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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  The Song of Bernadette was published on May 11, 1942. Three weeks later it had climbed to fourth place on the best-seller list, and Viking was printing another 100,000 copies.[670] In June, Bernadette overtook John Steinbeck’s war novel Bombs Away and became the best-selling book in the country, retaining that position for several months. It was an almost unimaginable success, a kind of restitution of justice after book burnings, exile from the homeland, and life-endangering flight; a justice, it is true, that had not been evident in the fates of his fellow writers in exile who, almost without exception, lived at subsistence level. Werfel’s present triumph was not only the greatest success story of his life, but The Song of Bernadette became one of the greatest hits in American publishing history.

  The mass-media furor reached its peak in June 1942: major newspapers published long features on the book and the miracle of Lourdes, radio conversations with Werfel were broadcast nationally, and he was snowed under with requests for interviews. In the midst of all the excitement, Ben Huebsch asked him to come to New York, where Werfel was passed from one press conference and party to the next.

  It was a triumphal procession, observed by many of Werfel’s fellow exiles with astonishment. They indulged in — often public — wisecracks about the mawkish legend of a saint and assumed that the author could not really be naive enough to believe in this Catholic fairy tale, accusing him of only pretending to do so. Werfel’s visit to the East Coast was also overshadowed by the flare-up of an old family antagonism[671], one that caused him deep concern and depressed him for a long time. Mizzi Rieser had written a play, Eugenia, which she tried to have produced on Broadway. She expected her brother, with his connections, to get her a theater contract — perhaps to suggest the play to Max Reinhardt. After Werfel had sent Eugenia to the New York Theatre Guild and received a firm rejection, he made no further attempts to place it. Mizzi subsequently wrote a highly accusatory letter to her brother, a kind of farewell message, and Werfel was very hurt by it. He replied that Mizzi had “really ruined” his stay in New York: his sister and his brother-in-law Ferdinand were talking “about my wife and myself in the most malicious manner... In company, Ferdi refers to Alma only as ‘die Mahler,’ which certainly does not degrade her but is a deliberate insult to me. Strangers tell me about your orgies of abuse of Alma. You are fond of claiming that I am one person in my writing and another in my life — thus a liar. And now the last straw! Not even my worst enemies would dare to invent what you are proposing: that I owe my successes to ‘protection and connections.’ And that the Book-of-the-Month Club picked my Bernadette only because we are friends with Harry S[c]herman [founder and president of the Book-of-the-Month Club].” Besides, Mizzi was vastly overestimating her brother’s influence: “As we know, here in America money is everything. In local theater jargon, a play is called a ‘property’ — and rightly so. The money people alone decide if it will be produced or not... We live... in an alien world with its own laws, one not easily mastered. I too would die of starvation here if my reputation didn’t date back twenty years... A hundred recognized European artists, among them a few true geniuses,... are subsisting on alms and handouts.”

  Mizzi Rieser replied that as an artist she felt oppressed by her brother, and as a human being simply ignored. Werfel responded by trying to provide a psychological analysis of his relationship with his sister: even as a child, she had always felt rejected and mistreated. Mizzi’s present “emotional turning away,” however, dated back to about 1936, in his opinion: Alma’s anti-Semitic remarks, which then had “burned... like vermouth” on the “wounds” of the Riesers, had caused this real rift between sister and brother. “And since Ferdi... was Alma’s enemy from the beginning, you soon had a collection of bitter injuries, which you ascribed to Alma. Thus Hitler had thrown his torch between us too... Thus I had married an anti-Semite (an ancient conflict situation in Jewish families).” He did, however, readily admit to Mizzi that Alma’s anti-Semitism had caused him “a hundred bitter hours” in the twenty-five years of their relationship.

  Upon his return to Los Angeles in July 1942, Werfel continued the correspondence with his sister. “Only once have I ever met someone,” he wrote to her, whose attitude had been similar to hers: “Karl Kraus... To climb into each other’s psyches is not courage, not fighting spirit, but one of the intellectual ills of the past epoch. It is one of the roots of Nazism. I would be very happy if we wanted to understand each other instead of trying to ‘see through’ each other.”

