Posterity has not been kind to Franz Werfel, born in 1890 and on his death in 1945 perhaps one of the most famous and successful German writers of the 20th century. In the English-speaking world, many people may recall The Song of Bernadette as a classic of Catholic piety, or The Forty Days of Musa Dagh as an Armenian national epic, but few, I suspect, would be able to recollect the author’s name, and of these, most would be surprised to learn that he was a German-speaking Jew from Prague. Even in Germany, Werfel’s reputation is a shadow of its former greatness.
Peter Stephan Jungk’s sensitive biography is a major atempt to rescue Werfel from obscurity. In this book Jungk shows just what a fascinating character Werfel was—but, ironically, he also offers many clues as to why Werfel’s star no longer shines so brightly, and probably never will.
Jungk sticks very much to Werfel’s life; there is surprisingly little here about his work. In an intriguing format, each chapter of the biography comes complete with its own running commentary in which the biographer recounts some of his experiences and conversations while doing research for the book—a sort of Citizen Kane in words. Sometimes pretentious or superfluous, these small commentaries nevertheless help supply an atmosphere of melancholy and faded memory which for the most part adds to the book’s charm.
The picture that emerges is of a man beset by a mass of contradictions which no one, certainly not Werfel himself, was ever able to figure out. This was so from his earliest years, when as the child of well-to-do Jewish parents he was introduced to Catholicism by his pious Czech nanny. Growing up as a German-speaking Jew in a Prague increasingly torn by Czech-German strife cannot have helped create a stable sense of equilibrium. But one gets the impression that the young Werfel was not very stable to start with. What he lacked most was structure: spoiled and indulged until it was far too late for his father to remedy the situation, young Franz was fat and shabby, with a liking for being humiliated and for playing the villain. He also had a pronounced tendency to be carried away by his emotions: the experience of hearing Caruso sing Verdi arias in 1904, for example, awakened in him a lifelong obsessional love of Italian opera.
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From the age of fourteen on, Werfel wrote compulsively. Ignoring his father and his studies, the teenager led the dissolute life of a “poet.” Behind the pose, however, lay real talent: at the age of twenty-one he published The Friend of the World, a breathless, ecstatic poem that overnight made him one of the great figures of German literary expressionism. He had arrived, and from then on was never to leave the center stage of German literature.
In early 1918, Werfel met Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler and one of the most notorious femmes fatales of fin-de-siècle Vienna. She was to prove both muse and nemesis for the rest of his life, and his relationship with her dominates the rest of the biography as much as Alma dominated her “man-child.” Not only did Alma turn Werfel away from poetry and toward the more profitable field of the novel, she was at least partly responsible for a major shift in his political outlook—from support for socialist revolution to a pro-Catholic, Austrian-conservative stance.
There followed years in which Werfel devoted himself to success, and achieved it, in historical novels like Verdi, The Pure in Heart, and Paul among the Jews. Each of these works bore some relation to their author’s concerns and personality, whether it was his strained attitude toward Jewishness, his fixation on Catholicism, his Bohemian origin, or his great love of all things Italian. Yet together these qualities did not make a whole; they were all aspects of a character which did not mesh.
In 1932 Werfel began perhaps his most important novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the first real publicizing of the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I. By the time it was published, in November 1933, this novelistic account of modern genocide had achieved an eerie relevance: Hitler had seized power in Germany. Two months after publication, Werfel’s novel was banned in Germany, as were eventually all his works. In the ensuing period of despair, Werfel tried everything to get around the fact that he had been banished from his readership. As Jungk unsparingly reveals, he even signed a declaration of loyalty to the new Nazi regime—it was, of course, rebuffed. Nor was this Werfel’s only instance of morally questionable behavior. Although on the one hand he now began (in works such as Hearken Unto the Voice) to emphasize his Jewishness, on the other hand he allowed himself to become unofficial poet laureate to the Austrian dictator Schuschnigg.
The rest of the story is one of flight and emigration. In 1938 Werfel and Alma, no longer welcome in post-Anschluss Austria, settled in France. There he wrote perhaps his most sensitive novel about a Jewish theme, April in October. In 1940 they managed to reach America, settling eventually in Southern California. During these last years Werfel devoted himself to Jewish and Catholic motifs, notably in Jakobowsky and the Colonel and, most famously, The Song of Bernadette. The latter, which tells the story of Bernadette Soubirous and the miracle of Lourdes, became one of the best-selling books in American publishing history. Mortally ill for the last two years of his life, Werfel completed a work of science fiction, Star of the Unborn, before dying of a heart attack in August 1945.
