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

  Franz Werfel

  A life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood

  by Peter Stephan Jungk

  Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo

  Published by Plunkett Lake Press, March 2012

  www.plunkettlakepress.com

  © Peter Stephan Jungk

  Translation © 1990 Anselm Hollo

  Cover by Susan Erony

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  To Anna Mahler

  “You know, Felice, Werfel is really miraculous; when I read his book The Friend of the World for the first time... I thought I was going off my head with enthusiasm.” — Franz Kafka, 1913

  “My problem: What business have I in a world in which a Werfel finds interpreters?” — Robert Musil, 1930

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  City Park

  Caruso

  Café Arco

  The Day of Judgment

  The Good Soldier

  Alma Maria Mahler-Gropius

  Breitenstein am Semmering

  “I Am Goat Song”

  A Novel of the Opera

  Success and Crisis

  Barbara, or Reality

  Hohe Warte

  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

  Bad Tidings

  Jeremiad

  1938

  Heaven and Hell

  “I’m an American”

  Dance of Death

  “The Book Must Be Finished”

  Chronology

  Select Bibliography: Works by Franz Werfel

  Notes

  Translator’s Note

  Throughout the text, titles of Werfel’s works are given in English (with the German title in parentheses at first occurrence), whether or not the work in question has been published in English. For editions of Werfel’s works in German and English, see the Bibliography. In the Notes, German titles of works cited by the author have been left untranslated; full bibliographic data for these appears at first citation or, in the case of Werfel’s works, in the Bibliography.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the initiative and active participation of Anna Mahler (1904-1988). I thank her first of all.

  Dr. František Kafka deserves much gratitude indeed for his tireless assistance. His assiduous search for documents in Prague archives and his extremely constructive suggestions regarding the description of Franz Werfel’s childhood and youth have made an irreplaceable contribution.

  My thanks also go to the witnesses of their times who knew Franz Werfel personally and were thus able to give me information and inspiration of a unique kind: Gustave O. Arlt (1895-1986), Los Angeles; Anne Marie Meier-Graefe-Broch, St. Cyr; Anuschka Deutsch (1895-1984), Berlin; Professor Milan Dubrovic, Vienna; Marta Feuchtwanger (1891-1987), Los Angeles; Brigitte Bermann Fischer, Camaiore; Gottfried Bermann Fischer, Camaiore; Adrienne Gessner (1896-1987), Vienna; Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, Saas-Fee; Albrecht Joseph, Los Angeles; Gina Kaus (1894-1985), Los Angeles; Ernst Křenek, Mödling; Conrad H. Lester, Vienna; Leopold Lindtberg (1902-1984), Zurich; Professor Golo Mann, Kilchberg; Professor Hans Mayer, Tübingen; William W. Melnitz, Los Angeles; Alma Pixner, Vienna; Lady Isolde Radzinowicz, Philadelphia; Gottfried Reinhardt, Salzburg; Dr. Emmy Wellesz (1889-1987), Vienna.

  The following libraries have willingly opened their archives to my research: Special Collections, Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Beineke Rare Books Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Deutsches Literaturarchiv/ Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar; Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main, Abteilung IX, Exilliteratur 1933-1945; Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Handschriften- und Musiksammlung; Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung.

  Lillian Birnbaum, Marietta Torberg, and Dr. Ulrich Weinzierl were particularly supportive during my years of work on this book — thank you!

  My thanks to Professor Hilde Spiel, to whom I owe a great deal since my very first literary steps twenty years ago, for reading the completed manuscript.

  City Park

  In the first week of September 1890, Bohemia and wide tracts of northern Austria were hit by violent rainstorms[1] that caused rivers to rise and afflicted Prague with its most devastating floods in more than four hundred years. There were numerous casualties. Josefstadt, the Jewish ghetto, had already been inundated when in the early hours of September 4 the Karlsbrücke, an ancient stone bridge, was swept away. Not until Wednesday, September 10, did the rain stop and the water begin its slow retreat; it was still cloudy, although by evening the skies had cleared a little.

  Shortly before midnight, Franz Viktor Werfel[2], the first child of Rudolf and Albine Werfel[3], was born in an apartment at Reitergasse 11[4], in a pleasant section of Prague’s New Town. His paternal ancestors, surnamed either Wörfel or Würfel, had lived in northern Bohemia for more than three centuries. Franz Viktor’s great-great-grandfather Gottlieb Würfel, a Jew with “protected” status, had lived in the Bohemian town of Leipa. His son Juda served as a noncommissioned officer in Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812. Juda Werfel’s son Nathan, Franz Viktor’s grandfather, was the fifth of seven children. He started out as a weaver in Leipa, then dealt in flour at Jungbunzlau, and finally moved to Prague, where he quickly amassed a considerable fortune with an eiderdown-cleaning business but lost it just as rapidly. His son Rudolf Werfel, born in 1858 in Jungbunzlau, one of nine children, grew up in Prague and was sent to a reputable Bavarian boarding school. Heavily burdened at first by his father’s debts, Rudolf still managed to move up in the world in only a few years. In 1882, at the age of twenty-five, he announced the opening of his glove-manufacturing business. Seven years later he married Albine Kussi, nineteen, the daughter of a prosperous mill owner from Pilsen.

