About Alma Maria Schindler Mahler.

ABOUT ALMA MARIA SCHINDLER MAHLER

   Alma Maria Schindler, wife of Mahler, Gropius, and
   Werfel, lover of Kokoschka, Klimt, and the Jewish
   composer Zemlinsky, admirer of theater director Max
   Burckhard who gave her lessons in antisemitism--
   in your bloated bosom lay the fetus of German culture sown
   by Christians and Jews, antisemites and converts, whose
   nurturing rain produced symphonies and soaring structures,
   plays and pictures, novels flowing from your flesh.

   Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, you gave up your burgeoning
   musical career in favor of your husband Gustav's titanic
   symphonies in Vienna and New York, secretly subverting
   your marriage in Gropius's bed. Twenty-two years after
   Gustav Mahler's death, you lived to see the rise of Hitler
   who banned the music of Felix Mendelssohn and Mahler,
   Christians by conversion, but Jews to be obliterated
   from the earth culturally and, soon enough, physically.
   He would have murdered your half-Jewish children fathered by
   Mahler and Werfel, had they lived long enough to die in the camps.

   Marriage to the Jewish poet and novelist, Franz Werfel,
   forced you to flee to France from Nazi pursuers. Before
   rejoining your husband, you contacted Nazi officials to ask
   if you would be safe in Vienna if you divorced the Jew Werfel.
   No one knows the answer. You led emigres by foot across the
   rugged Pyranees into Spain, your weary husband struggling behind;
   then by plane to Portugal, and finally by ship to safety in
      America.
   You were luckier than the Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis who
      were
   denied entry. Your fame as the femme fatale of culture was your
      visa.

   Did you ever regret Mahler's flight from Judaism and your aborted
      flight
   from Werfel? Perhaps your merciless flight from death in Auschwitz
      was
   punishment enough. Flight for flight. A story you never set to
      music. Your songs!
   Long long ago, Mahler finally helped you to publish them, to
      Viennese acclaim.