A Vivacious Viennese
KUNITZ, DANIEL
A Vivacious Viennese Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries 1898-1902 Selected and translated by Antony Beaumont Cornell. 494 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Daniel Kunitz Managing editor, "Paris Review" On...
...She knew poet-essayist Karl Kraus and eagerly read each number of his paper, Die Fackel, as it appeared...
...This duality in her psyche, her siraultaneous attraction to and hatred of Jews, was not unique...
...Unfortunately a rabid anti-Semite...
...First his intimate caresses, so close —and then no satisfaction...
...She consigns her flirtatiousness and musical ambitions to a childish past, and ends by accepting the more self-deluding pipe dreams of adulthood...
...both married Jews...
...Yom Kippur, of course, is a fast day...
...both were put at the center of the cultural elite and given far more thorough educations than most children then or now...
...Despite such attractions as racy anecdotes and new information, it is enraging to consider what this book might have been, namely, a first-rate introduction to the overlapping world of Vienna's cultural life circa 1900...
...And now I have a strange feeling that my love for him is deep & genuine...
...Whatever the disappointments of their marriage, Alma stayed with Gustav until his death in 1911...
...I called on Gustav—in the afternoon we were alone in his room...
...The passage's breathtaking nonchalance, coming, as it does, toward the beginning of the diaries, serves as a first indication that Alma Schindler would grow into someone quite other than a typical Austrian hausfrau...
...Still, even while referring to "this degenerate race" or apostrophizing her lover Zemlinsky with "you Jewish sneak, keep yourhook-nosed Jew-girl," shenever displays the same ignorance as Beaumont, who in one footnote writes of "the feast of Yom Kippur...
...Daughter of the once-famous landscape painter Emil J. Schindler, and stepdaughter to his protégé, painter Carl Moll (whom Alma's mother, Anna, married after Schindlern death in 1892), Alma grew up in an intensely cultivated, artistic milieu...
...He's even beginning to look Jewish...
...By the book's middle, she sounds like a true-believing proto-Nazi: "I must admit, though, that the bad company [Burckhard] keeps is causing his pure, Aryan blood to semitify...
...She had a cold and willful determination to greatness...
...Above all, she circulated in the Viennese musical world that Mahler had done so much to reinvigorate...
...She flirted with Zemlinsky and the singer Erik Schmedes, disdained Arnold Schönberg as "too Jewish," studied music with Josef Labor, and, notoriously, renounced composition at Mahler's request...
...That her philo-Semitism did eventually collapse remains one of her more repulsive characteristics...
...Alma's diaries, covering the four years previous to her marriage to Mahler, are in part a record of her confrontations with family and friends, with the society she lived in, and with her own artistic sensibilities as a young composer...
...Just how hard she fell for him is unclear from the diaries, but a determination to marry someone important is evident...
...But she did have a discriminating eye for painting: Klimt, Arnold Böcklin, Koloman Moser, Giovanni Segantini, and Franz von Stuck all were accorded her approbation...
...This volume finishes in mid-January, 1902, about a week and a half before the wedding, with Alma trying to reconcile what she sees as the two sides of her nature: "He wants me different, completely different...
...Then in his 40s, Mahler directed the Vienna Opera and was already well-known as a composer...
...Finally I took a piece of thick twine and pulled at it until it fell into my hand...
...in her diaries she employs Yiddish phrases and discusses with friends the importance of keeping kosher...
...He gave me his body—& I let him touch me with his hand...
...Reviewed by Daniel Kunitz Managing editor, "Paris Review" On October 30, 1899, 20-year-old Alma Schindler yanked out her own molar...
...Interestingly, her upbringing bears comparison with that of an accomplished contemporary, Virginia Woolf...
...Now it is apparent that they carried on a typically late-19th-century clandestine love affair—consummated only by a kiss...
...Among the century's great femmes fatales, perhaps only Lou Andreas-Salomé—linked at various times with Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud—can rival Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel, wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and writer Franz Werfel...
...Regrettably the editor and translator, English musicologist Antony Beaumont, has done an execrable job...
...With Mahler, she initially decided to wait for marriage, but on New Year's Day she gave in...
