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

  While reading[23], Franz indulged in frequent snacks; he had become a plump child. When Barbara banned eating between meals, he just looked at her with guilty little-boy eyes and kept right on eating.

  His parents had already taken him to plays and operas at the Neue Deutsche Theater near the city park. The high point of each season was the May Festival[24], created by Angelo Neumann[25], one of Europe’s most renowned opera impresarios and theater managers. Every year Neumann engaged the best singers and most famous actors from the great cities of neighboring countries for a five-week season at his theater in Prague. In May 1900, Josef Kainz came and performed his Hamlet; the following year, the year of Giuseppe Verdi’s death, the theater had a Verdi festival, followed by a great Wagner festival in 1902. These five spring weeks, when one could become totally immersed in drama and grand opera, were the absolute high point of the year for cultured German-speaking citizens of Prague. On the other hand, Czechs never participated in the May Festival, nor would any German-speaking inhabitant of the city ever stray into the Czech national theater, not even when Diaghilev or Nijinsky made guest appearances.

  Time and again Franz begged to be taken along to the festival events. But every time, a great sadness would overwhelm him during the very first act, because he knew that there was no stopping the progression of the plays and operas, and that in just a little while the performance would have to come to an end. He was happiest in the joy of expectation[26] before one of these evenings at the theater, and he always yearned for that feeling of excited anticipation.

  He built a puppet theater[27] and began to give performances of plays from the repertory of world drama. Georg Weber[28], Werfel’s closest friend at the gymnasium, shared his enthusiasm for the theater. They spent hours in the kitchen making cardboard figures, spears, shields, armor, and creating the special effects for their performances — colophony lightning, vapors of foul-smelling cooking fat — all according to the instructions given in Der Gute Kamerad. They invited schoolmates and relatives to performances of entire dramatic works and operas — Faust and Der Freischütz, The Magic Flute and William Tell — but what mattered most to the boys was the success or failure of their stage effects.

  Another schoolmate, Franz Jarosy[29], also played an important part in Franz’s first years at the gymnasium. He was the very opposite of Franz’s Christian friend Georg Weber and impressed Franz with his air of superiority, his joie de vivre, and his cynicism. Though Jarosy was a Jew, most of his classmates thought of him as nondenominational or converted — he certainly succeeded in shirking religious instruction. Son of an insurance company director in Trieste, the twelve-year-old was already an accomplished actor who treated his contemporaries with pronounced arrogance; for example, he sold Franz an ordinary trouser button, claiming it had been Napoleon’s.

  Jarosy was willing to participate in his friends’ theatrical performances, but only on condition that the boys themselves take the place of the puppets; Jarosy would specialize exclusively in princes and men of noble birth. Franz agreed readily: he himself wanted to play only villains, schemers, and demons.

  A very different theatrical event[30] took place in Prague in the middle of 1901. Children were given the day off from school, and the populace packed the sidewalks of all major streets: for the first time in a decade, His Apostolic Majesty, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia and Moravia, was paying a visit to Prague. Thus, Werfel, Jarosy, Weber, and Haas were among those who glimpsed him for seconds as his carriage rumbled across the Wenzelsplatz. The city’s public buildings and many private ones had been decorated festively; the decorations on the main office of Werfel & Böhm on Mariengasse were especially outstanding.

  The gymnasium, with its strict bureaucratic disciplinary principles, depressed and frightened Franz more and more. He experienced the school’s coerciveness as a torture that threatened to suffocate him, and the weeks of summer vacation[31] provided intense relief. The Werfel family usually spent those weeks in the Salzkammergut, in Austria. Franz loved swimming in the lake, hiking in the mountains, and taking afternoon naps in high meadows or shady forests. But vacation was always overshadowed by the Damocles’ sword of the return to school, and its end broke over him like a natural catastrophe. As in the early days at the Piarist school, illness seemed the best way to escape occasionally from gymnasium life; he managed to contract almost every existing childhood disease.

