The tale of the cook Teta Linek, as she is called in the novel, is intertwined with another narrative consisting of thinly disguised autobiographical elements. Theo, the other protagonist of Embezzled Heaven, is an exiled writer who reminisces about his stay in the country house of “the Argans,” patrons of the arts. While Austria was still free, Theo had retired there in order to recuperate from the strain caused by an abandoned work[591] (an obvious reference to Cella). “I feel my exile as a summons to renewal... Yet I will not deny the sadness by which I am seized at this moment as I think of the house at Grafenegg and the room there which I called my own.” Grafenegg in the Mountains of the Dead was a simple disguise for Breitenstein on the Semmering Pass, and the furnishings, scents, and colors of the wood-paneled house, the parties and celebrations, all correspond to Werfel’s favorite place and its own history of the past twenty years.
The first version of Embezzled Heaven was completed as early as June 1939. Werfel told his publisher that he didn’t usually believe in his work[592] while it was still in progress, but this time seemed to be an exception, and his prognosis for the book was quite optimistic: what had been merely a “primitive attempt” in the commercially successful The Man Who Conquered Death had been “polyphonally elaborated” in this book. Teta, the heroine, a soul sister to Barbara, had to be regarded as “an exemplary instance of simple popular Catholic piety.” While he was working on the second draft, he informed Fischer that he considered this “story of a maid... one of the best books” he had ever written.
One of the first people to whom he gave the finished manuscript was his friend and editor of many years, Ernst Polak, who was now living in exile in London.[593] “Remember, I wrote the novel twice in about ten weeks,” Werfel told Polak by way of apologizing for possible stylistic or dramatic shortcomings. “Surely this Embezzled Heaven is one of my most architectonic books... The narrative is modeled, to a certain extent, on the musical fugue... The subject: death and the hereafter.” In any case, he had “taken endless pains” in the construction of the book.
Werfel also asked his friends Lion Feuchtwanger and René Schickele for their opinions of the book before it went to press, and both predicted enduring success and even confirmed that Embezzled Heaven was the best work Werfel had ever produced in this genre. Fischer had asked his author to choose another title, but after exchanging several letters they agreed to keep the original one. Werfel suggested that the publisher use thick paper and a large typeface for the first edition, saying that his readers were used to books of from eight hundred to a thousand pages, and it was important to avoid the impression that this was only a marginal or “stopgap” work.
The Werfels led a lively social life with their friends and fellow exiles in Sanary.[594] Walter Hasenclever lived nearby, in Cagnes-sur-Mer; Ludwig Marcuse, Robert Neumann, and Arnold Zweig belonged to their circle of friends, and almost daily Werfel met the journalist Wilhelm Herzog, the communist writer and physician Friedrich Wolf, and Lion Feuchtwanger in the cafés and on the beach promenades. They talked mostly about the extremely precarious and — for every one of them — life-threatening political situation. Werfel and Feuchtwanger had regular arguments[595], during which Werfel became tremendously excited while Feuchtwanger always remained calm and unshakably certain of his convictions.
On August 22, one day before the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to march into Poland on September 1. He had commanded his “Death’s Head” units to “send any man, woman, and child of Polish origin and language to their deaths.”[596] Only by physically destroying the adversary would it be possible to gain the Lebensraum Germany so badly needed. When voices were heard saying that genocide might further damage the already bad reputation of the German Reich abroad, the Führer replied that only a little less than twenty-five years after the extermination of the Armenian people, no one in the world was talking about the Turkish government’s actions.
After Hitler’s attack[597] on Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Instantly, German-speaking immigrants in France were regarded as undesirable aliens, possible spies, members of a fifth column, or Bolshevik fomenters of unrest. House searches and arrests in the streets became daily events. In the vicinity of the Sanary courthouse, Franz Werfel was stopped by a burly policeman who shouted that the author surely wrote his poems and novels mainly for the proletariat. “No,” replied the intimidated Werfel, “I write them for everybody.” He was verbally and in some cases even physically abused on the street by local people.
