ARMENIAN - Erevangala500

liked Romain Rolland, Auguste Rodin... it's an endless
list o f great personalities who all adored this femme
fatale. She fascinated men.
Unfortunately in her personal life as a mother she was
less lucky. Her daughter Anna Maria (from Gustav
Mahler) died at the age o f five. From Walter Gropius, the
famous creator o f the "Bauhaus" she had another daugh­
ter, Manon, in 1916. She also died at a very young stage.
In 1918 she became, still married with Walter Gropius,
pregnant by Franz Werfel. The child, named Martin, only
lived ten months. A series o f personal tragedies.
Why is this excurse to failed motherhood and painful
pregnancies so important for the background o f our prob­
lem with Franz Werfel? These facts seem to be the key to
the "40 Days o f Musa Dagh".
While Werfel him self mentions in his "note" to the book
just "famished-looking children, working in an carpet
factory" Alma Mahler-Werfel in her memoirs "Mein
Leben" (Alma Mahler -Werfel "Mein Leben" Fischer
Taschenbuchverlag, ISBN 3-596-20545-x) writes about
the days in Damascus, 1929:
"The owner (ofthes carpet-factory) guided us through his
establishment. We walked along the weaver's looms and
everywhere we saw the starved out children, with pale El
Greco-faces and over dimensioned dark eyes. They rolled
upun the floor, took spools and might, sometimes, have
swept the floor.
Franz Werfel asked the owner about these remarkable
children. "Oh, these poor creatures, I collect them from
the streets and I give them one pisatster per day, so that
thay should not die from starvation. They are children o f
Armenians, slaughterd bv the Turks. I f I do not shelter
them, they would die o f hunger. Nobody cares fo r them.
They can afford nothing, they are to weak... Werfel and I
left the place, nothing from now on seemed to be o f
importance or beauty..."
88
The book by Oliver Hilmes, W ITW E IM WAHN (literally,
"Widow in M adness"), looks into Alma M ahler-W erfel’s diaries
and reveals both her tendency to hysteria and her constantly
growing anti-Semitism. This attitude would seem to have been
more than ju st a remnant from the good old days o f the Empire,
and is on the contrary evidence o f her Aryan/Nazi assumption
o f superiority. In our cultural-historical consciousness, Alma
Mahler-Werfel is a kind o f sexual alter ego to such figures as
Zemlinsky, Mahler, Kokoschka, Werfel and Gropius, and she is
treated as such in Hilmes's study. I f one left aside the artists
mentioned, the book would read like a cheap paperback
account o f the life o f an intelligent, elegant and sensitive oppor­
tunist. But it is also the psychogram o f a woman struggling at
once for recognition and sexual satisfaction, a salon lady
drenched with the transient fragrances o f late Romanticism and
Impressionism.
This moving moment provokes, beyond any irony, two
questions:
How is it possible that AD 1929, fourteen years after the
tragic events o f 1915, starved out Armenian children,