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

by Peter Stephan Jungk

  Strange, indeed, this Star of the Unborn, dictated by a powerful imagination.[728] It was, among other things, Werfel’s vision of America’s future, a warning to the United States of the 1940s not to underestimate the risks of overdoing its technology and to put a halt to the displacement of nature by increasing automation, if it did not wish to subject its descendants to an entirely artificial and inhumane world. To this threatening aberration of mankind Werfel opposed the concept of the Jungle, zones of natural simplicity that the Astromentals of the year 101943 regard as “swinish hubbub.” This Jungle resembles the Europe of the early twentieth century — its atmosphere is also a bit reminiscent of Goat Song[729]: Jungle people are still busy herding cattle and tilling the soil, and their Slavic features are those of Albanian peasants. “The Jungle people not only had to plow, sow, and reap, they also had to spin and weave. In short, they had to labor.” Not only their work but also their dwellings distinguish the Jungle folk from the Astromentals: they are still living in houses aboveground. “What a horrible thought,” says one Astromental to his visitor F.W., “that humans live in such boxes, and on the surface, at that.” And another companion blusters, “You can’t call those creatures humans.”

  The inevitable happens, “the calamity [that] proves to be the turning point of Astromental history.” War breaks out between the Astromentals and their enemies, the Jungle people. The combatants deploy their “trans-shadow-disintegrators” everywhere, and suddenly the book resembles a run-of-the-mill dime novel, not unlike the Flash Gordon comic strips of the late thirties and the sci-fi movies (among other B productions) that flooded the American market in the forties. Werfel had seen quite a few of these: in Santa Barbara, where there were few other distractions from work, he often went to the movies in the evening, picking them at random and enjoying even those of little artistic merit.

  To Werfel’s own amazement, work on the first draft of the novel proceeded apace, and he took breaks from writing only on weekends. These were spent in Beverly Hills with his wife. During the week, he talked to Alma three or four times daily[730] on the telephone, reporting on the steady progress of the book.

  By fall, he felt considerably better than he had at the beginning of the year, although he had not “returned to the old me,” as he wrote his sister Mizzi; they were now on more or less friendly terms again. “I now take daily walks of a couple of hundred strides, very slowly, like a ghostly replica of those decrepit old Jews in Prague’s city park... Amusingly enough, one does not get used to dying... It is particularly amusing if, while engaged in that serious activity, one doesn’t really feel grown-up (much less, old) as I do.” He also told Mizzi that the “travel novel” had in the meantime changed “from a little children’s stroll to the conquest of a glacier.” He said that his scientific education was quite insufficient for this work, which was why he had to spend his evenings “learning many things from books written in English, to be able to fantasize with impunity in the daytime.”

  His new novel was a “humorous-cosmic-mystical world poem, in a mix that has not been attempted before”[731]: thus Werfel praised Star of the Unborn to his American publisher, Ben Huebsch, while expressing far more pessimistic views to Friedrich Torberg — who had, to Werfel’s great regret, moved to New York: “I’m working, sluggishly and with a bad conscience, on my great big novel of the future. Sometimes it makes me want to puke. You see, I don’t really know if what I am doing is good.”[732] In addition, the work was becoming far too voluminous and demanding: “Hardly able to breathe again, and back in the soup!” (Werfel himself often referred to his big novels as “Wild West stories”[733] — in his own view, only the poems were entirely serious work.)

  Around the turn of the year 1944-45, Werfel began the third part of this mammoth novel, the episode of the Wintergarden, in which F.W. goes to the interior of the planet Earth and learns about the future people’s burial rites: after very long lives, the Astromentals voluntarily move into a region where they are immersed in “retrogenetic humus” and slowly transformed back to their embryonic state and finally planted in an immeasurably large field, ending up as daisies. In contrast to his comic-strip treatment of a futuristic world war, Werfel’s Wintergarden passage is one of the most brilliant creations of his oeuvre. The certainty of mortal illness permitted him experiments and stylistic and thematic risk taking he would not even have considered only a year earlier.

