January 16, 2020 21
ALONE.” While Gropius fought
bravely at the front, she sent him let-
ters complaining that he did not write
frequently enough. She wrote to him
of her longing for his “sacred append-
age” and described oral sex in florid but
surprisingly explicit language, a kind
of late-Romantic sexting. She charted
her feelings for Gropius and her other
suitors like a hypochondriac taking her
temperature. Does she love him? Him?
These measurements of sentiment
seem to have been part of a search for
authenticity by this grandly idealistic
yet emotionally erratic woman. She
was keeping tabs on her feelings not to
make sure that she was still loyal to her
lovers, but to make sure that she was
still loyal to herself—that she was not
missing out on something, or someone,
greater.
Gropius’s absence at the front took
its toll. Enter Franz Werfel, a well-
known and respected poet and play-
wright: “Werfel is a stocky, bow-legged
somewhat fat Jew with sensuous, bulg-
ing lips and slit, watery eyes! But he
wins you over.” He won her over com-
pletely at a performance of Mahler’s
Fourth Symphony. They exchanged
glances, then left “discreetly” at the in-
termission. Gropius, meanwhile, lay in
a field hospital, having been buried for
several days under a building’s rubble
after a grenade killed every other sol-
dier there.
The death of five-year-old Maria
Mahler was not the last tragedy of
motherhood for Alma. When Alma
realized she was pregnant again, she
was unsure if the father was Gropius
or Werfel. She gave birth to a boy two
months prematurely, following a night
of rough sex with Werfel that she be-
lieved had induced labor. The child,
who died after a few months, looked
just like Werfel. Through his grief,
Gropius behaved with great dignity to-
ward Werfel, much as Mahler had be-
haved toward him years before. Over
the next few years there was a divorce,
a bitter fight over custody of their
daughter, Manon, which Alma won—
and, though of little interest to Alma,
the birth of the Bauhaus.
Alma adored Manon, in whom,
she wrote to Gropius, “all our good
Aryan characteristics were merged,”
but the girl died of polio at eighteen.
Alma found Anna, her only surviv-
ing child, “alien” and “cool—superior
and Jewish,” and often fought with her.
“The leader of my opponents is always
Anna,” she wrote after one political
disagreement. “It is such a sorrow for
me to have given birth to a 150% Jew.”
Toward the end of Alma’s life, she and
Anna reconciled. “She was a big ani-
mal,” Anna told one interviewer. “And
sometimes she was magnificent, and
sometimes she was abominable.”Though the Werfel chapter of Alma’s
life began in World War I, its most fa-
mous episode came during World War
II. Alma was known to say, even after
the war, when all the atrocities were
undeniable, that she rather approved
of Hitler. Her anti-Semitism had grown
more pronounced during the unrest of
the 1920s. “The mob unleashed,” she
wrote in her diary in 1927. “THE EVIL
SEED OF JUDAISM BLOSSOMS.” But
she still surrounded herself with her
artistic, Jewish circle as well as Vi-enna’s high society. Up until the last
possible moment, Alma conducted her
salon, gave lavish parties, and contin-
ued her flirtations, including a heady
love affair with a well-connected Cath-
olic priest (though she was scandalized
when she heard after the war that he
had left the priesthood to live with a
woman).
It was not until the morning of Ger-
many’s takeover of Austria in 1938 that
she fled Vienna, and not until 1940 that
she and Werfel admitted they had to
leave Europe. Their escape, with Hein-
rich Mann and his wife and nephew,
aided by the heroic American Var-
ian Fry, was dramatic and dangerous.
Sixty-one-year-old Alma encouraged
the younger Werfel across the Pyrenees
while lugging a suitcase loaded with
jewels and the original score of Bruck-
ner’s Third. Throughout the six-month
ordeal of escape, Haste dryly notes,
Alma “had shown remarkable calm,
stoicism and resourcefulness—and an
almost complete absence of debilitat-
ing introspection.”
The Vienna of Alma’s youth was
gone forever, but she reestablished her
salon in the Hollywood hills of Los
Angeles, entertaining the émigré artis-
tic elite, feuding and flirting with them,
drinking heavily and enraging Werfel
with anti-Semitic comments: the Al-
lies were “weaklings and degenerate,”
Hitler and the Germans “supermen”;
the tales of concentration camps were
“fabrications put out by refugees.”
She rid herself of Werfel’s name when
he died and went back to being Alma
Mahler. In New York, where she moved
in 1951, she attended Leonard Bern-
stein’s rehearsals of her first husband’ssymphonies. She returned to Vienna
only once, to settle some financial mat-
ters, and there is footage of her as a
blousy old woman getting off the boat.
Albrecht Joseph describes her at this
time as “simply a bag of potatoes veiled
in flowing robes,” though still “impos-
ing, regal, radiating authority.”
Alma Mahler died in 1964, but her
hold on the men she loved is as intrigu-
ing as ever. “Alma was deeply roman-
tic,” Haste writes on the first page of
the book. “She needed to be loved
fiercely and also to feel love with a pas-
sion that fired her being. Only superior
creative talents inspired her love.” That
is the best explanation we are likely to
get. As for her legend, that was formed
by her own creative talent. Declining to
compose songs anymore, she changed
genres and began to compose instead
a life. She was the force of artistic dis-
cipline and inspiration for Werfel. She
was Kokoschka’s Bride of the Wind.
She was Mahler’s “Almschi!,” the muse
of his Tenth Symphony.
Haste sees Alma as “a modern
woman who lived out of her time.” I
think she was, on the contrary, a Ro-
mantic in a modern time, one who
worshiped at the altar of genius, and
found her own genius not in creating
art but in attempting to embody it. A
frustrated maestro who found satisfac-
tion in being an inspiration for some of
the century’s greatest cultural figures,
Alma’s real creation was her own leg-
end, an operatic event of both squalor
and grandeur. As with any work of art,
you do not look for accurate, factual
history there. You watch and listen and
admire. Surely that is all Alma ever
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