  After his sister had accused him of moving too close to a Christian world view over the past years, Werfel wrote a kind of afterword to their disagreement: “To me... Catholicism is nothing but the only spiritual system that still exists in the flat desert of materialism. But the Jews don’t have enough imagination to realize that, once Christianity is finished, they will be as superfluous in the world as the Poles or Bulgarians.”

  At this time, late July 1942, sales of the American edition of The Song of Bernadette had reached 400,000 copies.

  “During the war years, my friends and I practically lived from one news broadcast to the next,” says Albrecht Joseph, steering his rattletrap Dodge through Beverly Glen Canyon and on to the San Fernando Valley to do his weekly shopping at a supermarket. “Because of the nine-hour time difference between California and Europe, the most important news from the battlefronts came in the middle of the night. That was when we could hear what new catastrophes had taken place over there. To while away the time until the midnight news, a group of us would often meet in the evening and play games. The most popular one was charades, where you had to mime an animal or a plant or a quotation from world literature — whatever — and the others had to guess what it was. We all did it, even Thomas Mann, who was otherwise rather reticent. And it really got quite grotesque sometimes — we were all fit to be tied. What wouldn’t I give to have a documentary movie of those days!

  “One evening we were gathered in Bruno Frank’s house. Our host, a gigantic man with broad shoulders and the head of a Roman emperor, was crawling on the floor on all fours, acting a mouse. Suddenly the door opened and Werfel and Alma stood there, having just arrived from France via New York. Years later, Werfel told me that this sight counted among the strangest moments of his life, even after all the tumultuous events of his emigration.

  “A few months later I started working for Werfel. He dictated his novel The Song of Bernadette to me. I went to his little house in the Hollywood hills. Alma’s piano was on the ground floor, but the bedrooms were below[672] that because the house was built on a steep slope. So there was this narrow spiral staircase down into Werfel’s little room with its whitewashed walls, a narrow bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and two chairs. I sat at the typewriter and Werfel dictated from eight school composition books with black covers. He wrote everything in longhand, mostly in that kind of notebook. ‘When I was a boy, they forced me to practice writing in these things,’ he once said to me, ‘and ever since, it’s been my sweet revenge to write whatever I want to write in them!’

  “Right at the beginning of our work on Bernadette he told me, ‘If something doesn’t seem convincing to you, please let me know.’ But there really wasn’t much to complain about. If there is anything wrong with the book, it is perhaps only that it’s written too smoothly, almost like a tourist guide. Sometimes he would look at me as if to say: Do you like that or not? But I rarely had any objections. There was no friction at all in our work together. After work Alma used to call me to her room and say, ‘Don’t act like a Jew. Sit down and have a little glass of schnapps.’ I reminded her repeatedly that wine drinking was part of Jewish ritual and that there had been at least two Jewish alcoholics in Vienna: one of them her friend Egon Friedell; the other, Joseph Roth, who had drunk himself to death. But rational argument never stood a chance with Alma. Her dogma was that Jews were inferior to Aryans, and that was that. When we talked, Alma never mentioned Werfel’s writing. It would have been only natural for her to ask
how the novel was coming along and whether I liked it. Nothing. Not a word. I don’t think that Alma was too interested in what he was doing. She mostly just talked about what a criminal Roosevelt was and how Hitler was really a very intelligent person. There were other émigrés in L.A. with similarly bizarre views of the Germans — Fritz Kortner[673], for instance, or Arnold Schoenberg. This was still before Stalingrad, of course. They were visiting the Werfels when I was there and saying, ‘But of course the Germans will win the war. They have that discipline, and they’re much smarter than the Americans!’

  “Alma loved a fight. One morning, when I came to work on Bernadette, I walked right into one. This one, like so many before, was about the war news from Europe, which had again been particularly depressing. And again, Alma took the view that those German victories were not at all surprising, as they were all supermen, Hitler included. Werfel did not want to let her get away with that nonsense, but Alma didn’t give an inch until Werfel slapped my shoulder and said, ‘Come on, let’s go down and work on Bernadette.’ Then he stopped halfway down the spiral staircase, turned to look at me, and sighed. ‘What do you do with a woman like that?’ It sounds almost good-natured, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in his voice. He felt really desperate. I tried to say something, but he just shook his head and said, ‘One mustn’t forget, she is an old woman.’

