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Alma's relation to Judaism
Paulus Manker
Talking about Alma and her husbands Mahler and Werfel, we
have to talk about her relation to Judaism.
Joshua Sobol
Alma didn´t seem to be a great lover of Jews in general.
She was not a admirer of Jews, but she said once that she
could not live without, and she could not imagine her life
without Jews, that both, Mahler and Werfel, ment a lot to
her, and probably because they were Jewish. That played an
important part.
The funny thing is that Alma picked those two great persons
who were physically very non-attractive. On the other hand
with Gropius, who was very attractive, she did not seem to
develop a very deep relationship. It was shallow, it was short,
short lived, and somehow he bored her. That was my impression
when I read what she had to say about Gropius, the way she
dismissed him. It is very interesting to see that Alma speaks
with such great enthusiasm about his physical beauty, and
then she just dismisses him, and takes that unenchanting person
- physically speaking - of Werfel, who was a spoiled child,
and had this tendency to grow fat, and became very, very heavy
later.
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left: Gustav Mahler
center: Franz Werfel
right: Alma Mahler-Werfel |
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What attracted her to Jews? I am speculating here, but I think
that she felt that the Jewish spirit at that moment in history
was probably very much alive, and very much at the front line
of artistic expression. It had to do with the fact that Jews
were freshly emancipated, that Jewish young artists or writers
were given the freedom to join the European society in the German
cultural circle, to join German society only a few decades earlier.
And the urge to join, and to cut a place for themselves in that
culture made them extremely creative.
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left: Alma and Franz Werfel
right: Alma with Franz Werfel in Palestine, 1930 |
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I think it has also to do with the fact that the Jews were beween
two cultures or sometimes between three cultures, like Mahler
was. Mahler was born in Bohemia, he grew up in the German culture
in Vienna, he was neither Bohemian, he was nor Viennese, nor
German, he was a Bohemian Jew. And the fact that he grew up
on the crossing borders between these three cultures, fertilized
him very much. We hear it in his music, Leonhard Bernstein made
great efforts to prove that Mahler´s music is full with
Jewish motives, and he interpreted almost everything in Mahler´s
music as a transformation of Jewish themes. There is obviously
a very strong influence of Jewish themes in Mahler´s music.
But there ist also a very strong influence of Wagner on his
music, there is a very strong influence of the German tradition
on Mahler. And Werfel also came from a Jewish family, and grew
up on the borderland between Judaism and Christianity. He was
flirting with the idea of converting to Christianity. On the
other hand when he went to Palastine with Alma, this contact
with the new Jewish life in Palestine, the renewal of Jewish
existence there, shattered him, and he decided to learn Hebrew.
That influenced him in a very strong way: he decided not to
convert to Christianity, but he played with the idea to bring
together modern Judiasm and Christianity. Alma felt that these
Jewish artists and writers at that moment in history were extremely
meaningful to the history of art and literature. This was one
of the things that attracted her to them, or made them attractive
to her. Alma was interested in that front line of what was taking
place in art. This was one of the reasons that she was choosing
and picking out those Jews. |
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