Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood
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[164] DlW, pp. 547ff.
[165] FW, “Das Bozener Buch,” EzW, vol. 2, pp. 389ff.
[166] FW, “Das Bozener Buch,” EzW, vol. 2, pp. 389f.
[167] Unpublished letter from FW to G. H. Meyer, June 16, 1915: “I was quite ill in Bozen but was happy to return and feel much better now, even though I’m still unable to walk and limp along supported by canes” (KW Archive). In a later letter to Meyer (unpublished): “My state of health is still pretty much below zero. Supported by two canes, I limp through the flag-bedecked streets of Prague. Everybody wants to know whether the damage was done by infantry or artillery fire, and then listens with increasing disdain to my civilianly confessions” (KW Archive).
[168] See BeV, pp. xixf.
[169] Unpublished letter from FW to Meyer, July 1915; KW Archive.
[170] See SL, pp. 56ff.
[171] A matter of gossip may have been an additional cause for the estrangement between Brod and Werfel. In ADK notes, Frau Mahler-Werfel mentions that Otto Pick tried to pit Werfel and Brod against each other by making them jealous.
[172] See SL, p. 53; the book was published in installments in Die weissen Blätter, January-June 1915, and in book form in 1916.
[173] See FW, “Cabrinowitsch,” EzW, vol. 1, pp. 21ff.
[174] See Foltin, p. 34. I owe all my information on FW’s relationship with Gertrud Spirk to the lovers’ correspondence, several hundred letters preserved in DL. Dr. Kafka (FK letters) provided Gertrud Spirk’s date and place of birth: February 8, 1885, in Karlin, Karolinenthal. In 1930, she acquired a house at Palackého 147/75 in Prague and ran a fashion shop on the ground floor of that building. Gertrud Zach (née Spirk), a niece of Gertrud Spirk’s, told me that her aunt’s shop had been well known beyond the boundaries of Prague. Frau Zach reports the date of Gertrud Spirk’s death as August 1967; she died in Vienna, and her grave is in Waidhofen an der Thaya in Lower Austria.
[175] As reported by Gertrud Zach.
[176] Unpublished letter from Willy Haas to Alma Mahler-Werfel and FW, 1943; M-W Coll.
[177] The Trojan Women, directed by Victor Barnowsky, premiered on April 22, 1916.
[178] Kurt Wolff to FW, May 2, 1916, in BeV, pp. 109f.
[179] FW to Kurt Wolff, early May 1916, in BeV, pp. 111f.
[180] DlW, pp. 194f.; See also FW’s letter to Gertrud Spirk, postmarked September 6, 1916: “Back in Elb[e] Kost[elec] I wrote a poem and dedicated it to you. It’s called ‘The Blessed Elizabeth’ and I think it begins, ‘How she walks, the sister of / the fifth hour and the meadowlarks!’“ (Jungk, Das Franz Werfel Buch, p. 386).
[181] DD, vol. 2, pp. 396ff.
[182] See FW, Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit, pp. 224ff.
[183] At the time, Hodóv had 1,200 inhabitants, Jezierna 4,700; both townships belonged to the judicial district of Zboróv, East Galicia (Vollständiges Verzeichnis der Ortschaften der im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder, 1880).
[184] These, as well as most other details of FW’s service at the front, I owe to the unpublished FW/Spirk letters.
[185] Ibid.; See also FW, Barbara, e.g., pp. 262ff.
[186] In Hodóv he wrote, among other things, the short prose pieces “Bauernstuben,” “Die andere Seite,” and “Geschichte von einem Hundefreund,” a text directed against Karl Kraus (EzW, vol. 1, pp. 19f., 27f., 29ff.); “Der Berg des Beginns: Festkantate mit Szene und Tanz” (DD, vol. 2, p. 412); and the polemical pieces “Brief an einen Staatsmann,” “Substantiv und Verbum,” and “Brief an Georg Davidsohn” (ZOU, pp. 210ff., 216ff., 577ff.).
[187] ZOU, pp. 476ff.
[188] ZOU, pp. 560ff.
[189] FW/Spirk.
[190] Die Fackel, nos. 443-44, pp. 26-27. See also FW’s poem against Karl Kraus, “Ein Denker,” DlW, pp. 292ff.
[191] See FW, “Dorten,” ZOU, pp. 559f.
