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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  In Marseilles the Werfels stayed at the Hôtel Louvre & Paix on the Canebière[619], the wide main street leading from the railroad station to the old port. The city was like a witches’ cauldron: thousands of emigrants congregated here to besiege the consulates. Any country at all, as long as it could be counted among those of the free world — be it China or Argentina, Brazil or India — was now a desirable land of exile.

  Marseilles was not yet part of occupied France, but even here there were numerous Gestapo agents and German officers. Some of them even stayed in the Hôtel Louvre & Paix. The Werfels had registered under a false name after making friends with the desk clerk, Monsieur Martin, who could be relied on to warn them of any immediate danger.

  The personal intervention[620] of Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, led to a sudden improvement of the Werfels’ situation, only a few days after their arrival in Marseilles: they received transit visas for Spain and Portugal as well as visitors’ visas for the United States. Now all they needed were French exit visas, and Werfel addressed an urgent appeal to the influential writer Louis Gillet, a member of the Académie Française: “Nous sommes dans une situation terrible — nous sommes quasi prisonniers... Si vous avez une possibilité: Aidez-nous!”[621]

  Werfel told his parents that the chances of salvation had improved considerably. “Now only the visa de sortie [exit visa] is a problem.” However, he found it “incredibly hard to leave the country knowing that you are still here.” Then he qualified his optimism: “No one knows if it will be possible to get out... It’s all made worse by the perpetual rumors that keep one awake at night. We all feel godforsaken.” At the beginning of August the Czech Embassy had informed Werfel that his name was at the top of a blacklist of intellectuals and artists that France was absolutely obliged to hand over to the Germans.

  In the middle of August, a decisive and even miraculous turn of events brought to Marseilles a young American Quaker[622] who immediately came to visit the Werfels in their cozy room at the Hôtel Louvre & Paix: Varian Fry, a courageous idealist, had been sent to France on a secret mission by a group of European immigrants and independent American citizens, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among them. The Emergency Rescue Committee’s goal was to save endangered scientists, artists, and intellectuals from the clutches of the Vichy police and the Gestapo, and bring them to the United States.

  “You must save us!” Werfel implored the unknown rescuer at their first meeting, and Alma celebrated Fry’s arrival by opening a bottle of champagne. That evening Fry promised to get the Werfels out of the country illegally, without exit papers: it was his plan to smuggle them and Heinrich Mann, his wife Nelly, and nephew Golo, as well as the Feuchtwangers, to North Africa in a small boat. A short while earlier, Lion Feuchtwanger had been freed[623] from the San Nicola camp near Nȋmes by the American consul Harry Bingham. He was now in Marseilles. This successful rescue had been initiated by Feuchtwanger’s wife, Marta.

  “So now we’re forced to make decisions,” Werfel wrote to his mother.[624] “You may not hear anything about us for a while. But don’t worry!” The small vessel chartered by Varian Fry was being stocked with provisions in the port of Marseilles when members of an Italian armistice commission became suspicious and confiscated the boat, causing the plan to be aborted.[625] Now Fry decided to take his group on a train from Cerbère across the Spanish border; this was a risky venture, but his desperate protégés agreed to it without hesitation.

  Franz Werfel’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated in a large restaurant[626] at the port, in nervous anticipation of things to come. The guest of honor looked years older, marked by the anxieties and strains of exile and the heart attack of the summer of 1938, from which he had never really fully recovered.

  The next day[627], the eve of their departure from Marseilles, Werfel burned the manuscripts of his anti-Nazi essays of the past years in the fireplace of their hotel room. In the early hours of September 12, 1940, the refugee group met Varian Fry at the St. Charles railway station. The Feuchtwangers remained in Marseilles for the time being because it was rumored that Spanish customs officials were no longer allowing stateless persons across the border. Feuchtwanger, no longer a German citizen, did not want to endanger his friends by his presence, and Fry promised to escort him and his wife to Spain and Portugal a little later.

