Franz Werfel
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Franz Werfel (September 10, 1890 – August 26, 1945) was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet who wrote in German.
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[edit] Biography
Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), he 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 they lived together in partnership from that point on; they finally married in 1929. Werfel was already an established author, but his true claim to international fame came in 1933, when he published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a chilling novel which first drew world attention to the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks.
An identified Jew, Werfel fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and went to France. With the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II, and the deportation of Jews to the Nazis concentration camps, Franz Werfel had to flee the country. With the assistance of the American Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille, he and his wife narrowly escaped the Nazi regime, fleeing to the United States.
While in France, he had made a visit to Lourdes where he found spiritual solace. He also experienced much help and kindness from the Catholic orders which staffed the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. He vowed to write about the experience, and once in America, in 1941 he released The Song of Bernadette. While living in southern California, he 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.
[edit] Bibliography
In English (some of these titles are out of print):
- 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
[edit] See also
- List of Austrians
- List of Austrian writers
- The Song of Bernadette (novel) – review of Franz Werfel's novel
[edit] External links