...I must strive to become a real person, let everything happen to me of its own accord...
...He carried me to the sofa, laid me gently down and swung himself over me...
...Although Beaumont fails to address the paradox, it existed throughout Viennese society...
...Were they not so thickly populated with ?-list names, these diaries would very likely not have seen publication...
...he wanted her devotion to it...
...I must live entirely for him, to make him happy...
...Distraught as I was, I comforted him...
...In the first entry she notes that one Theobald Pollack "picked a bone with [Rudolf Krieghammer], accusing him of anti-Semitism...
...For how long, I don't know...
...Both were reared in liberal, wellto-do families...
...Jews occupied a complex position in Vienna...
...Stiff and upright stood his vigor...
...It took her only one night to rationalize giving up music for Mahler: "Yes—he's right...
...Eschewing a full Foreword, he instead reprints a number of letters between himself and Susanne Rode-Breymann, who transcribed the original manuscript and assisted with its editing...
...The event was a disaster: "What I have to write today is terribly sad...
...It gave me the inner satisfaction of prevailing overmyself It's not easy to pull out one of your own teeth, especially if it's scarcely loose...
...The affair caused a minor scandal among their acquaintances because Klimt, who had a reputation as a womanizer, was known to have another lover, Emilie Flöge, his sister-in-law's sister...
...A month later she explains, "When I'm in such company, my pro-Semitic feelings are really strained: they waver, but don't fall...
...He fell for Alma Schindler quickly: They met in November 1901 and were married at the end of January 1902...
...Beaumont does recognize, however, that the publication of these diaries changes the historical record...
...Since antiSemitism will become one of the book's prominent themes, it might have occurred to the utterly inept Beaumont to mention Mahler-Werfel's religion (raised as a Catholic, she laterconverted to Protestantism), and to note her family's views on the issue...
...For instance, most historians believed Alma Schindler and Gustav Klimt were merely close family friends...
...Alma's enduring love for Klimt returns like a Wagnerian leitmotif, until Mahler's appearance in the last 20 pages of the diaries...
...Ultimately, though, Woolf used her background to become a great writer, whereas Alma Mahler-Werfel used hers to marry a succession of celebrated artists...
...Mahler-Werfel literally spent her life among Jews...
...The abbreviated document, itself over 400 pages, also provides a more than ample picture of the fledgling Alma—who at 21 has several serious flirtations behind her but doesn't know the mechanics of sexual intercourse...
...Representing about half of the complete German manuscript, the English translation offers a somewhat naïve view of haute bourgeois artistic culture in Vienna at the turn of the century...
...She modeled for many of his paintings, and the pair lived together until his death in 1918...
...Words cannot express what today I have undeservedly suffered...
...Alma initially recoiled from anti-Semitism...
...Over the course of four years, Alma had preserved her virginity from numerous assaults...
...He laid his head on my breast, shattered—and almost wept for shame...
...It would develop that she could dig cast-off lovers out of her life like teeth...
...The architect Josef Maria Olbrich courted Alma, as did Max Burckhard, theater director and editor of Ver Sacrum, the journal of the Secession...
...And that's what I want as well...
...When the diary opens, on January 25, 1898, we have no idea how old Alma Schindler is or what her life was like before this date...
...As long as I'm with him I can manage—but when I'm on my own, my other, vain self rises to the surface and wants to be let free...
...She frequently socialized with the founding members of the avant-garde Vienna Secession, of which Moll was a member and Klimt its first president, and attended virtually all their early shows...
...at once socially and culturally ascendant, they nevertheless were under constant attack from the very society they moved in...
...Though Alma created almost 5 0 works —mostly lieder—she was not, by most accounts, an especially talented composer...
...First I loosened it with a finger, then I pressed it inwards with a nail file, causing the gum to turn blue...
...Then —just as I felt him penetrate, he lost all strength...
...Of a Berlin CourtKapellmeister she writes: "A very good-looking fellow...
...But they are foremost a narrative structured by her three great infatuations of the period: the painter Gustav Klimt, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky and Mahler himself...
...Alma did not care for his music...
...I can scarcely say how irritating it all was...
Vol. 82 • May 1999 • No. 6