During an interrogation[598] in nearby La Seyne, he was afraid he might faint from fear; the investigating official was slowly turning the pages of blacklists, but it turned out that the summons had been issued by mistake. “But I’m still quite ill from it,” Werfel wrote in his diary. “At the end of the interrogation, Alma showed the commissioner my picture in the magazine Match with the caption ‘Un des plus grands écrivains contemporains’ [‘One of the greatest contemporary authors’]. We take that picture everywhere. It’s really comical.”
In mid-September, Werfel volunteered for the Czechoslovak Legion.[599] Should he be fit for service (which was hardly to be expected), he regarded it as his patriotic duty, he informed the Czech consulate in Marseilles, to bear arms against the Nazi regime or at least to perform clerical duties behind the lines.
“The Hitler gang will be destroyed; no doubt about it.”[600] With these words he encouraged both himself and Fischer. “Perhaps we’ll all be permitted to enjoy a modest future.” But a new edict from the French government declared that all males of German origin who were not past fifty would be put in a French internment camp, at least temporarily. Uncertain whether he, as a German from Prague, would be counted as a member of this group, Werfel spent days and nights of fear and despair in Le Moulin Gris.
In the course of the summer, before the outbreak of war, Rudolf and Albine Werfel, Hanna, and her husband, Herbert von Fuchs-Robetin, had moved from Zurich to Vichy[601] in central France, a step they now bitterly regretted. To make matters worse, Franz Werfel’s eighty-two-year-old father had recently suffered a stroke and seemed to be declining rapidly. At the end of October Werfel at last succeeded in obtaining a travel permit, a sauf conduit, which allowed him to visit his family for at least a few days.
In early December, Werfel reported to the draft board of the Czechoslovak Legion and was examined by a regimental physician. “I wouldn’t have believed it possible that I would once more stand in front of the yardstick of a draft board,” he wrote to his mother in Vichy. “I had to laugh at myself in my Adamic nakedness. It is all like a grotesque dream.” However, and by no means surprisingly, the regimental physician declared Werfel unfit for military service.
Urged on by Alma, Wilhelm Herzog started a campaign to award Franz Werfel the Nobel Prize for Literature in the coming year, on his fiftieth birthday. At the end of 1939, Herzog organized a petition and asked former Nobel Prize winners and members of the most highly respected academies of the arts and sciences to support it; it was his intention to present the entire list to the Nobel Committee in Stockholm. One of the first to respond[602] to Herzog’s initiative was Thomas Mann, who said that while he certainly admired Werfel’s work, he had already voted for Hermann Hesse, whose prospects looked better to him, since Hesse belonged to a “higher German tradition.”
After an extended stay in Paris and another visit to his parents in Vichy, Werfel started work in February 1940 on a “tricky little marital story.”[603] He warned his publisher that it was “something I have never tried before” and at the same time announced that upon completion of this novella he would turn to his true “favorite idea,” the sequel to The Pascarella Family. He had “really wonderful plans” for this big novel.
The marital story, April in October (Eine blassblaue Frauenschrift)[604], dealt with Leonidas, a prominent civil servant, and his wife, Amelie; like Cella, it reflected the tragedy of Austria, the Anschluss to the German Reich.
The greatest fear in Leonidas’s life is his “relationship with a Jewess eighteen years earlier, at the beginning of his marriage,” Werfel noted in his sketchbook.[605] “Convinced there is a child, his only son...” Vera Wormser, the author of the letter in pale blue handwriting that plunges Leonidas into violent conflicts of conscience, is the most positive Jewish character[606] in Werfel’s oeuvre, aside from his portrayal of the prophet Jeremiah. Werfel’s Jewish characters usually have a degree of self-contempt and are depicted with kindly, compassionate forbearance (for example, the convert Kompert in Embezzled Heaven) for their supposed crudity, lack of sensitivity, and pushiness, but Vera Wormser is very different than that cliché: her aristocratic, forgiving behavior places her far above the Austrian civil servant Leonidas, who starts his social climb by marrying a wealthy woman.