  During the second semester of his third year of secondary schooling, having missed a great many classes, the debilitated Franz found himself engaged in a hopeless battle against his adversaries: Royal and Imperial Professors Konthe, Krespin, Löffler, and Rotter. His mother paid frequent visits to these gentlemen during their office hours and did her best to save what might still be saved. Nevertheless, Franz failed Latin and mathematics, and had to repeat his third year of gymnasium.

  In mid-September 1903, after his thirteenth birthday, Franz was bar mitzvahed.[32] This confirmation — as the assimilated Jews of Prague called the event — consoled him a little for his defeat at school. Alexander Kisch, the Maisel synagogue’s rabbi, had been preparing the boy for months, and now he elevated Franz to the status of son of the Jewish commandments and prohibitions, enjoying equal rights and duties with adults.

  Franz had always found the teeming crowds[33] in the synagogue and the constant murmuring of the congregation unpleasant. When he encountered Polish or Russian Hasidim on the streets of Prague, refugees from the pogroms, with their long sidelocks, black caftans, and the fringes of their prayer shawls dangling from their waistbands, he had to admit to himself that he did not feel any kinship with these people. But to touch the velvet-wrapped scrolls of the Torah with his fingertips; to listen to the cantor singing, or to the blowing of the shofar during Rosh Hashanah; to watch his mother descend the synagogue steps on Yom Kippur, weak from fasting — these moments of Jewish life he loved[34], and he certainly wanted to be part of that tradition.

  Now he stood on the bimah, the wide, raised platform facing the congregation, the books of Moses open before him. In a voice both excited and plaintive, he sang out the Hebrew words, a prayer shawl wrapped around his shoulders. Then he loudly recited the blessing that precedes the weekly reading from the Prophets: “Praised be Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who hath chosen the prophets, the richly gifted, and taketh pleasure in their words which they have spoken in truthfulness.” And finally he said the Shema, the prayer at the heart of Israel since the ancestral days of Moses.

  The Werfel family moved again[35], this time from Hybernergasse to Mariengasse, into a building in the immediate vicinity of the main offices of Werfel & Böhm. They now lived in the most exclusive part of town, on the edge of the city park, with a view of the tall Spanish chestnut trees and the Neue Deutsche Theater on the far side of the park. The large rooms of the apartment were fragrant with cleanliness, and everything had been painted a dazzling white, including the corridor walls and doors; even the moldings had a glossy coat of white enamel. The floors were covered with costly carpets, and valuable paintings[36] adorned the walls. However, Franz’s own room, located between the kitchen and Barbara’s room, was very small.

  Later residence of the Werfel family, Mariengasse 41, Prague

  To ease Bábi’s burden, the Werfels hired governesses to attend to the two girls, Hanna and Marianne, and to make sure that the son of the family, that disappointing scholar, did his homework and turned his light out at the proper time. Anna Wrtal was one of these women, but Erna Tschepper[37] was Franz’s favorite. Around thirty when she began working for the Werfels, she wore her beautiful blond hair in a demure chignon. Almost every day Fräulein Erna accompanied Franz to the park, and often a young admirer joined them on their walks along the gravel paths; Fräulein Erna also spent the night with this admirer quite frequently, a secret that she and Franz kept well.

  Franz enjoyed being bathed and dried by Erna, and he was happy as long as he was allowed to
read. While ill with the various childhood diseases, often for weeks at a time, he had become addicted to reading. Now, every night and often long into the night, he studied Gustav Schwab’s massive work on the legends of classical antiquity, immersed himself in Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii and Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit. But, this happy state of affairs did not last long: Erna became pregnant, and Albine Werfel dismissed her without notice. Franz cried for two nights[38] after Fräulein Erna told him that she would have to leave.

