Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile: From Prague to Beverly Hills

Franz Werfel—

The Faith of an Exile

From Prague to Beverly Hills

Lionel B. Steiman

Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890 and died in Beverly Hills in 1945, a popular and artistic success in Europe and America. Despite his Jewish birth and upbringing, he was attracted to Christianity at an early age, and although he never formally converted, he celebrated his own vision of it in his entire life’s work. The origins of that peculiar faith and the response it engendered in Werfel’s work as he lived through the horrific end of Jewish life in Europe are treated here. Werfel was not a systematic thinker, and, while his writing contains much that is philosophical and theological, his eclecticism and idiosyncracy render any attempt to trace the specific origins of his thought or its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers and theologians highly problematic. Thus, this work is neither biography nor intellectual history in the strict sense —it goes beyond, melding the concerns of both genres into a thoughtful, comprehensive portrait of faith at work.

Of interest to historians of the twentieth century as well as to students of that intriguing zone that lies between faith and art but is neither—or both.

Lionel B. Steiman teaches in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba.

Franz Werfel ca. 1927

Franz Werfel

The Faith of an Exile

From Prague to Beverly Hills

Lionel B. Steiman

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Steiman, Lionel B. (Lionel Bradley), 1941-

    Franz Werfel, the faith of an exile

Bibliography: p.

ISBN 0-88920-168-4.

1. Werfel, Franz, 1890-1945 - Criticism and

interpretation. 2. Werfel, Franz, 1890-1945 -

Religion and ethics. I. Title.

PT2647.E77Z87 1985      833’.912      C85-098076-3

Copyright © 1985

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

85 86 87 88 4 3 2 1

No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

For

Laura

and for

My Parents

Contents

List of Photographs

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter

1. Mystic Sources

2. The Great War

3. Social Conscience and Christian Quietism

4. Alma

5. Alma and Barbara

6. Alma and Franz: Political Counterpoint

7. Poetry and Politics: Werfel Between the Wars

8. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

9. Between Heaven and Earth

10. First Fruits of Exile: Cella's Austria and Embezzled Heaven

11. Historical Vision and Political Nostalgia: Twilight of a World, 1938-40

12. Vox Clamantis in Tusculum: Bernadette and the Bishop

13. A Special Relationship

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Photographs

Franz Werfel ca. 1927

Alma, Franz, and Manon in Venice, 1920

Alma and Franz in Semmering

Franz Werfel, Beverly Hills, 1941

Alma and Franz in their California home

Franz Werfel shortly before his death

Acknowledgements

The research for this book was carried out with financial assistance from the University of Manitoba Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, and the German Academic Exchange Service (D.A.A.D.).

The following facilities were used: the Akademie der Künste, West Berlin; the Leo Baeck Institute, New York; the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Special Collections in the University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; the Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main; the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar; and the libraries of Princeton University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Manitoba.

I wish to express my gratitude to Lady Isolde Radzinowicz (the former Mrs. Adolf D. Klarmann), literary executrix of the Franz Werfel estate, for her permission to quote from the Werfel Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, of which she is the curator, and for her hospitality and the reminiscences of Werfel she so kindly shared with me. Permission to quote from unpublished letters and postcards in the literary archive of the Schiller-Nationalmuseum has also been generously granted. Credit for the photographs included in this book belongs to the Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. I am especially grateful to the Curator, Daniel Traister, for his kind efforts.

Dr. M. W. Heiderich of the German Department at the University of Winnipeg assisted me in translating some of the more troublesome German passages into English and also ensured that the original retained in the notes was correct. The manuscript benefited greatly from the critical reading it received from Dean John L. Finlay. Special thanks are also due to Blanche Miller for her expert and patient typing, and to Laura Steiman for skillfully editing the manuscript for publication.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Introduction

Prag gebar mich, Wien zog mich an sich. Wo immer ich liege, werd ich es wissen? Ich sang Menschengeschicke und Gott.¹

Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890 and died in Beverly Hills in 1945, a popular and artistic success in both Europe and America, and one of the more fortunate members of the California contingent of the German literary emigation.² Although Jewish by birth and upbringing, he was attracted to Christianity at an early age, and, though he never formally converted to that faith, he celebrated his own peculiar vision of it in his entire life’s work. Werfel wrote in every genre, but it was as an authentic voice of early expressionism that he made his mark before 1914. Thereafter, his expressionist sensibilities blended with newly awakened religious impulses to produce that unique loving feeling for all creation which he called piety, a feeling of such intensity that it made all of his subsequent work a song of faith.

