The curse of Alma's Autobiography

Paulus Manker
When talking about Alma, all the time it sounds to me like a description of a very pleasant, intelligent, really worthy woman. How it comes that the image which survived, mainly through her autobiography and through interviews, the image that survived is so different. Because according to Alma´s "fama" she has not been a very pleasant person. Most people prone to make a fool out of Alma. But how you descibe her, the opposite is the case.

Joshua Sobol
If I thought that she should be made a fool of, I would not even dream of writing one scene about her. I think her bad luck is her autobiography, or the way she dealt with her biography, which is a grotesque story. She tried to cover up facts, she tried to rearrange her biography, to wipe under the carpet certain unpleasant stories, and to ornament her lifestory. And that was, of course, a terrible mistake, which had to do with her mentality. There is some, I would say "Kitsch" value in Almas "Weltanschauung". Otherwise she would not care, she would not even bother to ornament her biography. On the contrary, she would have told her story in a bold way, and it could have made a great book. If she really told us the truth. But I think she was ashamed of many things. That´s obvious, she felt ashamed of certain affairs or events in her life. Because she was, in a funny way, sticking to old values when coming to judge her own life. And she wanted to leave us with a very idyllic description of her life.

I don´t understand how she could have imagined that all these famous persons - who were her husbands and her lovers - didn´t leave behind them notes, letters that will be researched, and exposed to the last detail. And that´s what happened with persons like La Grange, for exampel, who researched Mahler´s life in such great detail that it´s obvious that he knows about Mahler much more than Mahler knew about himself. And La Grange does not leave one inch or one millimeter, which is not exposed to the fiercest light. So, when you put Alma´s pitiful attempts to cover up certain facts in her life against the light, which is now shed on her biography by Mahler´s biographer, so by Kokoschka´s biographer, so by Gropius" biographers - let alone the fact that Gropius kept copies of the letters that he has sent to Alma, alongside with the letters that he recieved from Alma, and she probably didn´t know that he was a maniac of order - so everything is there. And then her autobiography becomes a document which tells a lot about her naivity, in a way. And I think that she must have been very naive to believe that she could canalize the story of her life without exposing herself to the accession that she was a liar.