  The Werfels now had twelve pieces of luggage: the suitcases that had been lost on the trip to Bordeaux — containing, among other things, the uncompleted Cella, a few scores by Gustav Mahler, and the score of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony — had reappeared intact in the meantime. The refugee group, consisting of the Werfels and Heinrich, Nelly, and Golo Mann, accompanied by Fry and his colleague, Dick Ball, now traveled via Narbonne and Perpignan to Cerbère, where they arrived late that evening. French border officials refused to let them go on to Spain without the proper exit visas. Although some customs officials were known to have let refugees cross the border on occasion without valid documents, luck was against them that night of September 12-13, 1940.

  Ball had to leave the refugees’ passports with a border official. He tried to persuade the man to let his five protégés through, and showed up again the next morning. The official assured him that if he was alone in the office in the afternoon when the train left for Port Bou, he would let the group pass; on that very day, however, a particularly conscientious superior would also be on duty and would certainly double-check each one of his decisions. Hence, he urgently advised Ball to drop this plan and send the two women and three men across the border mountains on foot. Better today than tomorrow, the official said: the next day might bring new regulations issued by the Vichy regime, obliging customs officials to detain every refugee.

  Fry and Ball were afraid that both Werfel and the seventy-year-old Heinrich Mann might not be up to the strenuous hike; however, they had no choice but to attempt it. The Werfels left all their luggage with Fry, who, as an American citizen, would have no difficulty boarding the train to Port Bou. They would carry only the essentials; Alma concealed her jewelry and their remaining cash in her clothing.

  In the blazing noonday sun, they set out on their perilous march, escorted by Dick Ball. They were following a steep goat path. Driven by terror of falling into the hands of French gardes mobiles and the Gestapo, Franz Werfel, drenched in sweat, climbed from one ledge to the next, stumbled through thornbushes, and dragged himself onward.

  This difficult ascent must have given him a sense of déjà vu, of the fulfillment of a vision, a prophecy: in 1917, while he was still serving on the East Galician front, he had written the play fragment Stockleinen, whose main character was a dictator in a brown uniform. After he has usurped power and installed his brutal regime, many of his opponents try to flee the country. In the second act of the play, Martin, a young laborer, describes the dismal failure of his own attempt to escape: “There were many thousands who wanted to cross the border, the best of the people among them... One stop before the customs station, everybody got off, and the people ran forward on all sides as if to cheat death of each second! No exodus ever compared with this for terror and hope of salvation. As soon as the border posts came into view, an exhausted and terrifying shout of joy burst from the throats of the panting, running band. A mad wave threw itself with closed eyes against the fence. Then it broke. Everyone had to turn back. The roads on the other side had been chained off, the rails had been torn up, a ring of men blocked the way into the valley and the hills. No one would be able to cross. They were the stricken people in the desert, as they reeled back, aged, sere, in rags, covered with dust. The directorate had canceled all trains, by way of revenge. Our friends had disappeared... No one will survive this without being swallowed up.”

  In about two hours, the Werfels reached the top of Mount Rumpissa, an altitude of seven hundred meters. They had left the rest of the group far behind, and Alma suggested that they go on alone; it would be better in any case to cross the border as a couple and not as part
of a group of five or six. They could see a small Spanish customs station immediately below them. When the exhausted Werfels arrived there, the officials thought they were hikers unfamiliar with the terrain and escorted them part of the way, leading them — and the Werfels did not realize this — back toward the French border. To their horror, some of the feared French gardes mobiles appeared shortly thereafter but let them go on their way, indeed warning them to make a right turn, not a left, at a fork in the path on top of the mountain, in order to reach the right border post.

  Just before the Spanish border they met up again with Heinrich, Nelly, and Golo Mann. In front of the customs officials they all acted as if they knew each other only casually. Alma gave the border policemen generous tips and cigarettes. During the Spanish Civil War, these Catalan gendarmes had fought on the Loyalist side against Franco, and they were sympathetic to antifascists everywhere (among whose number, in these circumstances, Frau Mahler was only too happy to be counted). They let the refugees cross the border without further difficulties.

