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

  At the beginning of 1917 Karl Kraus printed Werfel’s personal letter from the front[196], dated November 1916, in Die Fackel, under the title “Over There” (“Dorten”), adding a full page of satirical commentary. It was another demonstration of Kraus’s cutting wit in matters of linguistic purity, and it heaped relentless mockery on his favorite adversary.

  “I really feel sorry for the man,” Werfel wrote to Gertrud. “He is not evil, he has just built himself up so boundlessly on false foundations. In the final analysis, he is like a criminal on the run who uses all his criminal wits to build ever new structures around a deed that remains in the dark. His entire work consists of the uninterrupted recitation of an alibi by someone who was never asked for an alibi in the first place.”

  This time he responded with an open letter titled “The Metaphysics of the Twist” (“Die Metaphysik des Drehs”).[197] He sent it to Die Aktion, a Berlin literary journal that had dedicated a special issue to Werfel the previous fall. “If you were an I-am,” the offended author writes in his somewhat confused and not very convincing response, “you could go on conjugating and say: You are. But you resist the We-are, because it is painful to see others be without being yourself.” He admitted to Gertrud that his text was not really successful but added that he simply did not believe in “false refinement” and that it would be “quite misplaced in regard to this man” to remain silent, as practically everybody targeted by Kraus had done. Moreover, he felt that his response would act as a protective spell “against an evil eye (mal occhio).”

  At the end of February 1917 Werfel was promoted to the rank of corporal “with two stars” and moved, with some other men of his company, to a building on the outskirts of the village, hidden behind some trees next to a military cemetery. The move meant the loss of the little hut in which he had been working and spending most of his nights; true, he now had a much larger and more comfortable room, but he had to share it with an artillery engineer and suffered from the lack of solitude. As the telephone had also been installed in this room, there were no more quiet moments, and he felt that he was living in a train station. He was mostly on night duty and did not have much to do in the daytime, but he still found it impossible to concentrate on creative work as he had been able to the year before.

  A ray of hope came with the news that the German diplomat and patron of the arts Count Harry Kessler[198] had set wheels in motion to have Werfel recalled from the front. Count Kessler tried to have the young poet invited to lecture and give readings in Switzerland, a country completely untouched by the war, and he had the support of numerous other cultural figures, such as Kurt Wolff and the writers Annette Kolb and René Schickele.

  The decision of his sister Hanna to announce her engagement to Herbert von Fuchs-Robetin[199], a paper manufacturer from Prague, took Franz by surprise. Hanna was only twenty, and he regretted[200] that she had not had a chance to learn much about life. He wished that she could spend some time in a great city like Berlin, where she would meet people with a sense of freedom, far away from Prague and its German-Jewish milieu. He tried to dissuade her from the marriage, asking her to think things over, but the wedding took place only a few weeks later, in the middle of March 1917.[201]

  Werfel managed to get leave at short notice, and on the wedding day he arrived in Prague at five in the morning, surprising the family. Hanna helped him dress[202]; his father lent him a tailcoat and a top hat. During the days he spent in Prague he was haunted by the feeling that Hanna’s marriage marked the irrevocable loss of his own childhood.

  “It’s hard to believe that I went to Prague,” he wrote to Gertrud the day he returned to the front, “and that we were able to experience so much during these long days... My love, I know, it is the most certain thing in my life, that we are meant for each other.”

  Spring weather transformed the countryside around Hodóv, first into a sea of mud, then into a flowering landscape, and Werfel’s frame of mind underwent a similar slow change for the better. As his roommate had been transferred away from the front, he had the room to himself at night, and even though the “telephone vultures” were still “picking away” at his nerves, he tried to write again after a break of several months. Without asking his superiors for permission, he went for two-hour walks in the afternoon, rested in the shade of a tall tree, read Montaigne’s travel journal, and wrote first drafts of many new poems.

