On the most legendary widow of the twentieth century – Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

‘The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, she was born Alma Maria Schindler, the daughter of the operetta singer Anna Bergen and the landscape painter Emil Schindler. She hoped to make her way as a composer, but that dream ended when, in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, she married the musical titan Gustav Mahler. After Mahler’s death, in 1911, she had an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then was briefly married to the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Her final husband was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she followed into exile, first in France and then in the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles. She lived until 1964, the most legendary widow of the twentieth century. Those who write about her—there have been eight biographies and half a dozen novels—tend to refer to her as Alma. This has the unfortunate effect of making her sound like a young girl in the company of grown men. Better to call her by the name under which she is buried: Mahler-Werfel.’

(…)

‘Mahler-Werfel was described as an incorrigible antisemite who enslaved Jewish men and drove them to early graves. According to one Mahler enthusiast, she was a “vain, repulsive, brazen creature.” Hilmes quotes a few ostensibly positive comments as well, although the praise is faint: Erich Maria Remarque dubs her a “wild, blond wench, violent, boozing.” In the end, the biographer categorizes his subject as a “classic hysterical woman.”’

(…)

‘Rehabilitation can go only so far. Casting Mahler-Werfel purely as a victim minimizes the power she wielded, particularly in her relations with Jews. At various points in her life, she was both oppressed and oppressor. We are confronted by a personality of maddening complexity—no less complex than that of any of the august men around her. At the age of eighteen, she wrote of her desire to accomplish a “great deed,” in the form of a “really good opera, which no woman has yet done.”’

(…)

‘The most detailed entries cover the years 1898 to 1902, when she was coming of age in Vienna. Turning the pages of the journals, which have been published complete in German and abridged in English, you see items typical of a vivacious young person: holidays are celebrated, faces sketched, vacation postcards pasted in, crushes confessed. (Her first kiss was with Gustav Klimt.) There are also signs of intellectual ambition. The first volume is emblazoned with a paraphrase of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Always act as if the maxims of your will could become the principle of a universal law.” Several pages are given over to excerpts from Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Wagner performances elicit ecstatic responses. Leading musicians are briskly assessed: Mahler is “a genius through and through,” Strauss a “genius pig.” Such pronouncements were to be expected from young men, less so from young women. She asks a teacher, “Why are boys taught to think and girls not?”’

(…)

‘Mahler-Werfel’s sterner critics scoff at the idea. The Mahler biographer Jens Malte Fischer grumbles that only an “embittered feminist dogma” would place her music on the level of Mahler’s. But no one is claiming that. Instead, the case of Mahler-Werfel dramatizes how opportunity, environment, and other contingencies shape artistic careers. Rode-Breymann draws a useful comparison to Alban Berg, whose sensuous, amorphous early work resembles Mahler-Werfel’s. Berg’s youthful songs offer few hints of “Wozzeck,” “Lulu,” and the Violin Concerto. But he had the chance to develop, with Schoenberg as his domineering guide. Zemlinsky contemplated sending Mahler-Werfel to study with Schoenberg, who possibly could have molded her as he molded Berg. When Schoenberg later studied her songs, he wrote to her, “You really have a great deal of talent.”’

(…)

‘The essential problem, as Mahler sees it, is a practical one: if his wife finds herself in the mood to compose, she will be unable to attend to his needs. He writes, “From now on, you have only one profession: to make me happy! ” Further, Mahler mocks the idea that a young woman could claim to possess a creative identity: “What do you imagine individuality to consist of? Do you consider yourself an individual?”’

(…)

‘The marriage was charged, combustible, and by no means one-sided. At first, Mahler-Werfel found herself trapped in the monastic world of a man who was always “striving in the infinite.” She wrote in her diary, “I feel as if my wings have been clipped.” She executed not only domestic tasks but also professional ones: copying out her husband’s scores, managing his finances, mitigating noise disturbances. Still, she asserted herself and began to influence the trajectory of Mahler’s career. It was through her that Mahler encountered the Secessionist painter Alfred Roller, who, in 1903, created a duskily evocative staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Court Opera—a landmark in operatic history. She introduced Mahler to Schoenberg and other radical youths. And she responded avidly to the abstract, proto-modernistic language of Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, which remained her favorites. It might be argued that she counterbalanced her husband’s tendency toward bombastic naïveté.’

(…)

‘Gropius then decided to confront Mahler in person, essentially demanding the release of his wife. Mahler handled this melodrama with remarkable composure; apparently, the two men digressed into a discussion of the brokenness of modern art. Mahler-Werfel was left to choose the man she wanted. She decided to have it both ways, remaining at Mahler’s side while secretly continuing the affair with Gropius.’