German troops occupied Denmark and Norway in April 1940. In a brief radio address, Werfel spoke to his Norwegian listeners: “The treacherously attacked land has fallen prey to the bandit. Now Norway lies in chains. No! Only Norway’s hands are shackled. Norway’s soul is free.”[607] The French writer Jules Romains, since 1936 president of PEN International, asked Werfel to write six more speeches against Nazi Germany to be used by French radio as counterpropaganda.[608] On May 10, the Wehrmacht marched into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. An attack on France was expected any day, and the propaganda assignment was dropped.
At the Hôtel Royal-Madeleine in Paris the Werfels lived in constant fear of bombing raids[609]: nine hundred civilians had perished in a German raid on Rotterdam. The alarm was sounded practically every night; all hotel guests had to leave their rooms and spend several hours in the cellar. All of France was in tumult, and tens of thousands of immigrants with their very particular fear of a German invasion wanted to leave what had been their sanctuary as quickly as possible.
The French authorities required all men and women between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five who had been born within the territory of the new Greater Germany to register immediately so they could be interned at a later date. Once more Franz visited his mortally ill father, who now scolded him fiercely for not having emigrated to America two years earlier, when it would still have been relatively easy, instead of hoping to escape now, when it was really too late: both Franz’s and Alma’s U.S. visas had expired.
Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Wolf, and Walter Hasenclever had already been interned in the French camp of Les Milles[610] near Aix-en-Provence when the Werfels arrived in Sanary at the end of May, for only a few days, to dissolve the household at Le Moulin Gris in great haste. They spent the next two weeks at consulates in Marseilles, desperately trying to obtain new immigration papers for the United States.
When Hitler marched into France in early June 1940, meeting very little military resistance and taking Paris on June 14, Werfel immediately wanted to make a run for Spain[611], even without valid visas. After an odyssey with many mishaps[612], many journeys in taxicabs, limousines, and trains, the Werfels finally reached Bordeaux, in a state of almost total exhaustion. They lost all their luggage on this journey, including valuable original manuscripts and their remaining wardrobe.
Shortly before their arrival Bordeaux had been badly bombed by the Germans, and chaos reigned everywhere. The French government under Premier Paul Reynaud, which had fled there from Paris, announced its resignation. The city was an armed camp, with soldiers and civilians, refugees from the northern regions of the country, entering it in a steady stream. After the aged Marshal Pétain had taken over the reins of government and Germany had presented its first armistice agreement, things calmed down for a while. For the Werfels, this was a signal to continue their flight without delay.
Biarritz, Bayonne, Hendaye, and St. Jean-de-Luz were the next way stations. Time and again they had to spend great amounts of money to hire automobiles and drivers, and to pay for gasoline. The refugees encountered the same scene everywhere: thousands of desperate people were laying siege to the Spanish and Portuguese consulates, hoping to receive visas to freedom.
The German forces were closing in, and a Portuguese consul in St. Jean-de-Luz was rumored to be providing every émigré with valid papers without complications. When Franz Werfel finally arrived at this assumed savior’s door, he was told that the consul had gone mad a few days before and tossed a great number of the passports at his disposal into the sea.
After France signed the armistice agreement, three-fifths of the country came under German occupation. German soldiers advanced as far as Hendaye, reaching the township on the Spanish border on the same day as the Werfels. For the first time since they had left Sanary, Franz Werfel lost his composure and had a nervous breakdown. In the internment camp of Les Milles, some five hundred kilometers east of Hendaye, Walter Hasenclever took his own life with an overdose of Veronal to avoid falling into the hands of the Gestapo.