[192] FW/Spirk. See also Barbara, p. 272: “Yet he recognized that his post, well behind the front line, was a gift of God and Captain Prechtl. Then the apparatus on the small table crowed again and fell into a long susurrus, like an insect that defends itself with a violent beating of wings against an enemy... At any hour, day or night, whether Ferdinand was asleep or awake, the jealously humming creature called him to itself.”
[193] See FW to Martin Buber, January 31, 1917, in Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, op. cit., pp. 468f. In this connection, see also Max Brod to Buber, February 13, 1917: “First of all, you must not think that I have been trying or will ever try to force some kind of conversion on my friend Werfel. That would, of course, be folly. Since he has been at the front, I have tried to influence him by sending him suitable reading material... I even avoided him when he was in Prague, because these debates always cause great strain and turmoil in me. He did, however, come to me and ask me to continue our discussion. Then, of course, I no longer avoided him, because I love Werfel dearly, and his mistakes, mostly due to a lopsided reading of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Strindberg, and other Christian authors, cause me pain. Quite apart from that, I do, of course, learn an incredible amount from him... Thus, this is the state of the Werfel case: Werfel is not the sensitive, mimosalike type, like, for instance, my friend Franz Kafka (with whom I don’t argue while being pleased to see how he is slowly and imperceptibly becoming more Jewish). Werfel is basically very robust and sensible. His entire life consists of argument. He argues incessantly, with everyone he meets” (ibid., pp. 472f.).
[194] Unpublished letter from FW to Buber, February 15, 1917; Martin Buber Archive, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem.
[195] FW in an unpublished letter to Alma Mahler: “Alma, I’m living here as I used to in the army years ago, where I would cut out every day I had survived from a calendar I had manufactured myself” (UCLA).
[196] Die Fackel, nos. 445-53, pp. 133-47.
[197] ZOU, pp. 581ff.
[198] See Foltin, p. 35.
[199] Born August 15, 1886, in Prague; died August 19, 1949, in Obergrünburg, Austria (FK letters).
[200] FW/Spirk.
[201] The wedding took place on March 21, 1917, in Prague (FK letters).
[202] ADK notes. See also SU, pp. 51f., where FW participates in the Astromental wedding and is dressed the way he was for Hanna’s wedding.
[203] This remarkable but until now largely ignored dramatic fragment can be found in DD, vol. 2, pp. 426ff.
[204] Vienna Kriegsarchiv, Stiftsgasse 2, A-1070 Vienna.
[205] “Franz Werfel is an author with a strong reputation who has readers first of all in Germany and Switzerland but also in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, and is therefore particularly suited for propaganda purposes. The lecture tour Werfel is to undertake is connected with the performance of his dramatic works The Trojan Women and The Visit from Elysium in Swiss theaters. The importance of Werfel is evidenced by the fact that, due to an initiative of the German Foreign Office, a German-Reich theater group is ready to perform the aforementioned works in Switzerland and Scandinavia. As can be seen from the enclosed superarbitration documents, Franz Werfel was repeatedly granted leave during the war by means of superarbitration, spent many months in the hospital, and was, during his time of active service, used solely as a telephone operator in the office of Regimental Command. Thus, since Franz Werfel’s health does not permit him to serve as well in other military capacities as in his present assignment,... I request that... he be presently excused from reserve officers’ school and permanently appointed to the Military Press Bureau. I take this opportunity to point out that there has been an increasing number of cases in recent times in which people who are eminently suited for intellectual propaganda service in the MPB have been removed from it, despite their inability to perform front-line service, and assigned duties that could just as well be undertaken by less intelligent persons” (Kriegsarchiv, Vienna).
[206] See Foltin, Franz Werfel, p. 35; Peter Altenberg and FW were also living in adjoining rooms in the Graben Hotel on Dorotheergasse.
[208] FW/Spirk; the information on FW and Gertrud Spirk’s relationship, and the details of FW’s life in Vienna, were gleaned from this unpublished correspondence.
[209] See FW, “Vorbemerkung zu Neue Bilderbogen und Soldatenlieder” ZOU, pp. 484ff.
[210] Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948; see the roman à clef character Ronald Weiss in FW’s Barbara); Otto Gross (1877-1920); Franz Blei (1871-1942), author, translator, and critic; Otfried Krzyzanowski (1891-1918).
[211] I owe the description of the Café Central to Werner J. Schweiger of Vienna, who was kind enough to provide me with a letter addressed to him by the author and screenwriter George Fröschel of Hollywood.
[212] MD conversations.