Werfel was involved briefly in the revolutionary action that erupted in Vienna as the Habsburg Empire disintegrated at the close of World War I, but shortly before that he had met and fallen passionately in love with one of the most remarkable women of that realm, the rich, beautiful, and reactionary widow of Gustav Mahler, a lover of Oskar Kokoschka and married to Walter Gropius. Revolutionary ardour could not compete with eros, and Alma Maria Schindler Mahler-Gropius added Franz Werfel to those artists of genius whose inspiration she felt it her special calling to foster. He remained devoted exclusively to her for the rest of his life, and she in turn became the primary personal influence in the increasingly Catholic and conservative outlook his work began to exhibit. Although he was sometimes jealous of her attending mass, as if that were a kind of infidelity on her part, Alma insisted that Werfel was really more religious than was she.³

The vision that sustains the body of his work is neither Christian nor Jewish in any conventional sense, nor is it simply a mixture of the two. It is, rather, almost iridescent, with a creatively dynamic tension born of the conflicting elements in his origin: as a child he was nurtured by a pious Slav woman in a Jewish home in the midst of a German community surrounded by a vastly larger Czech population. Growing up amidst such multiple and complex antipathies could have impelled the future writer in any number of directions. It certainly was responsible for two dominant tendencies in his creative orientation: the need for total communion with his fellow man, epitomized in his cry, My only wish, O Man, is to be akin to thee, the motto and theme of Werfel’s expressionism; and a corresponding need to affirm a social reality transcending political and national conflicts.

Of all the national or religious groups to which Werfel belonged — whether Jewish, Catholic, European, or American—none honoured him so much as did the Armenians, whose tragic fate at the hands of the Turks he depicted in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933). He was mobbed and feted by Armenians in Paris and New York, where an Armenian priest proclaimed in a sermon that, while his people had always been a nation, it was Franz Werfel who first gave them a soul.⁴ The transfer of Werfel’s remains from Hollywood to Vienna thirty years after his death was possible only with the financial assistance of the Armenian community in the United States, which also in that year helped finance a Werfel Symposium and the publication of a large volume of his occasional writings.⁵ The Forty Days of Musa Dagh did more than anything else to publicize the mass murder of the Armenian community in Turkey during World War I. Tragically, that publicity was insufficient to save other peoples from similar disasters. In 1939 Hitler boasted that he could proceed against the Jews with impunity because, he asked rhetorically and with scorn, who remembered what had happened to the Armenians only two decades before? Nevertheless, he had banned the only widely available book which told what had happened.⁶

Werfel’s novel was not the exploitation of a hitherto neglected horror story by a popular writer needing material for a bestseller. It is informed by a deep commitment to historical authenticity and factual accuracy. What makes it especially germane to the present study, however, is the range of affinity it reveals between problems in the Armenian experience and those of Werfel’s own identity as a European Jew of German culture married to a Catholic woman. The dynamic empathy this generated enabled him to pursue the Armenian tragedy to its denouement at a time when ominous parallels could already be detected between it and the predicament of Europe’s Jews. In the novel’s central characters and problems are projections of elements crucial to the cultural and political definition of its author, and the book is thus indispensible to any study of identity and action in a disintegrating cultural symbiosis.

