from self, the likes of which had probably never existed before in the course of history... They lived as cleanly, precisely, without thought, without conscience as motors. They were only waiting to be turned on or off... Robots.”
The Munich Pact between England, France, and Germany, signed at the end of September 1938, permitted Hitler to annex the Sudetenland — ”a high point of horror and shame!”[575] as Werfel noted after he heard that the western region of Czechoslovakia, mostly settled by German-speaking Czechs, would become the next victim of Germany’s policy of expansion. “I feel more for Bohemia than I would ever have suspected.”[576] The danger of a world war loomed large in Europe. At this time, Werfel contacted the Czech consul in Marseilles[577] to inform him that he wanted to put himself at the disposal of the Beneš government in whatever capacity it saw fit and was now waiting in Sanary to hear whether he would be entrusted with a task and what it would be.
Werfel’s response to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in October was a series of short essays that aggressively insisted on the sovereignty of the state of Czechoslovakia and declared solidarity with the Czech people. These were published in exile newspapers in Paris and London. “Just drops in the bucket,”[578] as Werfel admitted to his parents, who were visiting their daughter Marianne in Zurich. As soon as his new novel had reached “a certain point... that secures the book,” he would, he assured his parents, come to visit them. He told them that he and Alma had applied for a visa to the United States but that they intended to emigrate only when “political necessity arrives at the doorstep.” Life in France was “charming and cheap,” and working conditions in his sanctuary, Sanary, were “incomparable.” Financially, too, the Werfels seemed to be in good shape[579], at least for the time being: Alma had received royalties for Gustav Mahler’s works from the composers’ association in Vienna, and Juarez and Maximilian was to be made into a Hollywood movie[580] the following year — the contract with Warner Brothers was almost ready to sign.
Kristallnacht in Germany, November 9, 1938, was the most violent pogrom since Hitler had assumed power: synagogues, Jewish shops, department stores, and private buildings were burned down, destroyed, and plundered, and more than a hundred Jews were murdered — scenes beside which the events described in Werfel’s Cella novel seemed relatively tame. Now Werfel felt that the timely, straightforward subject matter of the planned trilogy had been overtaken by the latest political events and the almost unimaginable atrocities of everyday reality. He began to feel doubtful about the project and even toyed with the idea of abandoning it.
He reacted to Kristallnacht by writing a commentary, “Israel’s Gift to Humanity” (“Das Geschenk Israels an die Menschheit”)[581], for the Paris émigré publication Das Neue Tage-Buch. In it he emphasized the important contributions Jews had made to cultural and spiritual developments in world history, and their great range from Moses to Kafka, Jesus to Freud, Marx to Mahler. “A dark commandment,” he noted, “compels this people without a country and without a language, to make a gift to others of all it owns of its life of the spirit and not to keep anything back for itself. Once again Israel is on the road, its bundle on its back and no valid passport in its pocket. Frightened, it appears among the good nations that still allow it entry (for how long?) and raises its hands.”
Werfel’s reunion with his parents[582] took place at the end of November in Rüschlikon. His sister Hanna had come from Prague to join them. In a deeply anxious mood, the family discussed whether they should stay in Europe and wait to see if Hitler’s expansionist urge would be satisfied after the annexation of the Sudetenland, averting the danger of ano
ther world war. The eighty-year-old Rudolf Werfel pleaded for immediate emigration to America. “Papa tortures me with his whining: ‘Save your lives, you and Alma,’“ Werfel wrote to his wife. “He imagines that the Gestapo will shoot us if we stay in Europe.” Werfel’s father gave his son five thousand dollars to tide him over during the initial period in the United States. The poor state of Rudolf Werfel’s health, his alarming fragility, caused his son to fear that his father could not stand up to the hardships of emigration.
He himself felt much better than he had in the summer months but had to observe a strict diet and totally refrain from smoking. “I hope I’ll be ‘normal’ again soon,” he wrote to Alma, who was now in London: after receiving the news of her mother’s death, she had gone to stay with her daughter Anna. Werfel tried to console his wife and assured her that he was in love with her “as on the first day and again and again with new powers and from new sources.”