  Werfel’s birthplace, Reitergasse 11, Prague

  The newlyweds’ household included their live-in cook, Barbara Šimůnková[5], a resolute Czech in her mid-thirties, from Radič near Tábor. Barbara became nursemaid to the newborn Franz, whose earliest impressions were closely linked to her. He spent most of the day in her company. She talked to him in a dialect that was part German baby-talk, part kitchen Bohemian; one of his first spoken words was “Bábi.” Almost every day Bábi took him in his large white baby carriage to the nearby city park, wh
ere a canopy of treetops framed his first view of the sky. As soon as he learned to walk, she took him to the pond to explore its grottoes, inlets, and islands of weeping willows. He played in a sandbox near the monkey cage, gathered Spanish chestnuts, and learned to appreciate the morning dew, the flower beds, the tree shade, the progression of the seasons.

  Diagonally across from his parents’ apartment was the big Prague Central Railway Station, a building that intrigued Franz Viktor more than any other. From his window he could look down on steam and grime and boxcars, and hear the train whistles and the screeching of brakes. He loved the interior of this fascinating station and always wanted to touch the locomotives. “Maschina! Maschina!”[6] he called the hissing black monsters standing at the ends of the numerous tracks.

  On Sundays, very early in the morning, Barbara took the four-year-old to mass at St. Heinrich’s Church. Surrounded by cool stone walls and the fragrance of incense, he knelt, stood, and folded his hands in prayer in unison with Bábi. Back in his room, he used whatever came to hand — brooms, hatboxes, newspapers — to construct an altar[7], and then held something akin to a Roman Catholic service in front of it. A frequent guest at the family dinner table was Father Janko[8] of St. Heinrich’s, a good friend of Rudolf Werfel’s who gave Barbara special incentive to serve her most imaginative meals. At the same time, Franz Viktor was also exposed to Jewish tradition. Although his parents were far from Orthodox, his ritual circumcision had taken place on the eighth day after his birth, and on the high holy days his father always took him to the Maisel synagogue. The light of a multitude of candles[9] and the shimmering air of the synagogue impressed the boy as evidence of the living presence of God, both exciting and frightening.

  In the playgrounds[10] of the city park Franz made his first friend, Willy Haas, who was a year younger. Barbara later told them how they had traveled down the tree-lined gravel paths side by side in their baby carriages. Together they came to know the formidable Kakitz, the stiff-legged park gendarme with his mighty saber, and they liked to tease the “chair lady”[11] who collected a coin from everyone who felt like taking a rest on a park chair. They fed stale bread to the swans, Barbara bought treats from the pretzel man, and once in a while the boys went home with big, colorful balloons. All these joys of early childhood were abruptly terminated when Franz Werfel became a pupil at the private elementary school of the Piarist order.[12]

  Jewish families favored this school for their sons. In Franz’s first grade, most of the students[13] came from Jewish homes. In the high-vaulted rooms of the monastery’s rear wing, black-robed monks taught some sixty boys at a time. Only the periods of religious instruction were held in separate classrooms; for the Jewish boys, Rabbi Salomon Knöpfelmacher came to the Piarist monastery.

  Franz sat in a whitewashed classroom[14], squeezed behind a narrow desk painted a glossy green. Behind the elevated lectern hung a large map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph I in a white uniform. Near the door stood a cupboard containing geographical and astronomical globes. Surrounded by dozens of strange, noisy boys, the six-year-old found it hard to endure his first schooldays — he felt abandoned, separated from home by some unfathomable decision. He took refuge in illness: the first months of that school year he spent at home, attended and pampered by Mother, Father, and Barbara. Thus ended the eventful year 1896, marked by the frightening experience of entering school and by two other events in the fall: the death of grandfather Nathan Werfel and the birth of a sister, Hanna.[15]

  During his entire time with the Piarists, Franz Werfel remained a sickly child[16] and a poor student. He sat quietly at his desk; in the pockets of his blue-and-white sailor suit he kept some colored marbles and a small notebook listing the names of all his schoolmates and the monks who taught them. Most days, school let out at 4:00 in the afternoon; occasionally Franz and his schoolmates would go to the city park to play cops and robbers or marbles. But other days he hurried home so he would have time for a walk with Barbara. They would go to the Belvedere plateau and look down on the city of a hundred towers with its baroque bridges and large new building sites in the former ghetto, wander through the orchards of Laurenziberg, and rush back to Reitergasse so Barbara could prepare the family’s evening meal. They crossed the quiet squares of the Kleinseite, where grass grew between the rough cobblestones, passed by the great palace gardens of the nobility with their guarded gateways, and hurried across the rebuilt Karlsbrücke with its statues of saints and a great crucifix encircled by gilded Hebrew letters. The inscription, Barbara told Franz, had been paid for by a Jew as penance for mocking the cross. On they went, past the smoke-blackened masonry of the Altneu (literally, “Old-new”) synagogue, through dark alleys and sinister tenement courtyards redolent of stale beer and salt pork, and on across the Graben, with its horse-drawn tram lines and coachmen who ruthlessly whipped their horses through the dense evening traffic.