  “The Werfels’ living room was a frequent meeting place for Jewish émigrés — Ernst Deutsch and his wife, Torberg, Bruno Frank, Leonhard Frank[674], Kortner, Schoenberg, the Korngolds, and many more. Alma loved to insult or provoke this group. Even though she herself had just escaped from Nazi terror, she stated one afternoon, at one of her tea parties, that one should not condemn on principle everything the Nazis did; some of their actions were, indeed, laudable. When one of the guests countered that the single fact of the concentration camps was enough to drive one insane, she replied, ‘Oh, come on, those horror propaganda stories, they’re all made up by émigrés like you! One of my good friends, a head nurse, assured me that there is excellent medical care in the camps and that the Red Cross looks after the prisoners very conscientiously.’ And suddenly Werfel leaped out of his chair, his face turned purple, his eyes bulged. I had never seen him like that. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that he could get so furious — basically, he was a very gentle and sweet person. But this was like the thundering of an Old Testament prophet! He had lost all control over himself. And all of us knew how weak his heart was, and that an outburst like that could be lethal. Everybody wanted to get out of there as fast as possible, but then again, everybody knew that it was impossible to leave Werfel alone with her. There was talk about this and that. Small talk. And Alma seemed quite unmoved. She was probably just thinking that her childish husband had once again misbehaved like a naughty child.”

  Dance of Death

  About eighty miles north of Los Angeles on the Pacific coast, surrounded by citrus groves, lies Santa Barbara, possibly the most beautiful town in California. Cyrill Fischer[675], a Catholic clergyman whom Werfel had known in Vienna and whom he held in great esteem, had retired to the Old Mission[676] there, a large monastery of the Franciscan order, in the beginning of the 1940s. Werfel visited Father Cyrill frequently and came to regard Santa Barbara as an ideal refuge for undisturbed work, far from the big city, as Breitenstein and Santa Margherita had been. At the end of June 1942 he moved into a bungalow by the ocean, part of the luxurious Biltmore Hotel.

  He told his sister Hanna that he was now living “in a charming Spanish-style hotel.”[677] “Paradise — balmy, cool — orgies of flowers — swimming pool with stunningly beautiful girls at whom I stare with one eye while the other peruses Scheeben’s ‘Secret of Predestination.’“[678]

  He wrote a new play in ten days, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, (Jacobowsky und der Oberst), subtitled “The Comedy of a Tragedy” (“Komödie einer Tragödie”).[679] He combined experiences of his own flight from Marseilles to Marseilles with the rich collection of anecdotes of the Stuttgart banker S. L. Jacobowicz, his next-door neighbor in Lourdes. These were the stories he had “performed” those past months, over and over, the way an actor presents his favorite part. He had done so the previous fall at a dinner party given by Max Reinhardt, and Reinhardt’s son Gottfried[680] had suggested that Werfel turn the stories into a play: he sensed that this might be the break for which his father had been waiting for years — to have a hit on Broadway. At first Werfel had rejected Gottfried Reinhardt’s idea, saying that the subject was not right for a work bearing his name, and Alma Mahler also voiced her vehement opposition to such a play. Gottfried Reinhardt then asked Werfel for permission to adapt his stories for the stage, promising his friend a fifty-percent share in the proceeds and persuading the successful American playwright S. N. Behrman to be his coauthor. After a few weeks, when the two had completed the first act of their play, they received a letter from Werfel in which he told them that he had changed his mind and decided to write the play himself after all. Reinhardt and Behrman reacted angrily and told Werfel that they would take him to court if he did not compensate them for their loss.

  Working on the play in Santa Barbara, Werfel sent completed scenes to Albrecht Joseph[681] in Los Angeles to be typed, and at the end of August 1942 he sent the finished manuscript to the New York Theatre Guild. He had decided that, with this new play, he would achieve a breakthrough on the American stage similar to the one he had managed with The Song of Bernadette in the American book market. Viking Press had now sold almost half a million copies of the novel, and demand for it was still rising. “This development,... which no one really anticipated,” he wrote to sister Hanna, “is another miracle of Lourdes, and I accept it with humility and gladness.” He had realized, he told Hanna, that he would have to write “commercially viable things for the Americans” in order to survive in the United States.