In 1929, Werfel had come to terms with an earlier period of disintegration, that of the world that had nurtured him and in the destruction of which he had participated. Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit begins in the old Habsburg Monarchy and ends in the first Austrian republic. It shows all human striving to be vitiated by pride and illusion, and the only real value it holds out is the inarticulate piety of a simple woman. The novel’s unseen and unheard protagonist, Barbara, is Werfel’s own childhood nanny Babi, and while her part in the novel’s action is relatively insignificant, her spirit pervades it entirely. The novel also served as a platform from which Werfel denounced the activism into which he and so many other writers had been seduced during the course of the war, and much of its dialogue constitutes a bitter diatribe against what Werfel saw as the root of modern ills.

He attempted a more systematic and overtly polemical exposition of the fundamental modern evil in a series of lectures and articles beginning in 1930. He continued his tiff with modernity in his subsequent creative writing, culminating in the posthumously published Star of the Unborn, which depicts a world in which all the material aspirations of rational, secular humanism have been fulfilled, but which is still beset with the same spiritual malaise that had plagued it amidst want, and for which the only solution proposed is Catholicism.

This quasi-religious, mystical outlook determined Werfel’s response to fascism and the destruction of the secular foundations of his existence in central Europe. His one attempt to deal directly with this crisis was the novel fragment Cella oder die Überwinder, set against the backdrop of the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. This work contains Werfel’s best political and social writing, that is, his least polemical and least didactic writing, and therefore his most convincing realism. The reasons for his inability to complete the novel are related to his highly ambiguous identity in the very context about which he was writing. He evaded, or transcended, this ambiguity by engaging the crisis of his time on a plane far removed from the categories of political discourse or literary realism. And so, instead of establishing his name in exile as the author of a novel exploring the predicament of the victims of fascism and the possibilities for action open to those who would resist, Werfel presented America with a tale of frustrated spirituality, Embezzled Heaven (1940), and won its heart with his Song of Bernadette (1941).

This abandonment of the political for the mystical is characteristic, for Werfel’s whole intellectual life was a wavering between the realm of social reality, in the face of which he could be ruthlessly honest, and that of a mystical religiosity, in which secular distinctions dissolved, a realm accessible not through sacrament or confessional but only through acceptance of the world and identification with all its life. Whether Werfel wavered between these realms or conducted a lifelong dialogue between them⁷ depends upon perspective and value. Like Solzhenitsyn, he saw the division between good and evil running not between classes or nations but through the middle of every human heart. Working from this conviction, his analysis of the protracted European crisis of the interwar period tends to reduce political, social, and economic conflict to the point that the only real choice is between what is oriented toward transcendent reality and what is bound to natural appetite, or, as the English title of a collection of his essays has it, Between Heaven and Earth. In 1939, Werfel characterized his entire creativity since 1910 as attempting to convey his horror of the morally uncommitted, ice-cold, godless human being, posing against it a world-affirming nature that proposed to cosmic brotherhood of all living and mortal beings.⁸

Much scholarly work has been done to show the fundamentally and increasingly apolitical, other-worldly, and therefore conservative character of Werfel’s output after World War I.⁹ All of his stories and plays with political themes treat political activism as somehow inevitably doomed. The Utopian projects of a royal reformer founder in Juarez und Maximilian; a peasant revolt goes awry in Bockgesang; and in Schweiger the soul of the protagonist is consumed by socialism, psychiatry, and lust for power. All these works portray the hypocritical idealism and inhuman folly of attempts to bring human destiny under rational control, especially by the method of political activism. Although acknowledging the value of individual works of social melioration and by implication the shortcomings of the society in which they are wrought, Werfel never subjects the status quo of a given society to systematic criticism. Even though often presented in the darkest of colours, established social orders enjoy almost unassailable legitimacy by simply existing; they provide an immovable backdrop against which the plots of activists unwind with bloody bathos.