He went to Paris in mid-December to sign the contract for Juarez. Shooting of John Huston’s adaptation of the play, under the direction of William Dieterle, who as an actor had worked for Max Reinhardt, was to begin in the new year. Werfel was paid $3,500, and this made him feel quite confident. A few days before the new year he wrote to Gottfried Bermann Fischer, “The new year stands before us. Very sphinxlike. Can it get worse than ‘38?? Possibly! Nevertheless, and for no sensible reason, I am curiously optimistic in my premonitions.”[583]
In the mayor’s office of Sanary-sur-Mer, the little town on the Côte d’Azur, the names Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler ring no bells. The helpful officials turn the pages of numerous hefty folios and check hundreds of yellowed index cards but are unable to discover any reference to the Werfels ever having lived there. Even Le Moulin Gris, their erstwhile residence, is not known here. A young police officer gives me advice: “You should visit Monsieur Bartholomé Rotget. He’ll be able to help you. He knows everything about the Germans who were here before the war.”
My way to the Rue de l’Harmonie at the edge of town takes me down a palm-lined promenade past the small fishing port. The cafés with their big outdoor terraces still bear the same names as when Sanary became the center of German literature in exile: Le Marine, La Nautique, Le Lyon. Even the Hôtel de la Tour is still there, the first stop for most of the emigrants before they found a place to stay in Sanary and its environs.
Orchids are the passion of Monsieur Rotget, a sinewy elderly gentleman and former Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina in the 1950s. He knows every precious flowering species of orchid, at least by name. “And my second passion is the history of Sanary, especially the years of German emigration to the South of France. I know every little cottage where the German writers lived. Today, no one here even mentions those people anymore. The names Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel don’t mean anything here. In the official history of the town, A Thousand Years of Sanary, you won’t find one word about the refugees.”
M. Rotget drives me to the villa where Lion Feuchtwanger lived from 1933 until his arrest in 1939. “You know, Ludwig Marcuse once said, ‘Sanary was the capital of German literature!’ But no one here pays any attention to that. There was no hostility back then; people were just totally indifferent to those writers. And it’s still that way.” We are standing in front of the high fence of the splendid villa Valmer, where Feuchtwanger wrote his antifascist novel The Oppermanns (Die Geschwister Oppermann)[584] and worked on the sequel to his historical novel Josephus. “This house and its garden were the most important gathering place of those exiled writers,” M. Rotget says. “Every newcomer showed up here first, and then they would come back — there were regular weekly meetings — to exchange ideas, to discuss crises. See over there? That terrace was where it all took place.”
We cross a grove of cedars rustling in the breeze and, after a steep climb, reach the top of the hill and the villa La Tranquille, a building surrounded by cacti, cypresses, and wild brambles. “Thomas Mann stayed here at the beginning of his exile, in 1933. But that house had to be rebuilt after the war: the Nazis dynamited a number of buildings up here to get a clear line of fire. You see, they expected the Allies to land nearby, in Marseilles or Toulon. And where do you think those German soldiers who destroyed everything up here were quartered? In Le Moulin Gris, quite close by.”
The round three-story tower stands on the edge of a steep cliff, high above Sanary Bay, facing the chapel Notre-Dame-de-Pitié. A small plaque affixed to the wall of the Saracen tower reminds us that the painter J. G. Darragnès (1886-1950) resided here for a while. It is an unassuming building with a flat, slightly tilted roof. It is now inhabited by Monsieur and Madame Romans from Lyons. The lively lady of the house takes me on a tour: first the kitchen on the ground floor, then the other tiny rooms. She is surprised by my interest in an author of whom she has never heard. “I know that Parmelin, the writer, used to live here after the war. She told me that a writer by the name of Fecktwanger, something like that, had rented the tower before the war. So that wasn’t right? Well, there you are, that’s how history gets written, with people making things up based on erroneous information.”