Werfel calmed down after Vicky von Kahler[613], his friend from Prague days, managed to obtain some fuel and a taxi. The Werfels and the Kahlers pressed on — they had met briefly and accidentally once before on this journey, in Biarritz — and after an extremely difficult drive reached Orthez, which looked like a ghost town: it had been designated a border crossing town of the occupied zone. In Pau, the capital of the Pyrénées, where they arrived at dawn the following day, the refugees learned that Lourdes, the shrine town, was the only place for miles around in which it might just be possible to find lodgings in the midst of all the chaos and collapse. They rented another automobile for the remaining thirty kilometers and arrived in Lourdes[614] on June 27, 1940. Though the town had about three hundred hotels, they were at first unable to get a room. Even Lourdes — world-famous for the visions of the Virgin seen there by Bernadette Soubirous, a miller’s daughter — was terribly overcrowded. After a search, Alma found a place for them: the proprietress of the Hôtel Vatican decided to move a young couple out of their tiny room, and, for the first time since their departure from Marseilles a little less than a fortnight before, the Werfels were able to relax for a short while.
They had come to Lourdes chiefly to obtain new safe-conducts[615] for a return to Marseilles, having abandoned their plan to flee to Spain without valid papers. Only in Marseilles, the Werfels thought, would it still be possible for them to get the necessary visas. They sent a number of telegrams to the United States, urgently pleading for help. One of these was addressed to the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom[616], an organization founded by the journalist Prince Hubertus Löwenstein, who had emigrated to America.
The German Reich demanded a more stringent internment policy from the Pétain government: the arrest of all citizens of the Greater German Reich without exception. Every former Austrian, Czech, or Pole could be arrested, taken to French internment camps, and handed over to the Gestapo on demand. In mid-July 1940 numerous foreign newspapers (such as the New York Post, on its front page) reported that, according to BBC broadcasts, the famed author Franz Werfel had been shot and killed while trying to escape the Nazis.
After Vichy became the capital city of the new French government, Werfel’s parents left and moved to Bergerac[617], a sad little provincial town about ninety kilometers east of Bordeaux. They went to a clinic in Bergerac that had been recommended to them, where the mortally ill Rudolf Werfel was put under observation and his wife was able to stay with him. In the meantime, Hanna and her family had managed to get out of France, even though her parents at first did not know where they were. “It is for all of us an unspeakably terrible situation,” Werfel wrote to his mother from Lourdes. “But what I find most terrible of all is that even Papa and you haven’t been spared this.” He said he was considering a return to Sanary if his efforts to obtain exit papers in Marseilles once again proved unsuccessful.
Soon the Werfels were given a larger room in the Hôtel Vatican, and Werfel was able to work again for the first time in months. He completed the final draft of his novella April in October. During the five weeks of his stay in Lourdes he ret
urned time and again to the center of the shrine, the massive and ugly Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and the grotto at Massabielle, where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to the fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous and where, in 1858, the holy spring, whose water had saved the lives of many incurably ill people, had materialized. Millions of pilgrims from all over the world arrived there every year, many of them ailing, seriously ill, or at death’s door. In wheelchairs and on stretchers, they were taken to the grotto, and hundreds of bedridden pilgrims often celebrated mass in the open air. The large expanse on the banks of the Gave was then transformed into a sea of dark blue blankets and spume-white habits of the numerous priests.
Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes
Alma obtained books about the Lourdes miracle, and from these Werfel learned that the Church had not, in fact, accepted Bernadette’s visions at first but, on the contrary, had tried to suppress them by all available means. When the girl insisted that the wondrous lady had appeared to her seventeen times and spoken to her intelligibly every time, the Soubirous family was accused of trying to enrich itself by inventing this story. All threats from clerical and governmental authorities were in vain: the miller’s daughter stuck to her story, and she and her family were simply carted off to jail.
Werfel often drank from the spring, hoping for a miracle — the miracle of escape from the enemy, of finding his way out of this desperate, infernal situation and reaching the free world, the United States.
When the police gave the Werfels new safe-conducts to Marseilles in early August 1940, Werfel visited the grotto one more time to make a kind of vow[618]: if his escape to the United States was successful and he survived this intense emotional and physical trial, he would first of all write a book in honor of the sainted Bernadette Soubirous.
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 26