  When they finally reached the small town of Port Bou, after a strenuous descent, in a state of absolute mental and physical exhaustion, they had to submit to yet another grilling, hand over their travel documents yet again, and wait anxiously in a shabby customs station until their passports were returned. After this trial — the last for now — they had achieved what still seemed impossible the previous day: they had escaped from hell. For the first time in three months, since Hitler’s invasion of France, Franz Werfel felt free again. He had been saved.[628]

  THOMAS MANN — that is all it says on the small brass plate by the entrance to a villa in Kilchberg, near Zurich. This is where the great novelist lived until his death in August 1955. His son, the writer, historian, and critic Golo Mann, now resides in the house on Alte Landstrasse. I ring the doorbell several times, but nobody answers. After ambling aimlessly through the alleys of Kilchberg, I return once more and attack the bell.

  “I have one or two visitors every day, announced and unannounced,” says Golo Mann, leading me into a large, very light living room with a view of the Lake of Zurich, “and they all ask me questions about Thomas Mann, about Katia, Heinrich, Erika, Elisabeth, Klaus Mann...”

  Professor Mann fills his pipe, whispers soothing words to his large black Labrador, and gently lowers himself into memory: “In her autobiography Alma really gave a pretty accurate account of our mad crossing of the Pyrénées. However, she does make one unfounded claim: that Nelly Mann insisted in Cerbère that we shouldn’t undertake the ascent on Friday the thirteenth, as this was definitely an unlucky day. It was of course Franz Werfel who cried out in despair, ‘No! Let us wait until tomorrow! Let’s not go on the thirteenth!’ But Alma managed to talk him out of that superstition. The ascent itself was pretty strenuous — for Heinrich Mann and Werfel in particular. Alma managed surprisingly well.[629]

  “When the worst was over and we were in Spain, that’s when I really made friends with Franz Werfel. We traveled first from Port Bou to Barcelona, then took the night train to Madrid. We were standing there in the corridor of the train, watching the countryside go by in the bright moonlight. We talked about poetry in general and about his poems in particular. I mentioned his ‘Song of Parents’ [‘Elternlied’] and he asked me, ‘You know it?’ I even had it memorized, because I really liked his poetry very much. He got excited, opened the door to his compartment, and shouted, ‘Alma! It’s amazing! Golo knows all my poems by heart!’

  “In Madrid we took lodgings in a modest hotel. We were given special permission to stay five days. One night we complained to the concierge about all the cumbersome bureaucracy and especially the fact that we had to have our permits validated every day. He started shouting at us, ‘Ne vous plaignez pas! Don’t complain! Especially not you, you’re all Reds!’ And when Alma went to the office of the state-owned Spanish airline for tickets to Lisbon, she saw pictures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco on the wall and was so horrified she screamed out loud.

  “From Madrid we went on to Lisbon, where we had to wait fourteen days for the departure of our Greek steamship, Nea Hellas. Once Werfel and I visited a large and very handsome exhibition in Lisbon about the ship in which Vasco da Gama had gone on his voyages. The Portuguese were really proud of that show. It got late; we went to the railway station to take the train back to Estoril and our hotel. We missed it, went into a tavern, had a drink or two, and missed the second train, the one that left at midnight. Werfel was mortified: he was afraid that Alma would make a scene, the way she used to. And he seemed so visibly overstressed in his excitement that it seems to me he was suffering from an acute heart condition even then.