  At the end of May he spent whole afternoons outdoors and resumed work on a large new book of poems that he had originally conceived in the spring of 1916, before he was called up. The book was to be called The Last Judgment (Der Gerichtstag) and to consist of five sections, after Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.

  He told Gertrud that he felt a “great urge” to write, to let his “discontent coalesce into verses.” “This Last Judgment will be a monument of interior devastations, truly a book of the war!” He would find it hard to publish the work, but “beauty” was not to be expected from a “galley slave.”

  Every day in early June 1917 brought new indications of an imminent Russian offensive. After the czar’s abdication and the transfer of power to a provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, the Russian minister of war, laid plans for a decisive battle on the eastern border of Austria-Hungary. Werfel feared that the summer leave he had already been granted — in practically every one of his letters, he spoke to Gertrud about these coming holiday weeks — might be canceled. At the same time, he received news from his father that was both confusing and heartening. The propaganda section of the Military Press Bureau in Vienna had asked Rudolf Werfel for his son’s field address, indicating that they were considering Franz as a propaganda lecturer in Switzerland. “I still can’t believe it’ll work out just like that,” he wrote to his beloved. Days passed without further news, and Werfel’s hopes, never high to begin with, began to fade.

  “With a thousand interruptions, little by little every day,” Werfel was now working on a theatrical piece called Stockleinen.[203] In this futuristic vision of Europe after the war, a tumultuous celebration of peace suddenly turns into the moment of birth of a new totalitarianism. A civil servant dressed in brown steps into a circle of friends and insists on dancing with Fräulein Gertrud. And suddenly, while Stockleinen circles the dance floor with the girl, “something evil” happens, “an injustice... People are no longer enjoying themselves... It is all the fault of the man in brown.” The second act takes place shortly after Stockleinen’s rise to power. The populace is divided into work crews doomed to spend the rest of their existence at forced labor operating huge banks of machines. Thousands try to escape from the dictator’s reign of terror, but the country’s borders are sealed. Wearing his brown uniform, Stockleinen personally supervises the monotonously rhythmic assembly lines. “Man will become perfect!” he proclaims, and to that end he forces the closure of all opera houses and bans all musical performances.

  At the end of June the feared Russian offensive began, with considerable ferocity. Werfel had to interrupt his work on the play. As fate would have it, Hodóv was in the midst of the first great artillery battle when an inquiry came from Corps Command: Was Private Werfel available? Vienna wanted to send him to lecture in Switzerland. “Once again, my incredibly bad luck in the military,” he wrote to Gertrud. Because the telegram had arrived in the midst of battle, “everybody was up in arms against me, thinking that I had... made a trip to Corps Command and ‘fixed’ things in my favor.” On the previous day, he had visited his friend Otto Pick, who was stationed nearby, but that visit had nothing to do with the inquiry. His superiors and comrades remained suspicious, however, and his regular furlough as well as his transfer to Switzerland became doubtful. Werfel feared that the whole matter would end up with the higher authorities in an inactive file, never to arise again: “They’ll consider the telegram tomorrow and decide.”

  The following day he was told — to his great relief — that he was now under the jurisdiction of the Royal and Imperial Military Press Burea
u in Vienna, authorized to leave the front without delay. Back in Prague, he was to await orders for his journey to Switzerland.

  He had hardly left Hodóv, traveling west, when the building in which he had lived and worked as a telephone operator for months suffered a direct hit from Russian artillery and was completely destroyed.

  In the research room of the military archive in Vienna[204], I sit turning the pages of a bundle of official documents labeled “Werfel, Franz.” Through the open window I see a massive air-raid bunker in the courtyard of the Stiftskaserne; it was built shortly before the end of World War II by the forced labor of prisoners of war. “I doubt that we’ll have a whole lot here,” says Herr Lipič, a jovial elderly gentleman wearing the gray dustcoat still favored by many Austrian civil servants. He speaks a broad Carinthian dialect; the words are spaced out slowly, and so are his physical motions. “I’m sure those brownshirts destroyed most of it,” he says as he ascends once more to the attic. Thousands of bundles of papers, documents, and war reports reaching back at least to the fifteenth century are stored in this administrative building. In the midst of tremendous clutter and mounds of dust, Herr Lipič continues his search for papers documenting Franz Werfel’s employment with the Military Press Bureau.