  Philosophical Library published Werfel’s volume Between Heaven and Earth at the end of 1944. In addition to “Theologumena” (spelled “Theologoumena” in this edition), it contained three of his lectures from the thirties: “Realism and Inwardness” (originally titled “Art and Conscience”), “Can We Live Without Faith in God?” and “Of Man’s True Happiness.” The American public’s reaction to this publication of the famous best-selling author’s ruminations was lukewarm. Jewish reviewers[734] went so far as to brand “Theologumena” as anti-Semitic; Werfel’s opponents found his insistent flirtation with the Catholic Church impossible to explain. On the other hand, there were critics from the ranks of the Dominicans and the Jesuits who attacked him just as vehemently: they considered the section “On Christ and Israel” a total failure.

  Max Brod wrote a letter[735] in response to his friend’s collection of aphorisms and noted that it repeated the same arguments that had once alienated them from each other in Prague. Unlike Werfel, Brod was not at all ready to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the messiah but regarded him as a rabbinical figure, one less important than, say, Hillel, Maimonides, or the Ba’al Shem Tov. Furthermore, he could not comprehend how Werfel was able to urge the people of Israel to join a church whose absolute failure in every respect had been obvious for centuries. Once again Werfel defined his position: he wrote back[736] saying that he regarded the life of Jesus as “the decisive event in Jewish history... Without the effect of Christianity, Judaism would never have survived.”

  Werfel also told Brod about the extremely precarious state of his health: he wrote that his heart had “cracked” and that he now lived in constant fear of “cardiac asthma and emphysema.” Everything had become “extremely tiring,” and he was particularly exhausted by speaking, “more... than by anything else.” It was his fervent wish to once more “walk about in the city park” in Prague with Brod, “arguing as we once did so terribly long ago,” but he did not expect “ever to do that again.” Werfel reported that Star of the Unborn threatened to become a thousand-page opus: “I fear that I have fallen for a monstrous mélange of philosophy and entertainment.” In his salutation, he embraced his friend — ”in the old fidelity of youth” — and uttered this hope: “Perhaps God will permit us to see each other once more in this crazy world... I myself cannot make any plans.”

  In Europe this was the time of the decisive battles to defeat Hitler’s Germany. In January 1945 the Ardennes offensive, the Third Reich’s last great push, had failed, and Allied air raids on Berlin and Dresden killed tens of thousands of civilians. The Americans crossed the Rhine at the beginning of March, and, only a little later, the Red Army advanced toward Berlin and Vienna. By mid-April, Vienna was firmly in Russian hands. Only a few hours before the Soviet troops entered the city, Alma’s stepfather, Carl Moll, committed suicide[737], together with his daughter Maria and her husband, Richard Eberstaller. Those three had believed in Hitler’s “final victory” to the end.

  The Allies liberated the survivors of the concentration camps and revealed the unimaginable extent of systematic mass murder; pictures of infernal cruelty were seen around the world, unveiling the greatest crime in human history. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, more than two million people had been killed in the gas chambers. The survivors looked like breathing skeletons, living corpses, not unlike those saved at Musa Dagh, about whom a British naval officer in Werfel’s novel comments: “It seemed to me that I had not seen human beings, only eyes.”

  The news came fast and furious: Mussolini shot. Hitler commits suicide. Germany surrenders uncond
itionally. Werfel and Alma were already toying with the idea of going to Europe as soon as possible, planning a visit to Rome, which had remained almost unharmed, as their first stop. “The defeat of Germany,” Werfel wrote in a German-language New York daily, “... is a fact that has no like in world history.”[738] Germany’s collapse was unmatched by “the defeat of Carthage, or even the greatest of military catastrophes.” It was an event that would make the Germans conscious of having been “possessed by a spirit from hell.” The only road now open to the German people was one of “inward purification from the most atrocious crimes imaginable.”

  He expressed similar sentiments in a message, “To the German People” (“An das deutsche Volk”)[739], that was cabled to Europe by the U.S. Office of War Information to be printed in German-language newspapers: “Germans, do you know what happened, what you were guilty of and accomplices to, in the years of our Lord 1933 to 1945? Do you know that Germans killed millions and millions of peaceable, harmless, innocent Europeans with methods that would make the Devil himself blush for shame?” These atrocities were committed by a horde of individual criminals; they were supported by the community of the German people. “In this terrible hour of trial,” the Germans could find help only by casting their minds back to their “saints and great masters.” “Only they can relieve you of your shame.”

