A Hauntology of a Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel
James Reidel
Not just a narrative biography, Manon’s World is also a medical history of polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize-winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto “To an Angel”
Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.