  “Here — took a while to dig that up!” Herr Lipič hands me a Werfel manuscript titled “Report on my LECTURE TOUR IN SWITZERLAND” and a document signed by Major Baron Schramm-Schiessl in which the Ministry of War is petitioned to grant Private Werfel a permanent assignment with the Military Press Bureau. Schramm-Schiessl points out[205] that since the outbreak of the war it has repeatedly been necessary to release the poet from his duties for reasons of health, and that his only active duty has been as a telephone operator in the office of the Regimental Command. Thus it would be most inadvisable to send Werfel to reserve officer’s school: he would be able to serve the fatherland far better as a propagandist than he could in the field. On September 27, 1917, Schramm-Schiessl’s urgent petition was approved by the Supreme Command.

  “Now you should go down to the basement,” Herr Lipič advises me. “Go see Herr Tepperberg, he should be able to give you a little more help.”

  Dr. Tepperberg, a young, very cooperative military historian, receives me in his dark cubbyhole of an office. The odors and dust clouds of centuries have settled on the furnishings. Dr. Tepperberg searches in wide Biedermeier cupboards for a copy of Franz Werfel’s “Hauptgrundbuchblatt,” his “main registration record.”

  Once he has found it, we peruse this document of the Royal and Imperial Military Administration for Bohemia. With a fine nib, in Gothic script, Private Werfel’s height has been recorded as 166 centimeters. His “size of footwear,” hair color (brown), and eye color (gray) are also recorded; the shape of his face, we learn, was “round,” his nose “proportional.” A “moderate deficiency of vision” is mentioned as a “possible defect.”

  “It appears he was inducted in the usual way in the general mobilization of July 31, 1914,” Dr. Tepperberg notes, and then proceeds to help me with the registration record’s section of “Changes.” The Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s bureaucratese is well-nigh incomprehensible. “But then, right after that, he’s ‘superarbitrated’? That means declared unfit for service... So, released, until September 1915? And then, on October 18, he’s released again? Incredible! So he didn’t have to go to the front until May 1916! Telephone operator — not one day in the trenches! But see here: promoted twice. But that didn‘t necessarily mean a reward. He didn’t make it very far: first to corporal, and then, in the beginning of June 1917, to platoon leader. Three stars. But platoon leader isn’t a very high rank for someone with a gymnasium education and, well, his level of culture. But wait a minute. After eleven months in the field, he receives the Iron Cross of Merit with the ribbon of the Medal for Bravery? I don’t believe it. How did he manage that? What did he get that for?”

  Alma Maria Mahler-Gropius

  The Military Press Bureau in Vienna was a safe haven for renowned Austrian writers[206] — Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Musil worked there as propagandists, along with Peter Altenberg, Roda Roda, Franz Blei, Leo Perutz, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In early August 1917 Franz Werfel joined it as well, after his lecture tour of Switzerland had been postponed until late fall.

  He arrived in the war-scarred capital of the monarchy in the high heat of summer. He rented a little room in the Graben Hotel[207], in the heart of town, close to St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Gertrud Spirk accompanied him to Vienna but then traveled on to the Tyrol. The hardships of the last months[208] had taken their toll on her: she had lost so much weight that Werfel insisted she take leave from her hospital duties and go to a health resort.

  In the press office Werfel wrote his first texts for the war machine he detested, mostly long newspaper articles, obediently sentimental fairy tales of the front that nauseated him. However, he was willing to produce them as the price of his release from that front. Among other things, he described newly opened retirement homes for soldiers and discussed the journals of deserters. “I have been given an incredible number of assignments by the office,” he wrote to Gertrud, “and I sit up late writing introductions for war exhibitions and similar delightful matters.” One of these introductions[209] was for a children’s book, a collection of illustrations and marching songs intended to demonstrate to the youngest of the nation how “the man of their fatherland” defended his home at the front in an “indestructible and joyful” manner, being able to “do a great deal and endure a great deal.”