In the Werfels’ former bedroom, on the second floor of the tower, M. Romans is reclining on a couch. He rises with difficulty, gray of skin and beard, very tall but emaciated and stooped; he stands there while his wife chatters animatedly, hears that a writer called Franz Werfel once lived here and wrote novels on the top floor. M. Romans acknowledges it all with some incomprehensible phrase and lies back down on the couch.
A narrow circular staircase takes me to the top, to Werfel’s round workroom, a space he enjoyed a great deal; it even consoled him a little for the loss of the Haus Mahler in Breitenstein — the loss of his mansard studio with the rough wooden walls and a view, over the top of a tall beech tree, of the Rax and Schneeberg peaks. Nine of the twelve windows have been bricked up since the war; the three remaining have a view that extends to the horizon over the open sea. A bright room in the sky, on the edge of a precipitous coastline. The wall is crumbling. Today only a rickety table, a narrow bed, and two broken lamps stand on the stone floor.
Heaven and Hell
“Yet another infernal outrage!” Franz Werfel noted in mid-March 1939.[585] “Prague occupied by the boches! Hanna waited too long.”[586] Now Prague, Bohemia, and Moravia had become German protectorates, and the city of Werfel’s birth had been incorporated into Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. His sister’s family was in mortal danger, as was Willy Haas, who years ago had moved back to Prague from Berlin and now found himself trapped in his native city. Werfel, who in the meantime had been appointed honorary president[587] of the Austrian PEN Club in exile, immediately sent a telegram to British PEN asking them to invite Haas to London on some urgent pretext.
Two weeks later the ever increasing pace of political events made it impossible for Werfel to continue work on his trilogy about the half-Jewish pianist Cella Bodenheim. Not long before, he had told his publisher[588] G. B. Fischer that the book’s first draft would be about eight hundred pages long and represent a kind of Musa Dagh of the past twelve months, “powered” by his personal sense of having lost his homeland.
His main concern at this time was to see that Hanna, her husband, and their children managed to get out of Prague, and the Fuchs-Robetins arrived in Switzerland at the end of April 1939, safe and sound. Werfel traveled to meet them, and the whole family was reunited in Rüschlikon. “Alma and I still haven’t decided... whether to stay in France or go on to America (perhaps as soon as May 3),” Werfel wrote to Fischer from Rüschlikon.[589] But he managed to change his wife’s mind: they would emigrate, but only if there was absolutely no other choice or if war broke out.
“Perhaps I can slip in a smaller book (a simple, human-interest subject, something I’m good at) that I could finish by Christmas,” he wrote to his publisher after abandoning the Cella novel. In early May, in the round room of Le Moulin Gris, he started writing this new book, The Story of a Ma
id (Geschichte einer Magd), based on an idea Alma had given him. It had been years since Alma last influenced her husband’s choice of subject matter, but, having seen how hard he had taken what he considered the failure of the Cella project, she now suggested to him the true story of Agnes Hvizd, a woman who had been Alma’s cook for many years. She had served in the household in Gustav Mahler’s lifetime and left her post only after the Werfels moved to Hohe Warte. She died in 1933, at the age of seventy-two.
For many years Agnes had sent all her savings to a nephew, in the firm belief that the young man was getting a theological education and would one day — when he had become a priest and his generous aunt had passed on — secure her a good place in heaven by means of his daily prayers. The young scoundrel misused the funds provided by his benefactress, neither going to divinity school nor even contemplating the priesthood. When Agnes finally realized the deception, her world collapsed, and she only recovered a little from the shock after making a pilgrimage to Rome and taking part in a group audience with Pope Pius XI.
Werfel wrote the story of Agnes Hvizd with great pleasure and enthusiasm, a welcome change from the daily struggle with the Cella project. In a few days he completed several chapters. He was suddenly feeling much stronger and healthier; the new book, Embezzled Heaven (Der veruntreute Himmel), was not going to be just a “stopgap,”[590] he assured G. B. Fischer, “but a fully valid Christmas present.”
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 25