The absence of a consistent critical social perspective in Werfel’s vision and his resistance to the implications of his compassionate insight that might have served one suggest the syndrome recently characterized as therapeutic nihilism, symptoms of which were imputed to a number of Viennese writers of Werfel’s generation. The syndrome originated in an attitude prevalent in the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna around 1850, and it became a major trend in Viennese thought. It

denoted systematic refusal to prescribe remedies for fear of perpetuating quack cures. Although originally therapeutic nihilism had presupposed that nature’s healing powers would suffice, in its extreme form this doctrine encouraged neglect of patients and indifference to human life. Outside the Medical Faculty a conviction that no remedy could relieve suffering or forestall decline infected such thinkers as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and Albert Ehrenstein.¹⁰

Werfel grew up in Prague and may not have breathed the air of therapeutic nihilism when he moved to Vienna at the end of the war, but he did appear to believe that any intervention in the body politic was bound to do more harm than good. He liked to think of himself as nonpartisan rather than conservative, and his work is full of implications both progressive and reactionary. During the war he had acquired a certain notoriety as a pacifist and for railing against the bourgeoisie before an audience of Swiss proletarians, and at the war’s end he appeared briefly as radical orator thundering at the ramparts of high finance at Vienna’s Schottentor. But as the passionately loving consort of Alma Mahler, he utterly rejected this past and allowed the mystical religious tendencies in his earlier work to return with all the combined strength of bitter resentment and fervent hope.

To some this appeared the result of weakness or merely opportunism. To others it betokened an open, honest, and generous spirit. Karl Kraus had recognized in Werfel’s prewar poetry a lyric talent of the first rank, but by 1916 was accusing the poet of an unforgivable betrayal of his gift.¹¹ Stefan Zweig, on the other hand, despairing over the destruction of prewar intellectual brotherhood and the prostitution of language to the passions of war, found new hope in Werfel, whom he enthusiastically labelled Germany’s only great poet.¹² Later, in the thirties, the more radical and more complicated Walter Benjamin saw in Werfel just another ultrareactionary mind,¹³ but around the same time Thomas Mann called Werfel the most talented German writer of the present generation.¹⁴

Neither in Europe in the late thirties nor, after 1940, in his American exile did Werfel emerge as a significant spokesman of the antifascist cause. He did write articles in praise of the cultural and historical importance of various European peoples threatened by fascism, and he continued to address literary groups on the moral crisis of contemporary European culture. Alma, however, always discouraged any explicit political interest on his part, not only because of her own political prejudices but because of her concern for his work and his health. From 1938 on, deteriorating health stimulated Werfel’s necromantic fascination with death and enhanced the sweet morbidity of his lyric. When he and Alma reached the safety of America in 1940, he wrote The Song of Bernadette to fulfill a vow made in Lourdes during a respite in their flight from the Nazis: he would devote a book to the town’s saint if he should ever reach America. The commercial success of so spiritual a novel quite surprised Werfel, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and he received a hundred thousand dollars for the film rights to it. It also convinced many readers that its Jewish author had indeed converted to Catholicism. But the simple faith celebrated in The Song of Bernadette was inspired as much by Werfel’s love for Alma’s daughter Manon, whose death in 1935 at the age of nineteen touched him more deeply than anything else in his life, as it was by any gratitude he felt toward the saint of Lourdes.¹⁵

In 1942 the couple moved from New York to Los Angeles, where they settled into a comfortable Beverly Hills bungalow. The author lent his name to drives and appeals in aid of the war effort and various refugee causes, and he participated in radio broadcasts with other exile writers whose services were sought by the American government. A series of heart attacks in the fall of 1943 almost killed him, and for the two remaining years of his life he felt himself in a race with death to complete Star of the Unborn. This futuristic novel is many things —a settling of accounts by the author with himself and his time, a sustained polemic against the entire heritage of the enlightenment, an exercise in mystic religiosity, and a weird extravaganza of the fantastic. What sustains it all, however, is Werfel’s unending fascination with what he believed to be the infinite paradoxes of human life and the insoluble riddle of history. He liked to say that, with reference to the final goal, everything here below is paradoxical —that what is true in reality is a lie in art; that history moves forwards and backwards at the same time; and that man could not die if he were not immortal.¹⁶