[213] FW was in Dresden for the premiere (on September 20, 1917) of The Trojan Women and met Gustav Landauer and Walter Hasenclever there. At about the same time, FW staged his one-act play, The Visit from Elysium at the new Wiener Bühne theater as part of a Werfel matinée. The three actors performed so amateurishly that FW, who shared a box with friends in the sold-out house, had to laugh out loud (FW/Spirk).
[214] See ML, pp. 85f., and Alma Mahler-Werfel’s unpublished diary, M-W Coll.
[215] DlW, pp. 160f.
[216] From Alma Mahler-Werfel’s unpublished diary, M-W Coll.
[217] Ibid.
[218] Alma Mahler was not alone in reacting negatively to FW’s political views. A similar attitude can be seen in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1917 diary. FW visited Arthur Schnitzler for the first time on August 15, 1917, probably in the company of Victor Barnowsky, a man of the theater. During dinner FW made disparaging remarks about Germany; according to Schnitzler, these were not well received, and FW became “muddled” and “started talking nonsense that none of us would accept. He struck me a little as an honest provincial who unsuspectingly sits down at a card table and suddenly notices to his dismay that he has joined a game of masters. When he got going on mysticism. I said, ‘I draw the line at mysticism. As an author, I am a rationalist — and in political matters as well.’ Despite all of that, he didn’t strike me as a bad egg, and one could sense that he didn’t ‘really’ mean what he said” (Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch 1917-1919 [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985], p. 72). I owe the reference to Dr. P. M. Braunwarth of Vienna.
[219] FW/Spirk.
[220] See ML. In Alma Mahler-Werfel’s unpublished diary (M-W Coll.) she also says about her meeting with FW: “How wonderful it is to be associated only with MINDS, how happy it makes me, who am touched by them. I thank my god on MY KNEES. ONLY PRESERVE THAT FOR ME, ONLY THAT!” (The claim made by Karen Monson in her biography Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983] that Alma did not write these diaries herself is untenable.)
[221] FW/Spirk.
[222] MD conversations.
[223] On Alma Mahler-Werfel’s relationship with Walter Gropius, see ML; Karen Monson, Alma Mahler, op. cit.; and Reginald B. Isaacs, Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk (Berlin: Gehr, Mann, 1983).
[224] DlW, pp. 153f.
[225] FW/Mahler, January 18, 1918.
[226] Ibid.
[227] See FW, “Report on my LECTURE TOUR IN SWITZERLAND” (Kriegsarchiv, Vienna): “In one week, every newspaper in Zurich published articles of three, four, even six columns about me.”
[228] Ibid.
[229] FW, “Rede an die Arbeiter von Davos,” ZOU, pp. 531ff.
[230] FW, “Report on my LECTURE TOUR IN SWITZERLAND” (Kriegsarchiv, Vienna): “On March 20 the imperial military attaché in Zurich informed me of the Military Press Bureau’s decision to discontinue my activities there and have me return to Vienna. As a consequence, I had to cancel four important readings scheduled for the last days of my stay, to wit, two evenings in Winterthur, one in Chur, and one in the Great Concert Hall (Tonhalle) in Zurich; the last-mentioned... was intended as an original and extraordinary experiment in which poetry of a modern bent was to be presented to an audience of a few thousand people... In Vienna, I was immediately told by many sources about rumors according to which my lectures in Switzerland had displeased the Foreign Office, and I was even asked whether it was true that I had, as it were, been a fiasco. This notion... hurt and bothered me a great deal... It is strange, indeed: important German papers... reported on my tour in Switzerland with highly laudatory articles, while there was not a single notice in any Austrian paper... Be that as it may, and whatever I may be accused of, a pure consciousness of having worked for the glory of my fatherland allows me to deal with all attacks with equanimity.”
[231] During these last months of World War I, FW lived at the Graben Hotel, the Hotel Bristol, and the Grand Hotel at Kärntnerring 9, in the immediate vicinity of the Bristol.
[232] FW/Spirk, and author’s conversations with Gina Kranz Kaus (1894-1985) of Los Angeles. See also Gina Kaus, Und was für ein Leben... (Munich: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1979).
[233] František Edvin, nicknamed Munzo by the family, born June 23, 1918 (FK letters).
[234] ML, p. 94.
[235] According to Anna Mahler.
[236] See ML, and FW, “Geheimes Tagebuch,” ZOU, pp. 631ff. (original in M-W Coll.).
