Franz Werfel, a writer of enormous talent who yet fell continuously into the second-rate, remains one of those enigmatic figures who seem to represent not so much a literary tendency as the very problem of being a writer in the modern world. Here a new glimpse of Werfel is offered by the critic and poet Heinz Politzer, who has been a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY.  This article has been translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

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In a review of Franz Werfel’s poems, 1908-1945, Erich Kahler wrote (COMMENTARY, February 1948): “Franz Werfel was a bad author and a great poet. . . . His novels and plays show neither the spontaneous purity of a naive nature nor the achieved purity of an artistic conscience. . . . The poems [however] reveal his inner history, that childlike quality, that openness to the world. . . .”

But Franz Werfel’s greatness lies precisely in the unbroken unity of his statement. In his last collection of poems, on which he was working at the time of his death, he included incredibly vulgar verses from his early work; while parts of his novels, the conversation with the bath master in Barbara, Stephen’s journey in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the “most important moment of his former life” in Der Stern der Ungeborenen (“The Star of the Unborn”), and nearly all his short stories, particularly Das Trauerhaus (“The House of Mourning”), have a ballad-like force and density that will preserve them from old age and death.

The phenomenal unevenness of quality evident in Werfel’s work as a whole cannot be explained by the diversity of genres. It is more readily imputable to Werfel’s nature, to an exuberant boyishness that surrendered itself wholly to every possible source of inspiration, and to his journalistic dependence on his subject matter. Werfel gave himself, half as an enthusiast does to the thing he loves, half as a reporter to the thing he must deal with professionally. This twofold passivity on the part of his overflowing talent accounts for both the high and the low points in his work.

Was he, as Mr. Kahler says, lacking in “that ultimate honor and honesty which are the premise of genuine artistic devotion”? No, he possessed them to excess. He never dissembled, either in his person or in his works.

The comedian and journalist in him were authentic and superior. In his soul, playful improvisation dwelt side by side with the tragic and religious; fear of the teacher dwelt close by the fear of God, and since they were combined in this very living and very creative man, it is not fitting to weigh, measure, and turn them against each other.

Franz Werfel was a good and a bad writer, a little boy and a whole man. He reported his life in these times as faithfully and as falsely as few writers have done. He was a mystical reporter, a traveler and explorer in that unknown country which he once called “inwardness,” and precisely because his report is so often distorted by the immediacy and formlessness of direct perception, it attests the existence of an inner realm, the realm of the soul.

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A recent volume¹ of selections from early and for the most part forgotten or unpublished prose works by Werfel, put together by Adolf D. Klarmann with perspicacity and love, includes a sketch entitled “Cabrinowitsch.” Cabrinowitsch was one of the assassins of the Austrian heir-apparent in Sarajevo; on his hands, he had the blood of the First World War. Werfel, a youth of twenty-five reluctantly wearing uniform, saw the prisoner, tormented and sick to death, before he was shipped off to his certain end in the dungeon of Theresienstadt. “This face up in its cell, this kindness that has even ceased to be painful, this oblique friendliness, this transfigured weakness—I was shaken by the realization that this was the miraculously withdrawn face of the very last of men, of him who is thrust from the midst, who stands at the outermost edge of humanity. In these lost features, not otherwise than in the face of a hero, I discerned the beauty and dignity, the fatal, unthinkable loneliness of him who can never return to the midst of men. . . .” And: “All looked upon the shrunken aristocratic face with the darkly tranquil eyes, there on the bier. And into their rough souls the mystery penetrated. The men stood stiff at attention, embarrassed as though a superior were among them. A lamb had been charged with the guilt. This being wall receive nothing more, not even a human death. And for that reason it towers over them all.”

Here we have the whole of Franz Werfel: the sharp realism, accompanied by the evil eye of the born epic poet; the courage, the foolhardy courage of the ageless schoolboy, with which he plunged from reality abruptly into the depths of the mystery; the immediate juxtaposition of surface and inner meaning; the love and sympathy, the pathos; and finally a stylistic bravura so great as to cast a doubt upon the authenticity of the vision. Ordinarily the seer pays with his blood for his vision. But to Werfel visions were given in superfluity, as melodies were given to such composers as Mozart and Verdi. What was not given to Werfel was the strict measure of music, he did not mold what he saw, and the grace that befell him did not re-create him. He reported only what he observed, in a melody all his own that runs equally through his lyrical and his epic work.