Are such aphorisms profound truths or the specious wisdom of one seeking refuge from social responsibility? From a radical perspective, Star of the Unborn —and much of Werfel’s entire work—is less an honest encounter with the time than an elaborate evasion of the time’s most pressing questions, and the philosophical refinement with which Werfel dressed that evasion still left his position naked before the imperatives of logic and his own insight. But what are the possibilities open to those who measure the world around them by its highest ideals and wish to bring the two into greater accord? Is a commitment to truth incompatible with a commitment to change? Must he who wishes to represent reality refrain from involving himself in efforts to change it? Or is the truth of social reality disclosed only to those actively engaged in the conflicts, the outcome of which determines its shape? Can the conditions of free and independent intellectual activity exist apart from an active and on-going commitment to their maintenance and defence? Should one conceive of intellectuals and society as discrete entities in mechanistic relation, or is their relation more properly conceived as reciprocally constitutive and dialectical?¹⁷

As for Franz Werfel, the question remains: what should he have done? A British student of Austrian literature recently indicted him and most of his contemporaries for their political immaturity and ineffectiveness, without, however, claiming that it lay within their power to influence events.¹⁸ Two of Werfel’s younger contemporaries, writing with the bitter taste of exile still fresh, maintained that Germany could have been saved if the prominent artists and intellectuals had made a stand to defend reason and morality against barbarism.¹⁹ Werfel himself considered everything he wrote, especially after 1930, to be a defence of morality against barbarism, but he did not share the political assumptions on which the latter judgments were based, nor did he share their vision of what it would mean for a society to be saved. He had powerful critical insight indeed, but he turned it more on those who presumed to improve the world than on individuals and conditions he knew to be responsible for perpetuating its evils. Instead of trying to elaborate a political universe in accordance with his vision of what human society should be, and deriving from the one a strategy for realizing the other, Werfel nurtured his preoccupation with the reality he perceived, singing the loving acceptance of existence that was the basis of his mystic faith.

That faith is the subject of the present study—its origins and the response it engendered in Werfel’s work as he lived through the critical transformations that spelled the horrible end of Jewish life in Europe. This study is neither biography nor intellectual history in the full, strict sense. Werfel was not a systematic thinker, and, while his writing contains much that is philosophical and theological, the eclectic and idiosyncratic nature of his use of these disciplines renders any attempt to trace the specific origins of his thought or its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers and theologians highly problematic. Accordingly, no attempt will be made here to do so.

In pursuing these themes, this study portrays Werfel’s development and interaction with history by integating analysis of biographical material with critical analyses of his major prose works. How a writer reflects in his work the world he lives in is a question admitting of no definitive answer, but the work of one who insisted as intensely as did Franz Werfel on his responsibility before God and man deserves study as much for its value as a document of social and intellectual history as it does for its value as literature. One hopes that the limits and possibilities of responsible action so disclosed will provide understanding of the past and instruction for the future.

Chapter 1

Mystic Sources

It was the heyday of liberalism, when agnosticism in a more or less outspoken form had become the prevalent fashion. Did not Judaism present itself in obsolete religious practices and rituals which practically nobody observed? The prevalent relationship to it, even among the older generation, was a benevolent kind of humor.¹

So wrote Robert Weltsch, a prominent spokesman of the Jewish emigration, in recalling the religious atmosphere in Prague around the turn of the century. Recalling a visit to a synagogue in his youth, Franz Werfel wrote in his diary of the mystic dread struck in his heart by the candles’ glimmering aura, the sign of something both miracle and mystery, preserve of the sacred and sign of God’s presence. Standing outside with the other boys while the men observed special prayers for the souls of the departed, young Werfel divined a dreadful fervour, as if a veritable miracle were transpiring within: I thought that the dead were walking about with the living, in some kind of material presence much too sweet, much too tender even to be imagined. It was certainly not to be imagined in the synagogue at any rate. Although Werfel continued to nurture this mystical aesthetic of death as a prominent motif in his creative work, the rest of his childhood experience of Judaism only instilled in him the desire to have nothing further to do with it.² If he consciously felt driven away from that world of his fathers, it was not because of any prevailing liberalism or agnosticism, which were to be his lifelong enemies, but because the city of his birth had given him needs which that world could not satisfy.