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These are the bare bones of a complex and eventful life and an enormous literary output. Jungk’s is a well-handled—and fair—treatment of an intractable subject. There are many fine moments, one of the more comic being the first encounter between the great poet-aesthete Rainer Maria Rilke and the young “genius” Werfel in 1913. Rilke had decided beforehand to embrace the author of The Friend of the World, but on coming face to double-chinned face with him, thought better of it and gave the shabby and unkempt youth an embarrassed handshake instead.
One thing is clear from Jungk’s account: the sheer awfulness of Alma Mahler. This, admittedly, is legendary, but Jungk amply confirms the legend. He reveals, for instance, that Alma got a Catholic priest to perform a “baptism of desire” on Werfel’s corpse, against the deceased’s previously expressed wishes. Even in death he did not escape her tyranny.
But the central theme dominating Jungk’s book is Werfel’s attempt to come to terms with the dichotomy between his Jewishness and his Catholic yearnings. Werfel loved the Church’s wealth of imagery, and its opulence, and he perceived an affinity between Catholicism and his beloved Italian operas, the supreme expression of the culture of the South. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that the Church possessed a definite structure, and was indeed in his view the last “spiritual system,” exercised a strong appeal for a man desperately in search of a direction which neither he himself nor Judaism as he understood (or misunderstood) it could provide.
From as early as World War I, Werfel considered himself a Christian writer. Yet he never converted, and he came, eventually, to a positive view of his fellow Jews. The man who wrote about Paul and his emancipation from Judaism became, after Kristallnacht, the author of the essay, “Israel’s Gift to Humanity” (1938). A cynic might say that this transformation was a product of historical necessity. Yet the pressures on the author of The Song of Bernadette to convert to Christianity were immense, and Werfel did not succumb.
In the new understanding which he reached of the two religions, Werfel saw not so much a contradiction as a mutual dependency: Catholicism and Judaism were both threatened by the forces of a spiritually dead materialism, the source of Nazism. Indeed, not only were they mutually dependent, their very rivalry over the ages was due to the fact that they were, ultimately, identical. This, of course, was a point of view which few on either side could accept, and at heart not even Werfel believed in it. To his last days his attitude to Judaism remained deeply ambivalent; if Alma went too far in baptizing him, it is also true that he did not want a Jewish burial.
Werfel once expressed the wish to have lived at the time of primitive Christianity, before the split with Judaism had taken place. In this connection, it is surely no accident that the work which has done the most to preserve his reputation, and in which he came closest to finding his true voice, was The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. This is the story, after all, of a persecuted people, Christian to be sure, but whose history and legends linked them closely with the Jews. That the Armenians were, in a way, Werfel’s ideal, a Christian surrogate for the Jews, is suggested by the fact that he modeled many of the Armenian characters in the novel on Jews he had known in Prague.
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There were moments, then, when Werfel could imagine a resolution to his inner conflict. Most of the time, however, he could not. Perhaps this does not matter; he was never really one for consequential thinking. Hans Mayer, the literary historian, is quoted in Jungk’s book to the effect that Werfel rarely, if ever, questioned himself or his work. He “picked” subjects, as if from the air; he was a man brimming with ideas, eager and impatient to realize them as long as the plot worked and the (florid) language flowed. That his subjects were quite disparate, his political and religious views confused, contradictory, and often hopelessly naive, was not an issue of central moment.
Franz Kafka, with his meticulous, almost ethereal prose and his penetrating vision of the human predicament, has become part of the backbone of modern culture; his friend and fellow German-speaking Jew from Prague, Franz Werfel, was, in a way, part of that same culture’s soft underbelly. He was driven by his emotions and his urges. His very corpulence, in contrast to Kafka’s gauntness, is almost a clichéd symbol for the attitude to life he expressed and embodied. Indeed, the opulence, diffuseness, and superficiality of Werfel’s remarkable output were themselves, I would argue, ironically related to his adoption of Austrian Catholic culture as his spiritual home. That culture could produce charming art, aesthetically pleasing and even uplifting in a pious way. It could not supply the hard, penetrating eye of a Freud, a Schnitzler, even a Wittgenstein or Musil or Kafka. For that one had to look to other spiritual sources, to Judaism or to German liberalism.
One need not be too harsh on Werfel, or those like him. Soft underbellies are, after all, a necessary part of the anatomy—and in one book, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Werfel did achieve greatness. Yet the outlook for the reputation of this prolific and strangely unfulfilled talent cannot be bright: if Werfel’s work was the flesh made word, it is undeniable that flesh perishes long before bones.