  He had to stay in the office until 6:00 P.M. Then it was time to seek better surroundings than his tiny den in the hotel; it was always easy to let his friend from Prague, Egon Erwin Kisch, take him to his favorite haunt, the Café Central on Herrengasse. (The “Raging Reporter” was also working for the Military Press Bureau, despite his well-known antigovernment views.) Werfel liked Kisch’s enthusiasm and extreme temperament, and spent almost every free evening in his company.

  Kisch introduced the newcomer to his circle of friends at the Central[210]: the cocaine-addicted anarchist psychoanalyst Otto Gross; the littérateur and magazine publisher Franz Blei and his friend Gina, the adopted daughter and lover of Josef Kranz, president of the Depositenbank; Otfried Krzyzanowski, the impoverished poet and expert in the art of getting by; and many other characters of the Viennese vie de Bohème. Like its predecessor the Arco, the Central now became Werfel’s surrogate home. It was a large room with high ceilings and gray stone walls, full of cigarette smoke and dimly lit, a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, chess and card players.[211] Robert Musil, Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, and Egon Friedell came every day, as did the painter Paris Gütersloh, the actor Max Pallenberg, the composer Leo Fall, and many others for whom this café was home and office, gambling casino and restaurant all in one.

  Werfel often spent the whole night with this new circle.[212] After the late closing of the Café Central, they kept on going — arguing, telling stories, pursuing amorous escapades. Werfel entertained the group by reciting his own poems or singing arias from Italian operas. After those months in the field, he had an insatiable “hunger for people.” But he also had a bad conscience: in his letters to Gertrud, which he wrote surreptitiously during office hours, he proclaimed over and over again his longing for purity, rigor, and discipline. He beseeched his beloved to save him from the “atmosphere of corruption” into which he said he had fallen after his move to Vienna. “Is it base of me,” he asked, “to rely on you to such a degree in matters of morality?” And he kept going to the café every day.

  At the end of August 1917 Gertrud came to Vienna for a couple of weeks. The vacation in the Tyrol did not seem to have improved her health much, and she came down with a case of food poisoning. The lovers felt ill at ease, devoid of passion, almost like strangers. Franz made an effort to reconcile his ideal of the bride-to-be with the reality of the emaciated, sickly nurse. At first he took the responsibilit
y for the tension between them: “I must live through this period of moral crisis in which a new man beats against my old grimaces, struggling to be born,” he wrote to Gertrud at the end of September[213], after her return to Prague. “You mustn’t think that I am changing in regard to you. It is just that the entire content of my heart has to go through this hell with me.”

  A further postponement of his Swiss lecture tour worried him: once again the Austrian military attaché in Bern had canceled his dates. Intrigues between Major Schramm-Schiessl, Werfel’s patron, and some officers in the Supreme Command were endangering his position in the propaganda office: the Military Press Bureau had suddenly arranged a trip for him to the Italian war zone, during which he was to write reports from the front and also present himself to an inspection commission that would decide whether he was still unfit for active service.

  He had hardly gotten over the news of this assignment when he was informed that his childhood friend Franz Janowitz had fallen on the Italian front. “Only we, the more brutal ones, remain... The truly noble will be exterminated in this war,” Werfel wrote to Gertrud. Karl Kraus, a particular champion of Janowitz’s writing, had built him up as the antidote to the hated sentimentalist Werfel. Only a few hours before Janowitz died of his wounds in a small field hospital, he had converted to Catholicism. The conversion of his Jewish friend, with whom he had once played hooky and shared adventures at nightclubs and séances, preoccupied Werfel for weeks; he kept pondering the twin facts of his friend’s death and his decision to embrace Christianity.