Prague was the mystic city; its rich spiritual and ethnic textures fed its writers into a variety of schools. German, Czech, Jewish, and Austrian elements permeated the atmosphere in which Prague’s Germans grew up and which nourished the creativity of writers.³ In 1900 the city had a population of 450,000, of which 34,000 were Germans; of these Germans, 26,342 were Jewish. There were much smaller minorities of Croats, Magyars, and others, and almost 90 per cent of the city’s population was Czech.⁴ Despite their relatively small numbers, the Prague Germans had two major theatres, a concert hall, two Hochschulen, five Gymnasien, and four Oberrealschulen, along with two daily newspapers, major community centres, and other signs of an active cultural life. Yet theirs was a dying community, aging and declining in numbers, losing political control to the Czechs, and dependent on the Jews for infusions of wealth and talent.

Since German nationalism was based on a racial exclusiveness, there was no real symbiosis of the two elements in the German language group, and although the Czechs of Prague made no distinction between Germans and Germanized Jews, hating both alike, the Germans did, especially with respect to the strict segregation of völkisch and liberal (i.e., mainly Jewish) organizations in the German section of the Charles University. In other areas, however, there was a high level of Jewish participation in German community organizations; criteria of membership appear to have been socioeconomic rather than religious. This high degree of integration was due to the relative homogeneity of the Jewish population. Unlike Vienna and Berlin, which had massive influxes of poor Jews from Eastern Europe with a markedly foreign flavour, Prague had maintained a stable Jewish community. Its small growth came largely from the surrounding Bohemian areas; no Jewish working class had developed as in other central European centres; and most Jewish newcomers acculturated to the Germans, with the Jews in the poorest wards showing the strongest tendency to identify with the Czechs. Most Jews preferred to have their children educated in German schools, and between 1880 and World War I they sent each year on average only 425 pupils to the Talmud Torah, in contrast to over 3,000 sent to the public primary and secondary schools.⁵ The Germans for their part encouraged Jewish participation in community life but drew the line at family and private intermingling. Jewish and gentile Germans in Prague needed each other to survive, but it was only in public organizations that their mutual needs were served. In their private worlds, a silent, persistent segregation ruled, with the traditional bourgeois separation of domestic from professional life obscuring for many the real cause of this segregation.⁶

Some Prague Jews doubtless did suffer multiple discrimination and multiple alienation as members of a minority within a minority. School children spotted with German textbooks were sometimes beaten up by Czechs because of them, but these same children, even while getting their hard-won reverence for German culture, often remained totally unfamiliar with their gentile German neighbours. The increasing anti-Semitism after the turn of the century roused some Prague Jews, most notably Max Brod, from indifference to a fervent concern with Jewish problems, which led them to Zionism and some even to Palestine.

The interplay of elements from the city’s mystic past cannot be calculated exactly, but it certainly had some effect on the decision of so many of Werfel’s contemporaries to pursue unconventional intellectual paths, in most cases taking them away from the city of their birth. Some, like Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Weiskopf, and Rudolf Fuchs, joined the literary contingent of the political left, while others perceived only that one epoch was ending and became mired in hopelessness or mysticism. Rilke, neither Jewish nor mired, spoke for many who were: Die Könige der Welt sind alt und werden keine Erben haben.⁷ (The kings of this world are old, and they shall have no heirs.) His lines have become an epitaph for that age.