  In the meantime, The Song of Bernadette had been sold to 20th Century-Fox. Werfel’s agent, George Marton[682], a native of Budapest, had conducted protracted negotiations and secured the uncommonly large sum of $125,000 for the movie rights. Werfel’s simple imagery and his tendency to treat his subjects in a somewhat florid style — in Bernadette it becomes almost sentimental — were well suited to the demands of the dream factory. Ever since Verdi, The Pascarella Family, and Juarez and Maximilian, his work had seemed compatible with Hollywood’s needs. If a massive Turkish intervention had not finally prevented MGM from realizing its projected movie version of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, that, too, would surely have broken box-office records.

  The Jacobowsky play was finished. Werfel turned to a new project, undoubtedly with an eye to its commercial potential: he wanted to write “a big Jewish novel.”[683] “Mostly we hear about the fate of the émigrés,” he wrote to Hanna, “but I want to describe one who stayed at home. An honest silk manufacturer who packs his family off to America but thinks that he still has time... And so he proceeds to his doom, step by step, down to the Yellow Star and Poland. The strange apotheosis and purification of the man, in the midst of the massacres in Poland, is the climax of the book. An ordinary Jew, a nothing and a nobody, with a shop on Rothenturmstrasse or Obstmarkt” (both shopping areas in Vienna).

  For decades Werfel had preached, in always new variations, the inseparability of Jewish and Christian religious thought. After his sensational success with The Song of Bernadette, however, he was no longer identified with the Jewish cause. In order to tone down his purely Catholic image a little, he had finally decided to write Jacobowsky and the Colonel, and a similar motivation probably led him to plan a Jewish novel. Its working title was The One Who Stayed (Der Zurückgebliebene). He also considered it a kind of sequel to Musa Dagh — ten years after Werfel had called the atrocities committed by the Young Turk nationalists the most barbarous cruelty in human history, he realized that the German race madness surpassed the murders instigated by Enver Pasha and his cohorts by far. It is also possible that he conceived The One Who Stayed as a
defense against his wife’s attitude: Alma was still dismissing the news of the German slaughter of the Jews as “atrocity propaganda.”

  How much Americans already regarded Franz Werfel as a Catholic author was evident from the fact that Church authorities kept urging him to convert: there were rumors that he had converted long ago, and in the fall of 1942 Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans wrote to ask him whether he had become a Catholic or not. In his reply to Rummel, Werfel said that while he regarded Catholicism as the “purest force sent by God to this earth... to combat the evils of materialism and atheism,”[684] the current extremely cruel persecution of the Jews prevented him from “escaping the flock of the persecuted” at this time. Besides, as long as there were anti-Semitic Christians, the baptized Jew would in any case remain “a figure who is not entirely welcome and also somewhat intrusive.” Nevertheless, Werfel assured the archbishop, he would “not stop writing books such as The Song of Bernadette” and would take every opportunity “to praise the glory of the supernatural.”

  Six years earlier, in his notebook for Hearken Unto the Voice, he had remarked, “Even for a Jew who regards Jesus Christ as the true, historically realized messiah, baptism and conversion are not satisfactory... The Jew cannot be ‘cured’ by baptism and faith... No matter how much of a believer in Christ [a Jew] may be as an individual, he is as tragically barred from being a Christian as he is from being a German or a Russian.”[685]

  On the other hand, in a letter Werfel wrote (at roughly the same time as the letter to Archbishop Rummel) to Rudolf Kommer, the confidant and assistant of Max Reinhardt, he said, “I bow my head before your dear grandfather Simon Kornblüh, whose benevolent eyes become piercing at the sight of your ham sandwiches and my Bernadette.”[686] A short time before, Kommer had presented Werfel with an “announcement of victory” that had relieved the latter of “a shade” of his own “Jewish sense of guilt” — Kommer told him about promising efforts by American Zionists (led by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion) to bring about a Jewish “commonwealth” in Palestine. According to Werfel himself, the afternoon he received the news was “one of the proudest” of his life. Thirty years after his impassioned debates with Max Brod about the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine, three decades after his vehement rejection of a new Jewish land in the Israel of the Bible, the exiled, persecuted, and burned poet had made his peace with Zionism.