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

  Café Arco

  As soon as Franz Werfel gained his freedom from school, his father insisted that he attend university or enter a business apprenticeship. Although Franz did not register[77], he occasionally audited philosophy and law lectures[78] at Karlsuniversität in Prague. He also took a course at the business college but continued spending his nights on the town, sleeping late, and writing poems, short stories, and theatrical dialogues.

  He visited the coffeehouses daily — the Corso, the Edison, the Continental — but spent most of his time in the Café Arco, where he read dozens of literary journals, secretly paying for the subscriptions for some of them when he settled his monthly accounts with Herr Pošta, the headwaiter.[79]

  New faces appeared around Werfel’s special table, where he sat with his friends, most of them young poets: Otto Pick and Rudolf Fuchs, Johannes Urzidil, Oskar Baum and Ernst Polak, the bank employee bitten by the literary bug.[80] Like Kafka, Brod, Kornfeld, and Haas, all of them belonged to the small German-speaking Jewish minority of Prague.

  As often as not, Werfel’s works were created in the Arco’s smoke-filled hubbub; as soon as a poem was completed, he would read it to his admirers. Traveling businessmen or brokers from the nearby Corn Exchange became an involuntary audience and had to interrupt their conversation as soon as Werfel started declaiming his verses.

  Since his graduation, the number of poems he considered good had grown appreciably. Once again Willy Haas was his adviser[81] and encouraged him to put together a first volume of poetry. Early in 1910 they sent the manuscript — which contained “5 Songs to Fräulein Mitzi” (“5 Lieder an Fräulein Mitzi”) — to Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, a publishing house that had been founded in Leipzig two years earlier. Its initial lists, with their surprising number of avant-garde titles, had caught the attention of the Arco group. The Rowohlt editors soon returned Werfel’s poems without comment. Brod then advised his friend to send the book to Brod’s publisher in Berlin, Danish-born Axel Juncker, a wealthy older gentleman who was regarded as the leading publisher of modern poetry. “At the urging of Dr. Max Brod,”[82] Werfel wrote to Juncker in the summer of 1910, he was submitting a book of poems to which he “would like to give the title The Good Comrade [Der gute Kamerad].” Werfel went on to lie that another publisher was interested in the volume and had even begun “negotiations.” Nevertheless, he was asking Juncker to consider the book, as he greatly valued his opinion and “the possibility of becoming part of your highly esteemed publishing program.”

  1910

  The atmosphere was far from pleasant around the family table at Mariengasse. A year had passed since Franz finished school, yet he had not started university studies or begun any commercial training. Recently, he had even failed in his father’s place of business; he had been told to make a glove[83], but even with help from one of the workers, the journeyman piece had been a dismal failure. Rudolf Werfel was convinced that only a separation from the circle of friends in Prague and from the Arco and the Gogo would put Franz on the straight and narrow. He therefore got in touch with an import-export firm in Hamburg with which he was on friendly terms, the house of Brasch & Rothenstein, and arranged for Franz to start with them in the fall of 1910 as an intern. A minor until age twenty-three under Austrian law, the twenty-year-old Franz had no choice but to bow to his father’s decision, in sadness and anger.

  The summer vacation preceding his projected move was spent with his parents and sisters in Marienbad at the Grand Etablissement Egerländer, where he waited impatiently for a reply from Axel Juncker. Worried that the publisher might not see the “nature” of his poems clearly, Werfel wrote again to Berlin, saying that in the event of a favorable decision he would like to add “newer and more mature” poems[84] and “replace and complete many things.” The publisher, however, did not react to either letter.

  Early in September, Franz and his family went to Munich[85] and attended numerous theatrical performances and concerts. The world premiere of the Symphony of a Thousand, Gustav Mahler’s Eighth, conducted by the composer, impressed Werfel most.