  His work on Star of the Unborn was overwhelming Werfel. He sent a continuous stream of manuscript pages to Los Angeles, to his new secretary, the former Viennese theater director and scholar William W. Melnitz (Albrecht Joseph had, in the meantime, taken a job as a film editor), and only after the book was almost a thousand typewritten pages long, in the middle of June 1945, did he allow himself a few days of rest. When his friends Ernst and Anuschka Deutsch pleaded with him[740] to slow down a little and not to return to Santa Barbara yet, he replied, “The book must be finished — before I am.”

  He confessed to Friedrich Torberg in a letter of June 18 that he broke into a “sweat of anxiety and embarrassment”[741] when he thought of the “impossible adventure that is this book” — a book that wanted to prove “that things will be much worse in a hundred thousand years than they are now, mainly because things will be so much better.” He was also afraid that “partisans of all camps” — ”Muscovites to Catholics, and all in between” — would, after the publication of the novel, punish him for his basic political attitude and “hang [him] upside down like Mussolini.” He subjected himself to upsets and strains, although he was only kept alive “by the grace of foxglove” — a reference to the drug digitalis, which his doctors continued to administer to him.

  In the summer of 1945, in Santa Barbara, Werfel wrote the final chapters of Star of the Unborn and asked his “sweet, only beloved Alma” to forgive him for his long absence.[742] After three days and nights in the future world of the year 101943, F.W. asks the Great Bishop to let him return home, to the place where he had actually lived before his death in the twentieth century: “at the corner of Bedford Drive and April 1943.” Accompanied by Io-Squirt, whom he had met in the “Lamasery of the Chronosophers” and in whom he had subsequently recognized an incarnation of his own son[743], Martin Johannes, F.W. leaves the Utopia of the Astromentals. “My entire being was light, bright, airy joy, the very memory of which brings tears to my eyes,” says the narrator. And he strides past the mischievous, smiling gaze of his son Io-Squirt, “until I knew nothing more.” Below these last words of the twenty-sixth chapter, Franz Werfel wrote: “17 August 1945. Sta Barbara.”

  “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” were the loving nicknames the American military had given the two uranium bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 8, 1945. The Utopian reality of the Atomic Age had already begun.

  Werfel planned a final, twenty-seventh chapter[744] “in which is concealed an epilogue that is also an apology,” but he decided to return to Beverly Hills first for about a week in order to get a little rest from the strains of recent months. Only a few hours before his departure he wrote to Friedrich Torberg that he had now finished the third and last part of his “travel novel” — ”a ride across Lake Constance, physically and emotionally and spiritually, but I hope I won’t have to share the fate of that rider.”[745]

  It was an unusually hot midsummer afternoon. August Hess drove Werfel to Los Angeles[746], to North Bedford Drive, where the exhausted author immediately took to his bed. A general practitioner from the neighborhood made a house call — his personal physician, Dr. Spinak, had taken a few days’ leave. Werfel complained of feeling weak and unwell, and the doctor gave him an injection for his heart. He also prescribed a morphine injection, to be administered that evening. During the night Werfel suffered a severe attack and was convinced that he was about to die. Early in the morning, however, the danger seemed to have passed, and a group of consulting physicians ordered strict bed rest. Werfel had a fever, for no discernible reason. He was upset and angered by the thought that he would not be able to write the epilogue to Star of the Unborn. There was an owl sitting in a tree just outside his window[747], and it seemed to fix him with its gaze, day and night. Werfel perceived its presence as an omen of death.

  Around this time Werfel received a letter from his friend Johannes Urzidil.[748] The Prague-born writer, who had been living in New York since 1941, congratulated Werfel on the “Theologumena,” saying that they corresponded closely to his own world view: he was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. With great nostalgia prompted by the end of the war, he reminded both Werfel and himself of the Prague of yesteryear, their conversations in the Arco, Edison, and Continental cafés, and their visits to less reputable establishments. He reminisced about a city that would never again be as it had been — a magical construct inhabited by a mix of Austrian nobility, Czechs, Germans, and Jews. Urzidil noted that the nobility had been wiped out by World War I and the Jews by World War II; the Czechs were now busy eliminating the German element so that henceforth they would be in sole possession of the “golden city.” The Prague of their childhood and youth was gone forever.

