Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood by Jungk Peter Stephan

Author:Jungk, Peter Stephan [Jungk, Peter Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Published: 2012-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

In the summer of 1934, while Werfel was working on the second version, Austrian Nazis staged an abortive coup d’état in Vienna. Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated, but the government crisis the German planners had hoped for did not occur. Although he declined the offer at first, Kurt von Schuschnigg, until then the minister of justice and education, became chancellor and continued on the dominant clerical-authoritarian course set by his predecessor.

Franz Werfel expressed his approval of Schuschnigg’s appointment in a Viennese weekly[489], saying that the personality of the new chancellor, in addition to his qualities as a statesman and politician, included “three of the noblest human values: religious depth, incorruptible spirituality, great artistic talent and education” — thus a “trinity” that personified the “God-given harmony of the Austrian character... What a gift of fate, and hopeful fate for Austria, that it has found, on the very edge of the abyss, this distinguished and firm hand to guide it.”

But even in the summer of 1934, Werfel seemed not to have fully realized the dangers that truly lurked in the Nazi abyss: at the end of August, after he had finished the second version of the Bible play, he wrote to the theater critic Julius Bab[490] that although his new work had been written primarily with an American audience in mind, he would regard himself happy if he could “have his say” in Germany with a play that served “Israel and the Bible.”

Alma Mahler-Werfel’s parties in the festive marble-clad rooms and in the great garden of the villa on Hohe Warte continued unabated. Up to two hundred guests[491] often greeted the dawn here, and the closest friends were served breakfast. After Schuschnigg’s appointment to the chancellorship, Alma invited increasing numbers of ministers, highly placed civil servants, and diplomats, introducing them to representatives of cultural life, in the hope that such connections might be useful to both sides. Schuschnigg himself, who liked Werfel’s work, was a frequent guest at these soirées, being an old admirer of Anna Mahler’s and hoping to see her there.

Franz Werfel withdrew more and more from this hectic social life. During the last few years, the tumult about his literary success and his person had become a little too intense, and the speed with which political reality was changing a little too rapid. He was forty-four years old and needed time to collect himself, to find himself again; a quarter-century had passed since he had recited a few poems — breathless with excitement — to Max Brod from what was to become the collection The Friend of the World. Now, in 1934, Brod turned fifty, and Werfel’s fame had surpassed that of his erstwhile mentor by far. Ten years ago, his friend Franz Kafka had died; in an elegiac letter[492] to Kafka’s confidant, Dr. Robert Klopstock, Werfel wrote at the end of 1934 that he had always regarded Kafka as a “messenger from the King... who, tragically, had been given too great a share of the supernatural. Franz Kafka is one who was sent down to us, one of the great elect.

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