  Alone, he then traveled north to Hamburg and took lodgings in the Pension Schröder[86] on Hansastrasse, on his own for the first time in his life. The vitality of the Hanseatic city — the proximity of the North Sea, the great seaport, the markets, hotels, and theaters — was much to his liking, but his daily duties at Brasch & Rothenstein soon threatened to cast a shadow on these pleasures. Werfel responded to the demands of his job with passive resistance. During working hours in the firm’s office he drafted poems, prose texts, and dialogues, pretended to be stupid, and deliberately bungled many of his assignments. One day he tossed an entire bundle of bills of lading into the toilet and flushed them out to sea, fantasizing that without the documents, the freighters would get lost on the high seas.[87]

  After only a few weeks, the manager asked the new intern to leave his post[88] voluntarily and as soon as possible, to avoid the embarrassment of being summarily fired. Franz was delighted to agree to this proposal, jotting the equation “job = vice” into his notebook.[89]

  In the meantime, Axel Juncker had rejected Werfel’s unconventional hymns. Max Brod then wrote Juncker[90] a letter informing him that he no longer wanted to be published by a house that was unwilling to take a chance on a talent such as Franz Werfel’s, and Juncker changed his mind. Although Juncker still wanted some changes, Werfel ignored the demand and wrote to the publisher in late October 1910 that he had chosen a new title for his book: “I would like to call it The Friend of the World. A good title, don’t you think?”[91] Impatiently hoping to placate his father at least a little with the publication of his first book of poems, Werfel urged Axel Juncker to get the volume out before the end of the year, but the publisher was not able to comply.

  After his departure from the import-export firm, Franz stayed in Hamburg for several months, partly to avoid a confrontation with his parents, partly out of curiosity about bachelor life in the big North German city. He was attracted to St. Pauli and its cabarets. He went to seamen’s bars, stood on swaying landing stages, gazed at the great steamships as they left harbor. Aimlessly he wandered through town, watched the feeding of the sharks in the zoo, sat in seedy smoke-filled cafés, jotted down conversational fragments and observations. He wrote poems and short stories[92] and reflections on his work so far: “Too great a reliance on effects, I know that well.” He planned a “Praise of Idleness” (“Lob der Faulenzer”) and a “Hymn to Kitsch” (“Loblied auf den Kitsch”).

  Unexpectedly, he also found himself quite homesick. He sketched the heads of his parents on the back pages of his small notebook and often talked to them and his sisters and Barbara on the telephone.[93] After these long-distance calls, he usually felt even worse.

  One evening he ran into Mitzi Glaser[94] in the lobby of the Lübeck Stadttheater and was appalled by the changes in his recently married heartthrob’s appearance; now she seemed quite common to him. Each pretended not to recognize the other. Under the influence of this meeting Werfel wrote a one-act play, The Visit from Elysium (Der Besuch aus dem Elysium)[95], set against a background of tennis, dancing school, and “the cosmos.”[96] Lukas, formerly Hedwig’s platonic lover, has died and now appears as a ghost to thank his erstwhile tormentor for having been so lacking in empathy: “Had you loved me in return and granted me your greatest favor, my love could never have achieved the fulfillment it found when you did not invite it; thus you unleashed the most powerful force in my nature — longing!”

  In early April 1911, on a Sunday walk through a cemetery, Werfel saw the dedication on the headstone of Annie Kalmar, a well-known actress[97]: “In eternal memory — Karl Kraus.” He stopped at the grave and read the chiseled words over and over, unable to explain what kept him there. He hardly knew the voluminous works of the poet, satirist, and pamphleteer Kraus; at this point he had only seen a few issues of Die Fackel, the journal Kraus was publishing in Vienna.

  Werfel went back to his pens
ion and to bed. He dreamed of the funeral[98] of a young man: the coffin lid was open, he was able to memorize the features of the corpse. He saw wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair, a curiously twisted mouth. He loved this stranger so much that he jumped into the grave, shouting ecstatically, “Who is this whose pain resounds here with such emphasis?”