(…)

‘Later that year, Mahler-Werfel had a fling with the biologist Paul Kammerer, for whom she briefly worked as a lab assistant, overseeing a colony of praying mantises. When the relationship didn’t pan out, Kammerer threatened to shoot himself at Mahler’s grave. Hysteria was in the air, and it did not emanate from Mahler-Werfel.’

(…)

‘Kokoschka’s behavior justified her fears. He lurked outside her house and monitored her visitors. In a letter, he imagined “scraping from your brain with a knife every single one of those alien ideas that run counter to me.” Like Gropius, he resented her loyalty to Mahler, accusing her of performing a “dance of death” with a “man who was alien to you.” He tried to overcome her resistance to marrying him by prematurely publishing a wedding announcement. When, after a succession of such incidents, Mahler-Werfel backed away, Kokoschka’s mania only escalated. Notoriously, he commissioned a life-size doll of his love, which he paraded about, mutilated, and left in his garden, supposedly attracting the attention of the police. He further ventilated his frustration in his play “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in which Orpheus goes to the underworld, retrieves Eurydice from Hades (Mahler), and then stabs her to death. None of this stopped Mahler-Werfel from hailing Kokoschka as a genius.’

(…)

‘ Furthermore, Gropius turned out to be, in Mahler-Werfel’s eyes, a Spiessbürger, a provincial philistine. Her daughter Anna acidly commented, “She was married to an Aryan once. She was so bored.”’

(…)

‘What might be called the slut-shaming of Mahler-Werfel reached its peak after her death, when the songwriter Tom Lehrer wrote a sniggering ballad called “Alma”: “Her lovers were many and varied / From the day she began her beguine / There were three famous ones whom she married / And God knows how many between.” There was, in fact, nothing particularly outré about her love life, other than the fact that she allowed herself the same freedom as the men with whom she consorted.’

(…)

‘Some of Werfel’s friends thought that this metamorphosis had ruined his literary gift. Werfel said, “I don’t know whether Alma is my greatest fortune or my greatest disaster.” Yet the novels include several formidable achievements: “Class Reunion,” a tale of high-school sadism; “Embezzled Heaven,” which touches on the misery of exile; the eerie sci-fi novel “Star of the Unborn”; and, above all, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” a 1933 chronicle of the Armenian genocide which doubles as a prophecy of the Holocaust. Mahler-Werfel was intimately involved in these projects and in some instances proposed their subject matter. In the case of “Musa Dagh,” she recognized the book’s resonance. In October, 1933, she wrote in her diary, “It is a gigantic achievement for a Jew to write such a work at such a time.”’

(…)

‘The fact that she inhabited a mostly Jewish milieu adds to the irrationality of her position. It went beyond the proverbial “best friends” situation: some of her best husbands were Jews.’

(…)

‘Mahler-Werfel’s actions tell a less dismal story than her words do. In February, 1938, on the eve of the Anschluss, she and Werfel were staying in Capri. Mahler-Werfel, sensing what was coming, ordered her husband to stay put and went home to Vienna, where she emptied bank accounts, secured jewelry, and arranged for the extraction of precious documents. The couple settled in the South of France, where Mahler-Werfel worked furiously to raise funds and organize a new life. Her most improbable scheme was to sell a Bruckner manuscript—the first three movements of the Third Symphony, which had been in Mahler’s possession—to none other than Hitler, a Bruckner fanatic. Her Nazi brother-in-law, Richard Eberstaller, unsuccessfully tried to mediate the deal. Mahler-Werfel was carrying the Bruckner score when, in September, 1940, she escaped from Nazi-occupied France to Spain through the foothills of the Pyrenees, in the company of Werfel and three members of the Mann family. “She was always ahead of us,” Golo Mann later recalled of the trek. “She did it like a goat.”’

(…)

‘Alma was luminous,” Marina recently told me. “I was in love with her, which made my mother upset. She was statuesque, powerful. She had this incredibly fragile, papery, but very beautiful skin. And these eyes, which were a certain kind of blue I don’t remember anyone else having. They were so clear and piercing. She didn’t talk about the past, even though it was all around her—the books, the photographs, the Kokoschkas. The love of life was still there. Which made her end rather terrible. I was there in the apartment with my mother. Alma had been in a coma, and she awoke with a scream, or an attempt at a scream. My mother went in. Alma clutched her arm and didn’t let go—a death grip. She was not ready to leave.”’

Read the article here.

The Aryan men were just too boring for her.

And yes, perhaps her antisemitism was truly Jewish self-hatred. As Ross rightly points out, there is quite difference between the acknowledgement that some of your best friends were Jewish or that some of your best husbands were Jewish.

Her hunger for life didn’t fade away apparently.

That’s why she could escape to Spain like a goat.

In other words, despite everything and thanks to everything, she remains an example.