Jewogle - Franz Werfel

Biography:

Franz Werfel (September 10, 1890 – August 26, 1945) was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet who wrote in German.

Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Werfel was a contemporary and colleague of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Martin Buber, and other Jewish intellectuals who flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front and in the press office in Vienna, where he met and fell in love with Alma Mahler.

In 1920 Alma (Schindler) Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, divorced architect Walter Gropius in order to be with Werfel, and the couple lived together from that point on; they finally married in 1929. Werfel was already an established author, having assumed a leading place in German letters as an expressionist playwright; but his true claim to international fame came in 1933, when he published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a chilling novel that drew world attention to the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks.

An identified Jew, Werfel left Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and went to France. After the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II, and the deportation of French Jews to the Nazi concentration camps, Werfel had to flee again. With the assistance of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille, he and his wife narrowly escaped the Nazi regime and traveled to the United States.

While in France, Werfel made a visit to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, where he found spiritual solace. He also received much help and kindness from the Catholic orders that staffed the shrine. He vowed to write about the experience and, safe in America, he published The Song of Bernadette in 1941.

In southern California, Werfel wrote his final play, Jacobowsky and the Colonel (Jacobowsky und der Oberst). Before his death, he completed the first draft of his last novel Star of the Unborn (Stern der Ungeborenen), which was published posthumously, in 1946.

Franz Werfel died in Los Angeles in 1945 and was interred there in the Rosendale Cemetery. However, his body was later exhumed and returned to Vienna for reburial in the Zentralfriedhof.

Bibliography:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
The Song of Bernadette
The Song of Bernadette – The Immortal Story of Bernadette of Lourdes by Franz Werfel (abridged by John Martin)
The Man Who Conquered Death
Embezzled Heaven
Verdi
Class Reunion
Juarez and Maximilian – play
Star of the Unborn – science-fiction novel
A pale-blue woman's handwriting (Eine blass-blaue Frauenschrift)