Franz Kafka was one of the few significant Jewish German literary talents to remain in Prague, and he alone refused the comforts of any solution of whatever form, political, religious, or mystical. He tried them all, finding illusion or compromise in every one of them. He hungered for answers, simple answers of the sort that sustain simple folk, but he could find none. In one of Kafka’s tales⁸ an artist literally starves despite an abundance of food around him. He would gladly have eaten his fill, but none of it was to his taste. He could not eat it, and so he had to starve. Likewise did Kafka refuse that mystical ecstasy which was Prague’s unique historical legacy, and which she provided her writers in such various forms.⁹ Franz Werfel had been close to Kafka and visited him regularly when he was dying in a sanatorium outside Vienna. Werfel was even closer to Max Brod, whose unique blend of rationality and mysticism could only have come from this city of astrologers, miracle rabbis, and sundry religious heretics. The city of Rabbi Loew’s Golem, rediscovered in Gustav Meyrink’s fantastic novel, was also that of Rudolph II’s court astronomer Tycho Brahe, the subject of Max Brod’s finest novel. Werfel had attended table-raising seances at Brod’s, and their subsequent correspondence reveals that the adolescent Werfel took the sessions very seriously.¹⁰ The mystic impulse so fundamental to the novels of Werfel’s late period was active in his youth, nurtured in the exotic mysteries of old Prague, tempered and transformed by his increasing clerical affinities and cosmopolitan experience.

Yet there was something about the city that Werfel’s whole nature resisted. Even while acknowledging the superiority of Meyrink over Kafka in touching the nerve of Prague, thus aligning himself with mysticism rather than realism, Werfel asserted that for the non-Czech the city had no reality. Instead, it was a daydream, a paralyzing ghetto, a hollow world of sham and hallucination, offering no genuine experience.¹¹

The universal sympathy and yearning for human embrace that pervaded Werfel’s artistic personality also had sources deep in his childhood. No human influence on him was stronger than that of his Czech nurse Babi, who remained his model of love and piety—in short, of humanity. Through her he first experienced reality, and at an intensity that only childhood can know. Yet Babi was the only Czech person he really knew; despite peopling his novels with Slavs, he never learned the language. Werfel’s deepest wellspring of life was tapped by his Czech nurse but fed by scarcely any other Czech streams, and that great yearning for losing himself in human contact was really generated by lack of contact with Babi’s brothers and sisters, that wider Czech humanity across the city and in the countryside. Stationed in the Bohemian countryside during his prewar military service, he experienced more strongly than ever his love of simple people. The strength of this feeling expressed a need awakened by Babi but scarcely met since he had left her care. It was Babi’s wild cherry scent that became a leitmotif in Werfel’s autobiographical novel Barbara, not the air of fresh paint or pungent cleaning agent always about the sparkling corridors of the Werfel home in Prague. A distant mother preoccupied with maintaining the facade of home life and a father devoted to business and securing his children’s place in the world left in their son a longing not satisfied by the larger society around him.¹² There was less informal social contact between Jews and non-Jews in Prague than in any other major urban centre,¹³ yet the most deeply human influence on young Werfel came from the source to which he could not return but could only pursue by cultivating the mystic faculty it had brought to life in him.

Familial themes retained an important position in Werfel’s work all his life, but in none of his books do any members of his family figure directly, and behind none of his many characters can one detect the inspiration of particular family members.¹⁴ Partly this was because of the distance his parents had maintained, and partly it was because of resentment for their failure to inculcate any truly emotional religious identity. Werfel’s friend Willy Haas recalls that his own grandfather read him Bible stories in the manner of a Voltaire, relating exotic customs along with rationalist explanations. Werfel did not get even this much, and, while resenting the neglect of his spiritual birthright, he yet dreamed of a final blissful reconciliation with his father in some higher sphere.¹⁵

Like most of his contemporaries, Werfel was educated in a classical German gymnasium by clerics. The one he attended was run by the Piarist order. It was regarded as the most socially exclusive school in town, attended by an ethnically mixed but economically cohesive upper-middle class elite. About half Werfel’s classmates during his eight years there were Jewish, and although most of the teachers were monks they did not take their religion seriously and exploited their anti-Semitism more for humorous than for social or theological purposes.¹⁶ More than likely, the butt of these jokes were the strange inhabitants of the distant shtetls of Galicia and the Bukovina, who were regarded by Czech Jews as rabble to whom they felt bound only by their common Russian enemy.¹⁷ Thus the Piaristen pupils could feel safe, as they neither knew nor identified with the intended victims of their teachers’ barbs.

Werfel