  “Our ship was terribly overcrowded, the crossing to New York quite unpleasant. I spent my time socializing with the Manns and the Werfels, back and forth. From New York, the Werfels soon went on to Los Angeles, to ‘German California.‘ Later, in the spring of 1941, my father and I also moved there. T.M. really liked Werfel a great deal: he found him very amusing and loved to listen to him singing Verdi arias. My father didn’t think much of Werfel’s work — he liked the man much better than the author. About The Song of Bernadette, which Werfel wrote shortly after his arrival in America, T.M. once said, ‘A well-made bad book.’ But his kindness, sweetness, his utterly good nature and capacity for friendship — those were the qualities my father and I valued greatly. At first T.M. was in a financially precarious position in the States, but when his Joseph novel became a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, he received an immediate payment of twenty thousand dollars. And how did Werfel react? He was flushed with joy! There wasn’t a trace of envy in the man! He himself went from one success to the next. You mustn’t forget that: Werfel was always successful. Occasionally he would jokingly call himself a ‘novel manufacturer.’ Right after Bernadette he wanted to write a big novel about the Mormons — a life of their founder, Joseph Smith — but Alma talked him out of that one: ‘Franzl,’ she said, ‘don’t you become a village crucifix carver!’ He abandoned the idea. From the very beginning, Alma would provide him with material, but she would also censor subjects he came up with.

  “As for his essays, one could well be of two minds about those; they probably aren’t as substantial as his narrative works. They’re rather uneven in their subject matter as well. Werfel once said to me, ‘Since I’ve been living in America, I find it so hard to pick a subject.’ A very characteristic statement from him. Just think, for instance, of T.M. in regard to that: when and where would my father ever have had trouble ‘picking a subject’?! He knew, even as a young man, what he would have to write in his lifetime, come what may. Just think about the Joseph trilogy: it took him almost twenty years to write.” After a protracted silence, Golo Mann adds, “I really liked Werfel very much — and I owe him a great deal. He once said to me, ‘You’re a writer, right? You should write a lot more.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “I’m an American”

  “Now, having almost reached the Statue of Liberty, I embrace and fervently kiss you,” Franz Werfel wrote in mid-October 1940, still on board the steamer Nea Hellas.[630] The letter was addressed to his parents, who had not had any news from him since the end of August. “Now America lies before us, an entirely unknown continent. I hope that it will be favorably disposed toward me. Indications are that I’ll be received with friendship.” His parents’ situation caused him great anxiety. “Do you have enough to eat? Are you able to... provide Papa with the diet he needs?” He and his sister Mizzi would try everything in their power to rescue their parents soon. Marianne Rieser was now living in New York; Hanna and her family had ended up in London. “Tomorrow, Mizzerl and I will discuss all that needs to be done.”

  On the morning of October 13[631], exactly one month after the Werfels crossed the Pyrénées, the Nea Hellas docked at the Fourth Street pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. Numerous writers, journalists, and intellectuals, whose escape stories often surpassed the Werfels’ in terms of hardsh
ip, were among those saved; relatives, friends, and reporters now greeted them on the pier. Marianne Rieser and her husband, and Brigitte and Gottfried Bermann Fischer, who also had emigrated to America a short time before, were waiting for the Werfels; Thomas Mann had come to meet his son and his brother. An improvised press conference was held on the pier. Heinrich Mann, Alfred Polgar, and Franz Werfel were asked about the details of their escape, but Werfel did not oblige: he explained to the disappointed journalists that details of his escape might endanger those still trapped in France waiting to be saved.[632] When he was asked about his plans for the near future, he replied, “To have a little peace.”

  In their small suite at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, with a view over the park, the Werfels surrounded themselves, from the very beginning of their stay in New York, with admirers, acquaintances, and friends, mostly émigrés like themselves. They saw the Feuchtwangers and Zuckmayers again, this autumn of 1940[633], and got together with Anton Kuh and Hermann Broch, Franz Blei, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Otto von Hapsburg, and Alfred Döblin. On each one of these occasions Werfel would tell the story of his escape, calling it “the flight from Marseilles to Marseilles.” He described the weeks of mortal fear as an absurd but not at all comical farce, embroidering certain details with care, making both himself and his audience laugh until they cried. He told them about a night spent in a vacant brothel in Bordeaux and about meeting with a banker from Stuttgart, Stefan Jacobowicz[634], a fellow guest at the Hôtel Vatican in Lourdes: this man had told them his own escape story. In the company of another fugitive, an anti-Semitic Polish officer, this Jacobowicz had crossed France in a rattletrap automobile although neither one of them really knew how to drive, with many narrow escapes from advancing German troops.