He was a sublime reporter and he took over certain elements from the tradition of Austrian journalism whose last great representative, the satirist and pamphleteer Karl Kraus, was first his teacher and then his embittered enemy. It was from Austrian journalism that Werfel learned the art of the headline—the titles of his novels, as of each single one of his poems, are cabinet pieces of summation—it was here that he learned the sudden eruption of the narrative without preparation or exposition; the blurred ending, behind which stands the question mark of mystery, the mystery of a man or of all creation; the bon mot, through which, as through a crevice, one perceives the abyss; the strange fusing of psychology and musicality. But he also took over certain weaknesses of this essentially ephemeral genre: a certain flatness of perspective accompanied by a heavy laying on of color to simulate depth; the point for the sake of the point; a tendency to heap up words; a weakness for digression, and longwindedness; the obtrusive “I.” From the riches of the Austrian tradition and the abundance of his own imagination, he gathered at random; he had all he could do to keep pace with the flow of his own fancy; and so he had little time for arrangement and little energy for discipline. Even in his poems he was a reporter; but when in the course of a novel he paused and reflected, he became a great poet.

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He was a reporter also in his highly developed flair for the “interesting” and his gift for presenting it. As Erich Kahler noted, the story of his solemn vow with which Werfel introduced his Song of Bernadette was pure fabrication and showmanship. Nor did this most sociable of men ever suffer from the loneliness and seclusion of the modern creative artist, of Kafka or Joyce. There was always a banquet or an audience round him, whose applause he eagerly awaited. Franz Werfel was a festive, public phenomenon. Even when he was in exile and fatally ill, he collected people as a little boy collects butterflies. And this public, festive quality was another part of his Austrian heritage: Franz Werfel, the Prague Jew whom Hitler’s laws drove half around the world, bore in the depth of his being the imprint of the Baroque style that is preserved, gleaming and luxuriant, in the churches and palaces of his native land. Like Baroque literature, his work made a public affair of faith, of the mystery of life and death, of ecstasy and repentance—did this by the seduction of words, the melody of language, by the modern dexterity with which he reported metaphysical problems and experience. And like the Baroque language, his, too, with all its elaborate display, is fundamentally without structure.

Often he was aware of the faultiness of his style. Then he attempted to lend significance to his own weakness by giving music the pre-eminence over language, by declaring the wordless to be the home and the salvation of his poor, weak word. “In einem Felsengrab, Das aus Musik gehauen ist, Möcht ich einst schlafen gehen,” he writes in a late poem. (“Lay me to rest in a mountain grave carved out of music”) And in a fragment of a novel, Black Mass, written in 1919, he wrote: “Is song not the most sacred symbol of the lonely dialogue between God and man? The word bows down before music as a convict sentenced to life imprisonment bows down to a lonely ray of light in his cell at noon. The word is a poor sinner, confined to the prison of statement, but song, strong as a Samson, shatters the pillars of his house and raises the poor sinner aloft with unconquerable arms.”

Like all attempts at interpretation, this one has a certain apologetic quality and sidesteps the inner contradiction it set out to explain. With a style in which there is much local Prague jargon, much of the heritage of Viennese journalism, and a last gleam of the Hapsburg empire, of Maria Theresa no less than of Franz Joseph I, Franz Werfel was destined to plumb the depths of the modern soul.

Was he a Jew, a Catholic extra muros, a Russian Christian on the model of Dostoevsky? An answer would be meaningless. In a godless day, he presented local news of the kingdom of God. In this sense, his work is deserving of all honor.

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¹ Erzahlüngen aus Zwei Welten. I. Krieg und Nachkrieg. (“Tales of Two Worlds.” Volume I: War and Postwar.) By Franz Werfel. Edited by Adolf D. Klarmann. (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag.)