[237] All details about Alma Mahler’s hemorrhage are from FW, “Geheimes Tagebuch,” as are the descriptions of the ensuing hours, days, and weeks.
[238] FW/Mahler.
[239] Unpublished letters from Alma Mahler-Werfel to FW, M-W Coll.
[240] September 10, 1918, from Franzensbad: “Dear friend Werfel, I, the absent one, greet you who are present. Loving and healed of hate, I float above you; I suck your spirit into myself, I read your works and come ever closer to you. Thus will evil lose all its power over us... I had to make my way through this chaos... in order to comprehend this incredible good fortune in its full extent, that the beloved, divine woman is alive and that our child [Apparently Alma was still leading Gropius to believe that while Werfel was her lover, the son was Gropius’s] lives, that I myself live. Everything else pales into insignificance beside that... Our egos sink away the more we serve her who transfigures our life. We have found our Messiah; she is the fulfillment of what will place its seal upon the new world. Love in her very person has descended to me. You, Werfel, great poet and rediscoverer of the human heart, must immortalize this singular life in your best work, in such an inspiring manner and with such a burning heart that the distorted hatred will fall from all faces” (M-W Coll.).
[241] DD, vol. 1, pp. 91ff. In an unpublished letter to Alma Mahler written in the fall of 1918, FW writes: “My beloved eternal woman, I am not doing well at all. I do not know what you speak about with him [Walter Gropius], I do not know to what extent you are sacrificing me. I feel a great heavy homesickness for you. All my true vital feelings, my thoughts and senses are lost and exiled... Whatever your doubts may be, I sense that I cannot endure life without you, that you are a great strength of mine. You know that yourself, very well; how else would I have succeeded in writing something as lively as The Midday Goddess! It is a wonderful gift you have given me. The second divine gift. I believe that people will sense in it (despite all the hocus-pocus and sorcery) a living organism. That I received from you, Alma!” (FW/Mahler). In another unpublished letter to her from 1918, FW writes, “In my magical play I call you Mara. There, the I is missing from Maria, that sharp sound of the eternal virgin... There, you are a pagan Ur-principle... I love my homeland, I love you! You midday-midnight! Your body smells of the fragrance of the hearth on which creation is being cooked” (FW/Mahler).
[242] KW Archive.
[243] Unpublished letter from Rudolf Werfel to Kurt Wolff Verlag, KW Archive.
[244] See Isaacs, Walter Gropius, op. cit.
[245] ML, p. 117.
[246] Anna Mahler died on June 3, 1988.
[247] Agnes Hvizd (1861-1933). I thank Dietmar Grieser of Vienna for the reference; See also Grieser, Piroschka, Sorbas & Co.: Schicksale der Weltliteratur (Munich: La
ngen Müller Verlag, 1978). FW immortalized her as “Teta Linek” in his 1939 novel Der Veruntreute Himmel. See also beginning of chapter “Heaven and Hell” in this eBook.
[248] See “Franz Werfel im November 1918: Bericht des Polizeikommissärs Dr. Johann Presser,” in Salzburger Nachrichten, December 29, 1973. On FW in November 1918, see especially Dr. Hans Hautmann’s excellent study “Franz Werfel: Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit und die Revolution in Wien 1918,” in Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur (Graz), vol. 15, 1971, pp. 469ff.
[249] See also Barbara, “Third Life Fragment,” pp. 289ff.
[250] See “Franz Werfel im November 1918,” op. cit.
[251] On the entire question of the November revolution, see Hautmann, “Franz Werfel,” op. cit., and FW’s Barbara.
[252] See ML, pp. 121f. FW’s own view of events is found in a letter he wrote to his aunt Emilie Böhm in Prague in early 1919: “During the revolution in Vienna I became the target of much slander and persecution by the local press. Because I stood up for my convictions in public, I was called a protector of the so-called looters and arsonists. I’m sure you have read some of those things in the newspaper. In the end, it really doesn’t matter, although it was irritating to be smeared that way” (M-W Coll.).
[253] I owe all the details on the Central and Herrenhof coffeehouses to my conversations with Professor Milan Dubrovic, who was a habitué of both establishments in younger years; see also Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1985).
[254] See Hartmut Binder, “Ernst Polak — Literat ohne Werk,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, vol. 23 (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 366-415.
[255] There is a biographical sketch of Franz Kafka’s famous correspondent in the afterword of her collection Feuilletons und Reportagen 1920-1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1984).
[256] All details on Milena Jesenská are from ibid.