Alma - The Film

Part 3: Resurrection

At the age of 50, ALMA marries for a third time, this time to Jewish poet Franz Werfel, author of the novels »The Song of Bernadette« and »The Forty Days of Musa Dagh«, as well as successful theatre plays such as »Jacobowsky and the Colonel«.

Werfel sees in ALMA his saviour, a goddess whom he is allowed to worship. While still married to Gropius, ALMA gets pregnant by Werfel in early 1918. The baby is born prematurely, since Werfel is unable to hold back his insatiable lust and forces the child out of ALMA‘s womb in a veritable bloodbath. Ten months later, baby Martin is dead, a consequence of Werfel’s »degenerate seed«, as ALMA
puts it.

The burning of his works, followed the seizing of power by the Nazis, forces Werfel into exile with ALMA. Settling in Hollywood, he is to die there in 1945.

Gustav Mahler perhaps died of loving her too much; Oskar Kokoschka was unable to get over losing her for his whole life long; Walter Gropius was a plaything in her hands; and Franz Werfel wrote: »She is one of the very few magical women who exist!«.

Her men would have undoubtedly lived on without her: Mahler in his symphonies, Gropius in his steel constructions, Werfel in his novels, and Kokoschka in his untamed painting. For each of them was a creative genius. Alma, on the other hand, would be forgotten today were it not for her men. She only left any mark because, as she expressed it herself, she »hold for an instant the stirrups of her glorious knights«.

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