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

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Lionel B. Steiman, who teaches in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, has written an important chapter of social history, as well as the history of a writer. Werfel was not a systematic thinker, yet he tried, with eclecticism and idiosyncrasy, “to discharge social anxiety by translating perception of socioeconomic phenomena into moral and religious terms,” with the political implications of his words favoring those established in wealth and power, while his “instinctive sympathies were with ordinary people.” A paradoxical personality indeed, well worthy of Steiman’s concise analysis.

Werfel, born a Jew, earned literary renown by his contribution to early expressionism. A political activist until the age of 30, he later became convinced that all political activism was doomed and certainly not a writer’s task. His submissive and mystical love for Alma Maria Schindler Mahler-Gropius-Werfel (a collection to which we could add Kokoschka’s name, although she never married him), a rich and reactionary woman who specialized in the fostering of artists of genius, explains some of Werfel’s conservatism, but Steiman examines Werfel’s religiosity and mystic faith in far greater depth. He sees Werfel as perceiving very clearly social realities, but resorting to “quasi-mystic transcendentalism” for his analysis of the why of reality and the prescription of what it should be.

Werfel is probably best known for his account of the massacre of the Armenians, in the novel The Forty Days of Musa Daugh (1933). Hitler, of course, banned the book, but the world, thanks to an English translation (New York: Modern Library, 1934), could have learned from it that genocide was possible. It didn’t. And neither did Werfel, who with “cosmic optimism” believed that “if Atilla the Hun had served God’s purpose, then so too might Hitler.”

Werfel’s exile in France and later in the United States was a comfortable one. His wife had money and their lifestyle did not decline. Furthermore, he received $100,000 for the film rights of The Song of Bernadette, a novel he had vowed to write if he reached America safely.

Steiman is critical of Werfel’s faith and work; he sees the author as a “marginal man” who lived on the line “between Judaism and Christianity, sensuality and asceticism, left and right, earth and heaven.” The tension in his life led to productivity, his “bad conscience” marred his prose work.

Steiman’s bibliography is exhaustive, his notes thorough. His study of Werfel will be invaluable to historians, theologians, and literary critics. And the story of Franz Werfel — poet, Jew, and Catholic writer — should be of fascination to anyone interested in our political, intellectual, and literary past.