  It was in Los Angeles, California, where Franz Werfel died at the age of fifty-five, that I began my search for the story of his life. My intention was to end the quest in the city of his birth and childhood, but I was not permitted to enter the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, despite multiple applications. The shared culture that once joined Trieste and Prague, Trent and Lemberg, Vienna and Czernowitz, into one coherent space no longer exists. Before World War I it was possible to travel the continent without identification papers and even to visit India and the United States without ever owning a passport.

  I wanted to set foot in Werfel’s houses, see his school, walk through his streets, parks, and theaters, but each new attempt to gain access to Prague failed. Finally, I contacted an acquaintance from that city whom I had met many years before and asked him for advice.

  This gruffly amiable old gentleman replied by return mail, under the letterhead “Dr. František Kafka, Author, Prague” (no relation to Franz Kafka), that he was indeed familiar with the archives of the Golden City, but that he had to warn me: “Documentary research takes a very long time because one is not permitted to enter the archives oneself but can only apply for copies that have to be notarized and duly paid for.” From then on, I received one letter after another from Dr. Kafka, who calls himself the last survivor of the Prague circle.

  According to Dr. Kafka, Franz Werfel’s birthplace near the Prague Central Railway Station, on what was formerly called Reitergasse and is now Havlíčkova, has been used as an office building for many years. The site is currently being prepared for a new underground station of the B line, Revolution Square. In the lobby of Havlíčkova 11, Dr. Kafka noted some oriental landscape paintings, and “at the foot of the stairs, in a niche, the black figure of a knight in armor, made of plaster of Paris.” After some initial difficulties in gaining the doorman’s confidence, he managed to penetrate the upper regions of the building: “The present-day floor plan is far removed from that of 1889, as the original rooms have been divided up into smaller office spaces.”

  Franz Werfel’s first school, the monastery of the Piarist order at the corner of the Graben and Herrengasse, now contains about thirty rental apartments, a “well-established industrial enterprise for machine manufacture,” and the wine bar U Piaristů. The former German gymnasium now accommodates an electrical engineering school, whose courtyard is still connected to that of the Piarist building by means of a passageway.

  Alas, the city park opposite the gates of the modern main railway station has been reduced to a narrow strip of lawn leading up to the magnificently restored Smetana Theater, the former Neue Deutsche Theater. The construction of metro line A has claimed what used to be the largest green area in the inner city, with its pond, grottoes, waterfalls, and playgrounds.

  On my desk is a pile of single-spaced typed letters Dr. Kafka has sent me over the years. Looking through them, I find his reply to my inquiry whether there is any information in Prague about Barbara Šimůnková, of whom I know only that she died in 1935 in the hospital of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth. “She died at the age of eighty years, six months, and three days,” Dr. Kafka wrote, “and was buried on March 26, 1935, in Olschan Cemetery. There, I noted that she still lies in cemetery 3, burial plot 2, grave 782. In the register, her profession is listed as ‘cook.’ The fees have not been paid for twenty years, and the grave has become state property, including headstone and accessories.”

  Caruso

  In May 1904[39], Verdi’s Rigoletto was on the festival program at Angelo Neumann’s Neue Deutsche Theater. This first visit to Prague by the world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso had been advertised for weeks. Franz Werfel accompanied his parents that evening and witnessed a unique performance that far surpassed the Italian highlights of past years. The elegance of Caruso’s timbre, his effortless legato, his powerful Crescendos drove the audience wild. The tenor had to repeat the Duke’s aria three times, stressing new nuances every time. For hours after the performance, groups of Caruso-intoxicated people strode through the night and “La Donna è mobile” resounded in the city’s streets and courtyards.