  The next morning, his mail at the pension contained a letter from Karl Kraus informing him that Die Fackel was going to print five poems from his as yet unpublished collection. Werfel considered the acceptance a great honor: the criteria of this polemical Viennese journal were regarded as particularly stringent. Only six weeks later, Kraus, until then known only by hearsay, had become an important person in Werfel’s life. “All I need to be happy,”[99] he wrote to Kraus, enclosing some new poems, “is to know that you whom I revere and love (perhaps this declaration sounds a little bold) are reading my stuff.” Kraus responded kindly, giving the young poet more encouragement. “The praise you bestow on that one stanza of my poems,” Werfel replied, “has made me giddy with joy tonight.”[100]

  At the end of May 1911 he returned to Prague. His father’s position was unchanged: Franz would have to complete a course of academic study and enter a solid profession. Rudolf Werfel considered the publishing contract with Axel Juncker an irrelevant frill and even expressed doubts as to whether the announced book would actually appear. He now insisted that Franz do his military service.

  In the fall, the twenty-one-year-old Werfel began his year of voluntary service[101] in a barracks in Prague’s Hradčany Castle, as an artilleryman in the Eighth Heavy Howitzer Division. In the course of his military training, he often spent time in detention. Harmless pranks and small derelictions were enough to earn hours of solitary.[102] Werfel suffered from the stupidity and crudity of his superiors, and loathed the strenuous battle exercises and the daily preoccupation with rifles, artillery, ammunition. He hated the all-pervasive spirit of servility and its manifestations, such as having to beg for a pass to leave the barracks area.

  During his months of military service, Franz Werfel became sympathetic to Czech irredentism[103], which was close to Bakunin’s anarchism and strove for the secession of Bohemia and Moravia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The longer he served, the more resolute became his rejection of established power structures, whether familial or political. The very city of Prague became more and more alien to him, and he found its provincial restrictiveness, particularly for a non-Czech, increasingly insufferable. Angelo Neumann had died at the end of the previous year, and with his passing even the glamour and magic of the annual opera festivals were gradually fading. Werfel began to think seriously about leaving his native city on completion of his military service.

  But there were good moments too. At the end of a reading from his own work in Berlin, in mid-December 1911, Max Brod read a few poems[104] from Werfel’s Friend of the World and told the audience that the book would be available in just a few days. The audience responded well to these samples, and the Berliner Tageblatt reviewer, Albert Ehrenstein, reported that the most enjoyable part of a reading given by the author Max Brod had been his recitation of poems by someone far more significant[105]: the unknown young poet from Prague, Franz Werfel. In the December issue of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus printed five more poems by Werfel and made a point of calling his readers’ attention to the long-awaited publication of the book.[106]

  The Friend of the World came out in a first edition of four thousand copies that sold out immediately. During the following three weeks it had to be reprinted several times, and the name Franz Werfel became instantly known and admired in the German-speaking world. A new sound, said the laudatory reviews[107], was heard in Werfel’s hymnodic verses; the apparently simplest, most soulless things were elevated into living poetic images in these songs of feeling. Fame, once the schoolboy’s wildest dream, had now come to him: overnight the young son of a Prague glove manufacturer had become one of the most widely discussed poets of the German language.

  Franz Kafka envied his friend[108] the ease of his success, his abundance of talent, and the wealthy background that had permitted Werfel, so Kafka believed, the freedom from care that he himself longed for yet saw himself utterly incapable of achieving. For his part, Werfel was not very excited by Kafka’s prose. When Brod read him some of Kafka’s texts, Werfel expressed disappointment: “That will never play outside Tetschen-Bodenbach!” (a small border crossing between Bohemia and the German Empire).[109]

  It was not simply this judgment that caused a temporary estrangement between Werfel and Brod; more divisive was an argument about Richard Wagner.[110] On one of their frequent walks in the city park, Brod called the German composer the greatest in the history of opera — an opinion that Werfel, the Verdi enthusiast, could not leave unchallenged. When he dared to say something derogatory about Wagner and poked fun at the Wagnerian style of composition, Brod lost his temper and withdrew his patronage.

  Some diversion from the detestable routine of military training, which was to continue until the end of September 1912, was provided by the occasional maneuvers in which the Eighth Heavy Howitzer Division engaged. Werfel enjoyed sleeping out in the fields and forests of the Bohemian countryside, and he loved marching through the villages in the morning light, talking to the farmers. Undetected by his superiors, he was sometimes even able to write. One of these exercises saw the creation of a one-act play, The Temptation (Die Versuchung)[111], a bombastic three-way conversation between a poet alter ego, an archangel, and Lucifer, dedicated “to the memory of Giuseppe Verdi.”

