Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile

Lionel Steiman

Description

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 any early age, and although he never formally converted, he celebrated his own vision of it in his entire life's work. The origina sof that peculiar faith and the response it engendered in Werfel's work as he lived thorough 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.

Sujets

• Religión
• Philosophy
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554587964
• Langue: English

Extrait

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 K nste, 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 deno