Franz Werfel

Franz Viktor Werfel (10 September 1890 – 26 August 1945) was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II.

His two sisters were Hanna (born 1896) and Marianne Amalie (born 1899).

His family was Jewish.

As a child, Werfel was raised by his Czech Catholic governess, Barbara Šimůnková, who often took him to mass in Prague's main cathedral.

Like the children of other progressive German-speaking Jews in Prague, Werfel was educated at a Catholic school run by the Piarists, a teaching order that allowed for a rabbi to instruct Jewish students for their Bar Mitzvahs.

This, along with his governess's influence, gave Werfel an early interest (and expertise) in Catholicism, which soon branched out to other faiths, including Theosophy and Islam, such that his fiction, as well as his nonfiction, provides some insight into comparative religion.

Werfel began writing at an early age and, by 1911, had published his first book of poems, Der Weltfreund, which can be translated as "the friend to the world" as well as philanthropist, humanitarian, and the like.

By this time, Werfel had befriended other German Jewish writers who frequented Prague's Café Arco, chief among them Max Brod and Franz Kafka, and his poetry was praised by such critics as Karl Kraus, who published Werfel's early poems in Kraus's journal, Die Fackel (The Torch).

In 1912, Werfel moved to Leipzig, where he became an editor for Kurt Wolff's new publishing firm, where Werfel championed and edited Georg Trakl's first book of poetry.

While he lived in Germany, Werfel's milieu grew to include Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, Rainer Maria Rilke, among other German-language writers, poets, and intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century.

With the outbreak of World War I, Werfel served in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Russian front as a telephone operator.

His duties both exposed him to the vicissitudes of total war as well as provided him with enough of a haven to continue writing Expressionist poems, ambitious plays, and letters voluminously.

His eclectic mix of humanism, confessionalism, autobiography, as well as mythology and religiosity developed further during this time.

His poems and plays ranged from scenes of ancient Egypt (notably the potentially monotheistic religion of Akhenaton) to occult allusions (Werfel had participated in séances with his friends Brod and Kafka) and incorporate a parable from the Baháʼí Faith in the poem "Jesus and the Carrion Path".

His bias for Christian subjects, as well as his antipathy for Zionism, eventually alienated many of his Jewish friends and readers, including early champions such as Karl Kraus.

In the summer of 1917, Werfel left the frontline for the Military Press Bureau in Vienna, where he joined other notable Austrian writers serving as propagandists, among them Robert Musil, Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Franz Blei.

Through the latter, Werfel met and fell in love with Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, the former lover of the painter Oskar Kokoschka, and the wife of the architect Walter Gropius, then serving in the Imperial German Army on the Western Front.

Alma, who was also a composer, had already set one of Werfel's poems to music, despite Werfel's being much younger, shorter, and having Jewish features that she, being both anti-Semitic and attracted to Jewish men, initially found distasteful.

Their love affair culminated in the premature birth of a son, Martin, in August 1918.

Martin, who was given the surname of Gropius, died in May of the following year.

Others, however, stood by him, including Martin Buber, who published a sequence of poems from Werfel's wartime manuscript, Der Gerichtstag (Judgment Day, published in 1919) in his monthly journal, Der Jude (The Jew).

and wrote of Werfel in his prefatory remark:

"Since I was first moved by his poems, I have opened (knowing well, I should say, it's a problem) the gates of my invisible garden [i.e., an imaginarium] to him, and now he can do nothing for all eternity that would bring me to banish him from it. Compare, if you will, a real person to an anecdotal one, a late book to an earlier, the one you see to you yourself; but I am not putting a value on a poet, only recognizing that he is one—and the way he is one."

Despite attempts to save his marriage to Alma, with whom he had a young daughter, Manon, Gropius reluctantly agreed to a divorce in 1920.

Ironically, Alma refused to marry Werfel for the next nine years.

However, Alma, more so than with her first two husbands and lovers, lent herself to the development of Werfel's career and influenced it in such a way that he became an accomplished playwright and novelist as well as poet.

In April 1924, Verdi – Roman der Oper (Novel of the Opera) was published by Zsolnay Verlag, establishing Werfel's reputation as a novelist.

In 1926, Werfel was awarded the Grillparzer Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and in Berlin, Max Reinhardt performed his play Juarez and Maximilian (depicting the struggle in 1860's Mexico between the Republican leader Benito Juárez and the French-backed Emperor Maximilian).

By the end of the decade, Werfel had become one of the most important and established writers in German and Austrian literature and had already merited one full-length critical biography.

They married on 6 July 1929.

Werfel's journey (with his wife Alma) in 1930, to British-ruled Palestine, and his encounter with the Armenian refugee community in Jerusalem, inspired his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which drew world attention to the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman government.

Werfel lectured on this subject across Germany.

The Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps denounced him as a propagandist of "alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians".

The same newspaper, suggesting a link between the Armenian and the later Jewish genocide, condemned "America's Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel's book".

He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933, English tr. 1934, 2012), a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.

Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods, Rudolf Werfel.

His mother, Albine Kussi, was the daughter of a mill owner.

Werfel was forced to leave the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933.

His books were burned by the Nazis.

Werfel left Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and went to France, where they lived in a fishing village near Marseille.