  No theatrical experience had ever moved Franz as much. The arts, above all his passion for the theater[40], now began to absorb him completely, even — at least temporarily — making his scholastic worries recede. At Rosenthal’s, the court optician on the Graben, he spent his allowance on Caruso’s phonograph records on the Schreibender Engel label: Verdi’s Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Bellini’s Norma, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. By listening to them over and over again, he slowly memorized the melodies and librettos. Before long, the fourteen-year-old knew entire arias by heart.[41]

  He stuffed his coat pockets with Reclam pocket editions[42] of Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred. Portraits of Verdi and Dante adorned the walls of his room. He read poetry[43], especially Novalis, Hölderlin, Lenau, Rilke, and Walt Whitman and Jules Laforgue in translation. He loved to listen to his mother read to him at bedtime, always the same odes, sonnets, and ballads, and he had soon memorized every word of them. With Georg Weber he continued to improvise puppet performances on his now quite elaborate Punch and Judy stage. Hanna, the older of his sisters, also participated.

  Werfel’s talent for imitating adults[44] was astonishing; he reproduced their gestures, inflections, and vocabulary to near perfection. His greatest hit was the impersonation of the cantor[45] at the Maisel synagogue. With a bath towel wrapped around his shoulders, he reproduced the worthy cantor’s unwittingly comic lamentations. Hanna pretended to be a devout girl in the congregation, and even Marianne, the youngest, was allowed a part in the game.

  In September 1904, after repeating his third year at the German gymnasium, Franz changed schools. He now went to the Royal and Imperial Stefansgymnasium[46] on Stefansgasse, where Willy Haas, his gentle, dark-eyed friend from city park days was his classmate. The two often read secretly[47] during class, hiding books borrowed from their parents’ libraries under their desks; thus, a dog-eared copy of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde soon circulated in class, as did the latest works of Stefan George, Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, and Hauptmann.

  Their teacher, Karl Kyovsky, soon developed a certain fondness for the new student Werfel. One afternoon, when an organ-grinder was playing in the schoolyard, disrupting Latin class, Kyovsky wanted to know[48] if anyone recognized the melody. Franz immediately popped up and declared, “That’s the sextet, Herr Professor, from Lucia di Lammermoor, by Gaetano Donizetti.” The schoolmaster smiled, and from that day on, Franz was assured of at least a “satisfactory” grade, even when his academic accomplishments were poor.

  The theater performances and evenings at the opera of the past years, especially the works of Verdi; the practically constant reading of poetry, prose, and plays; the first, only semiconscious excitement caused by Woman, that alien being — all these fused into one element in Franz’s consciousness, and he reached out for it, trying to give it words, a language. Formulating sentences, he was writing poetry before he knew it — spontaneously, without premeditation. It happened, and the creator was taken by surprise. He channeled the power that flowed into him from the arias, duets, quartets of Italian opera — not least in the form of Caruso’s bel canto — into language. He invented the world anew, recreated the cosmos line by line, adorning the lines with exclamation points — he wrote an entire poem! He versified his anxieties, joys, memories; he sang words. Soon he was writing a new poem every day.

  Willy Haas was a
daily visitor.[49] His first duty was to greet Barbara and exchange a few words with her — Franz insisted on that — before entering his friend’s room, a scene of great disarray, with bits of paper and sketches for poems scattered everywhere — in the wardrobe, on the washstand and the bedside table, stuck between pages of books, or crumpled in jacket and trouser pockets. Franz recited his poems to Willy from memory. His friend was enchanted by Franz’s first lines of verse and encouraged him to keep writing, to keep writing without fail.

  Suspecting that Willy Haas was the instigator of her son’s sudden and unceasing production of poems, Frau Werfel banned him from the house. Franz kept on writing. During this initial exploratory period he received encouragement from the renowned Prague poet and physician Hugo Salus, a family friend. Once, when they took a train ride together, Salus sat staring out the compartment window for a long while, then suddenly turned to the schoolboy and suggested that he write a poem titled “Graveyard in a Field.”[50]

  During vacations in the Salzkammergut, Franz wrote dramatic dialogues and staged them in a garden pavilion with Hanna and other children, reserving the starring roles for himself. Aphrodite was one of these mini-dramas[51], Barseba another; Classical Philistines (Klassische Philister) mocked the professors at the Stefansgymnasium. Poems, too, kept coming in profusion.