Chapter 18 with steel claws (2)

The ten years Alma lived with Gustav were not successful.In her amusing autobiography, Alma complains that her husband is self-centered and pays little attention to her.By all accounts, Mahler was buried in his own work, stern, dull, and seemingly impotent.Alma cries, suffers, is sick, suffers from depression, misses her music, and resents the emptiness of her life.While recovering from an ordeal at a spa, she met Walter Gropius, four years her junior.They fell in love and had a torrid, underground affair; a month later, in what would have been a Freudian blunder, Gropius mistakenly sent Gus a love letter addressed to Alma tuff.Mahler was dumbfounded when he saw the letter.Alma then explained everything to him: her experiences with Gropius, her misfortunes and disappointments in her marriage.Deprived of the sanctity bestowed upon him by Alma's gaze, Mahler falls into utter despair.Only then did he realize how much he loved her and how badly he treated her.Now he listened for the first time (to which he had never bothered before) some of his wife's songs: "But what have I done!" he cried remorsefully. "The songs are beautiful. You should keep composing." He began to shower her with loving attention, giving her presents at Christmas.But it was too late.Alma relentes and tells him she will stay with him and give up Gropius; but she continues to date lovers in secret because, though she liked Mahler, she no longer loves him.She needs love to live.In the end, the restless, frightened, and moving Mahler developed tonsillitis; he was soon told that he had septicemia, and Mahler died six months later.They would probably be happier if they positioned their marriage relationship on conditions that were more free from prejudice and more equal.

Widowed at thirty-one, Alma "has reached the point where I can't learn to walk again," she says of her work as a composer.She gave up music forever, and never again would she allow a man to police her the way Mahler did.Whether it was Kokoska, who was six years younger than her, and spent her most passionate experiences (because of her abandonment, Kokoska went crazy, he had her features copied on a life-size doll, lived with it for a year, then beheaded it at a party); or Gropius, the most respectful and generous of all her men, and perhaps because of that she was the worst to him ("I just want this man to be happy," Alma said again when she married him; but this time she added, "May God keep love for me!" She already knew that eternal passion would soon end); or her third husband, Franz Werfel, who was ten years younger than Alma and affable and immature.

Meanwhile, life gradually took its heavy toll on her.Alma lost three of her children, all three of whom died in great pain: one of Mahler's daughters died of diphtheria at the age of five after an emergency tracheotomy without anesthesia; One baby, Werfell's son, survived only ten months with encephalitis; age.Her death was the cruelest loss for Alma.Alma's world, the world she grew up in, is also infected with death.It was her turn to go through very difficult years: the First World War, defeat, the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed some brutal peace terms on the defeated countries; after that, the hell of Nazism.

Hitler's arson (we remember he came to power democratically in 1933) was lit in a land of humiliation, poverty and despair.In Germany, inflation is so high that a daily salary needs to be paid in order for the salary to afford dinner.Savings gone: the stamp of the letter from your bank telling you to close your account is worth more than the savings you've had in that account for thirty years (Arthur Thomson explains all this in his charming novel A Princess in Berlin well explained).In the midst of so much misery and unrest, a revolution set fire to the streets: a real revolution that had just upended order in Tsarist Russia, a revolution terrible for the bourgeoisie.So the bourgeoisie supported the emerging Nazis against the Bolsheviks.Even wealthy Jewish people helped the Nazis at first: in Austria, the far right relied on a Jewish-owned newspaper for their weapons from a Jewish entrepreneur.

Alma is pro-Nazi, or rather, she is pro-Fascist: she believes in the good intentions of Mussolini's project and rejects Hitler's anti-Semitism.Oddly enough, Alma's diary is full of silly comments about anti-Semitism, yet she was married to two Jews (Mahler and Werfell); Fate combined with Werfell's, having to cross the Pyrenees on foot across France in the most dire conditions (she was then in her sixties).These were the years of Hitler's apparent victors, and Alma could no doubt have taken another stance: the fact that her entire family had become pro-Nazi in Vienna.Werfel, on the other hand, was a pro-Communist (“Franz wrote a poem for Lenin’s death!” Alma horrified in her diary in 1928), and the relationship between the two Intense political debate has brought the marriage to the brink of crisis.Both have held back a lot as time has passed and as time has revealed. "Weifell and I reaped the defeat," wrote Alma a few years later, "who believed in a world revolution through Bolshevism in his youth, and he could not have foreseen what it would become. I believe that through Mussolini's Fascism came to save the world, and I could not have foreseen what would become of that through Hitler's actions."

Aside from her mercurial pro-fascism and paradoxical anti-Semitic bias, Alma has other dark sides, such as her jealousy and possessiveness to the point of shamelessness, her quest with other women so brutally for love in front of men. So superior that she never had a girlfriend (I know women who need to be unique: they're annoying).I sympathized with her poor sister Gretty, presumably Alma gave her a horrible childhood.Alma never mentions her in her memoirs, though Gretty suffers a terrible fate: she is depressed and, after several suicide attempts, is locked up in a mental institution.She was executed there after Hitler invaded Austria (1938) and the Nazis declared the extermination of all lunatics.

But even if Alma wasn't a saint (and who is?), I still can't understand the antipathy and meanness with which she is usually treated.For example, she was seen as a coquettish, flirtatious, sloppy woman; yet she slept with only four men (perhaps five, and a priest, as it seems suspicious) in her life, three of whom were Her husband, she lived with Mahler for ten years and with Werfel for thirty years until both died.It's not like the resume of an unashamed female conqueror.Françoise Giroud, the former French culture minister, has written a unique and interesting biography of Alma Mahler, to the point of unseemly arbitrariness in her judgments.But that's because the former female minister was a right-wing lady, and the worst enemy to a woman who breaks the mold is a conservative woman.Giroud, for example, speaks of Mahler at the end of his life when he found out he was losing his wife, "who will later be the cruel queen of this madman's subjects".But in reality Alma was no grim queen: she devoted herself to caring for the dying Mahler for six months with absolute devotion and love, as she did later in Werfell's two years.

Alma was alcoholic from a very young age, during her failed marriage to Mahler, drinking a bottle of benedictine a day for the last thirty years of her life.Still, she lived a long life: she died at eighty-five in New York, where she had a small apartment.If she lived in our time, I'm sure she wouldn't have given up on music.As a composer, she would have a public career, for better or worse.In her day, she herself could not and did not know that she should, although she was always aware of her own contradictions, "marriage often takes a place in a woman in a strange way for her self", she wrote in her diary.She goes on to add a bitter sarcasm of self-contempt for her secondary status to men: "I build up my stolen nest step by step with steel claws... to me every talent is but all I need The straw ... is a little spoil for my nest." And yet she grasped life with those same steel claws; she lived, lived with intensity, in spite of many sufferings and all limitations. "I had a good life," Alma said at the end of her autobiography. "Anyone can do anything, but he has to be prepared for everything." Not all people are capable of displaying such fearlessness.That's probably where she wasn't forgiven.