  Franz absorbed all these colors, sounds, and smells, committing to memory even what seemed mundane: shop signs, streetlights, milk wagons, coal vendors. With equal intensity he engraved on his mind the sights in his own room, where colorful remnants of fabric and yarn, ribbons and ruffles, surrounded his toys as Barbara sat at the whirring sewing machine in the light of an Auer gas lamp. He listened attentively to the conversations of the adults and observed their exaggerated gestures and eccentricities — all the while collecting impressions as other children collect stamps or seashells.

  In 1899, when Franz was in fourth grade, his second sister, Marianne Amalia[17], was born, and the Werfel family moved[18] into a larger and more elegant apartment on Hybernergasse, near the Gunpowder Tower. This new abode was also close to the main railway station, from which Rudolf Werfel started out on his frequent trips to Tuschkau, near Pilsen, the site of one of his factories and his most important branch office.

  With his round face, bushy moustache, and gold-rimmed pince-nez, this distinguished businessman with a fondness for cards was a familiar figure in Prague. His passion for music was well known, and he was often seen at the Neue Deutsche Theater, accompanied by his attractive young wife. Albine Werfel was a head taller than her stocky husband, and her features had character and animation.

  Rudolf Werfel had taken his brother-in-law Benedikt Böhm as a partner, and Werfel & Böhm, manufacturers of leather gloves, had gained a reputation far beyond the boundaries of the Austrian Empire. The business, which was expanding steadily[19] and had branches in London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin, was mainly based on exports to Switzerland and the United States.

  The glove factories of Werfel & Böhm (letterhead of the firm)

  During these years, Franz knew his father as an extremely nervous and quick-tempered man. Even if he could guess at one reason for the tension at home, he was not yet able to understand it. Excesses against Germans as well as Jews had become increasingly frequent in Prague. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city had roughly 400,000 inhabitants, with a German-speaking population of about 35,000. Within this minority, there was a further minority of 12,000 German-speaking Jews. Yet even the Jewish citizens of Prague who spoke only Czech at home were not immune from the crass anti-Semitism of some Czech nationalists: Jews and Germans were loathed equally as exploiters of the Czech people, and it was commonly believed that in collusion with the hated aristocracy, they had simply divided up the best positions in the state among themselves. The great majority of the population of Prague felt like strangers in their own land, and mistrust, hatred, and lust for revenge were rampant.

  In the spring of 1897, hundreds of Czech workers staged anti-Semitic demonstrations.[20] The core of their movement consisted of members of the glovemakers’ union, and thus, to a great extent, employees of the Werfel factories in Prague and Tuschkau. At the end of the year, the “December Storm” swept through the city; some German-owned property was destroyed, but it was Jewish shops and dwellings in particular that were looted and set on fire. The government in Vienn
a took days to impose martial law on the city. Two years later, a trial concerning a ritual murder allegedly committed by Jews plunged all Bohemia into renewed anti-Semitic hysteria and markedly poisoned relations between Jews and Germans. Rudolf Werfel was deeply distressed by these developments. On the eve of the twentieth century, Prague was permeated by an atmosphere of terror reminiscent of the days of Rabbi Bezalel Löw, the great Kabbalist and scholar who had taken mud from the Vltava River and fashioned the Golem to protect the ghetto Jews.

  In the fall of 1900 Franz Werfel entered the Royal and Imperial German Gymnasium on the Graben, practically next door to the Piarist school at the corner of Herrengasse. He was a weak, listless, and far from clever student. Here, too, more than half the boys came from Jewish homes; here, too, Salomon Knöpfelmacher came to give them religious instruction; and here, too, ten-year-old Franz was one of his worst students. The rabbi did manage to teach him to read and write Hebrew, and also instructed him in the biblical history of Israel from Genesis to the Prophets. One day Knöpfelmacher remarked that he considered King David’s musicality[21] far superior to that of, say, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — and from then on Franz regarded religious instruction as a sham.

  His entire interest was focused on Karl May’s series of adventure novels, with their Wild West and oriental settings, and on the weekly illustrated boys’ magazine[22] Der Gute Kamerad, in which he read serialized stories about trappers and Indians, fascinating facts about China and Siam, India and Afghanistan, and instructions for building a camera. The tale of Erich the plucky cabin boy was a particular favorite. That deeply tanned North German lad, the hero of a story in the Der Gute Kamerad, became his friend and role model. Erich taught him sea chanteys, mariners’ yarns, and all about rigging a mast. A Sunday steamboat excursion on the river with his mother became a fantastic ocean voyage for Franz: islanders surrounded the ship, their arrowheads dipped in poison; typhoons threatened Erich and his friend with shipwreck; and on the horizon was a majestic procession of smoking volcanoes.