  One week after his return to Beverly Hills from Santa Barbara, Werfel felt considerably better.[749] He was allowed to get up and spent time at his desk, editing a selection of his favorite poems from the years 1908-45 to be published in German by a small press in California. The conductor Bruno Walter, a neighbor, came by on a Saturday evening to pick up the Werfels for a drive to town. Before they left, Walter sat down at the piano and started playing a melody from Bedřich Smetana’s Bartered Bride. Werfel, who loved that particular Czech opera, rushed from his room and belted out the aria in question, even taking a few exuberant dance steps. Then the friends spent a convivial evening in Werfel’s favorite restaurant, Romanoff’s, exchanging gossip, reminiscences, and anecdotes.

  Last photograph of Franz Werfel, summer 1945

  The following morning Werfel, in a good mood and feeling exceptionally well, discussed the projected trip to Europe with Alma. First of all, he wanted to see his sister Hanna again as soon as possible — she was still living in London — but he also wanted to visit Prague and Vienna, Venice and Rome. The doctors advised strongly against air travel but regarded a sea voyage as relatively safe.

  In response to a commission from the United Nations, which had been established as the successor to the League of Nations, Werfel wrote a piece that Sunday, “A Greeting to Salzburg” (“Gruss an Salzburg”)[750], in which he pondered Austria’s political future. The city of Salzburg was now part of the American zone of occupation, and there were plans to reestablish it as a center for the arts. “Would it not be an idea with great potential,” Werfel suggested, “for the United Nations to depoliticize all of Austria and to guarantee her economic existence in order to establish, on her sacred soil, a paradise of national reconciliation, a perennial fair at which all compete by offering the best gifts they have?”

  In the early evening, while Alma was receiving visitors[751], Werfel was again sitting at h
is desk editing that selection of favorite poems from almost forty years.[752] He was just working on “The Conductor” (“Der Dirigent”)[753], written in 1938, when his heart stopped beating, a few minutes before 6:00 P.M., on August 26, 1945. Franz Werfel slipped from his swivel chair to the floor.

  The grieving widow

  “Even in Vienna, Werfel often told me, ‘I don’t know whether dear Alma is my greatest joy or my greatest disaster,’“ Anna Mahler says. “I think it was in Santa Barbara that he really disengaged himself from her psychologically. Yes — there, in the last years of his life, while Star of the Unborn was created, he freed himself from her oppression. But she probably had a final victory over him after his death: there are persistent rumors that she and her friend, Father Georg Moenius, performed something called a ‘baptism by desire.’ Nothing was more important to her than to see that her Franzl didn’t go to meet God as a Jew.”

  “Alma asked me,” says Albrecht Joseph, “to reserve seats for the most prominent mourners, in the chapel of the Pierce Brothers’ Mortuary; when I went back to pick her up and told her, ‘Come, Alma, it’s time, we have to —,’ she said, ‘I’m not going.’ ‘What do you mean, you’re not going?’ ‘I never go to those things!’ And then, when all the mourners had gathered, the entire republic in exile of German-language literature, we just sat there and waited and waited for the ceremony to begin. Bruno Walter played some Bach, played a Schubert sonata; Lotte Lehmann sang several songs by Schubert twice. Everybody thought we were waiting for Alma. But we were really waiting for Father Georg Moenius; he was going to deliver the eulogy. By the way, it was he who had delivered Karl Kraus’s eulogy in Vienna, eight years earlier. When he finally appeared, there were whispers that he was late because Alma had rewritten his entire speech. Moenius stressed that he was not speaking on this sorrowful day as a Catholic clergyman, but as a friend of Franz Werfel. He went on to claim that in the Astromental world of Star of the Unborn the old enemies Werfel and Kraus would now shake hands and be reconciled. He made a special point of the explicitly Catholic tendency of most of Werfel’s work — and then went on to say, to the amazement of the congregation, that while it was true that the deceased had never joined the Church formally, by being baptized, he had, however, been on the way there when death called him away. The Church, he said, recognized not only the customary baptism by water but also baptism by blood and, further, the so-called baptism by desire, which applied to all those who had desired baptism but had not received it in their lifetime. Moenius’s speech raised eyebrows: why was he discussing the different varieties of baptism in a eulogy for his friend Werfel? Naturally, the rumor that Alma and Moenius had indeed baptized Werfel after his death spread like wildfire, but both of them denied it until their dying day.”