  “And why is it mine, this terrible gift of poetry?” That is the poet’s rhetorical question, to which Lucifer replies: “Triumphs will be yours before which those of kings and tenors pale... Pindar’s Olympic laurel [is] of a lesser mythic power than your tenfold Nobel Prizes.” When the archangel describes the impetuous poet as “one of ours, one of the infinite spirits,” the poet’s enthusiasm for himself knows no bounds: “I admire myself. I am great... For look, I am the Annunciation!”

  In the uniform of a one-year volunteer, wearing a wide cavalry saber, Werfel would hurry down from the Hradčany into town, back to the Café Arco, during his few hours of leave. His friends and admirers esteemed him[112] more than ever; they were proud of him, the famous writer they had known when hardly anyone outside the café walls had heard of him. As before, they immersed themselves in discussions of Dostoyevsky[113] and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Werfel recited his new drama, The Temptation, to the assembled friends from memory.

  Today, the erstwhile cradle of literary expressionism and main gathering place of the Prague avant-garde is a petit-bourgeois restaurant with adjoining spaces for variety shows and a student cafeteria. “Today’s Café Arco is much smaller than the original,” Dr. František Kafka says in one of his letters.[114] “Being a corner building, it was damaged by the construction of the new pedestrian walkway on Hybernergasse and Dlážděná.” He also tells me that the old leaseholder of the establishment kept the Arco going until his death in the mid-1930s — and that this same Suchanek is one of the main characters in Johannes Urzidil’s well-known story “A Night of Terror” (“Eine Schreckensnacht”).

  Not only young German-speaking authors frequented the Arco. Situated across from the Central Railway Station, and not far from the newly constructed main station, it was often used by business people and salesmen as “an ideal place to meet and relax.” Young women from Czech Bohemia also frequented the café, such as the beautiful Milena Jesenská, who later married Ernst Polak and corresponded with Franz Kafka. Willy Haas, too, first met his wife, Jarmila Ambrožová, in the Café Arco. The “Arconauts” — as Karl Kraus called the circle around Werfel — chose the café as their headquarters for yet another reason: unlike the well-established cafés on the Graben, says Dr. Kafka, the Arco “was not burdened by old enmities between the Czech and German nations. This generation was looking for something new, and thus the café became a bridge builder be
tween the young Germans ( = Jews!) and the young Czechs of Prague.” A lively exchange of ideas took place between these two groups in the Arco, where authors, painters, and musicians of both nationalities gathered, providing Werfel and his friends with a special escape route from the linguistic and cultural ghetto in which they would have existed otherwise.

  The famous saying “Es brodelt und werfelt und kafkat und kischt,” a description of the Arco circle, was not coined by Karl Kraus or Anton Kuh, as is commonly supposed. Dr. Kafka writes: “Max Brod, with whom I had an interview in 1967 in Flims, attributed it to Egon Erwin Kisch, who was thus trying to attract more attention to himself than he really deserved.”

  The building in which Franz Werfel lived until he left Prague in the fall of 1912 is still standing. The former Mariengasse on the edge of the city park is now named Opletalova Ulice, after a Czech student who was shot and killed by the Nazis in 1939. Dr. Kafka visited the former Werfel family apartment at Opletalova 41: “The doors and interior surfaces of this apartment, painted a high-gloss white, are still preserved in what are now the offices of the Průmstav construction company, and it is even possible to guess where Barbara’s little room was. It is a large luxury apartment with many rooms, in what was then the most elegant street of the haute bourgeoisie.” Rudolf Werfel always lived in modern Prague’s New Town, with its wide streets and sanitary new buildings, whereas Hermann Kafka, Franz Kafka’s father, was reduced to renting small, dark apartments in the former ghetto, on the narrow streets of the Old Town. “The Werfel family,” Dr. Kafka informs me, “was not only a notch above the Kafka family in its material living conditions, it was also more open in its thinking: liberal, tolerant — and as un-Jewish in life’s outward forms as possible.”