Franz Werfel | |
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 Werfel photographed byVan Vechten, 1940 | |
| Born | Franz Viktor Werfel (1890-09-10)10 September 1890 |
| Died | 26 August 1945(1945-08-26) (aged 54) |
| Occupation(s) | Novelist, playwright, poet |
| Spouse | |
| Relatives | Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (sister) |
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Franz Viktor Werfel (German:[fʁant͡sˈvɛʁfl̩]ⓘ; 10 September 1890 – 26 August 1945) was aCzechnovelist,playwright, andpoet whose career spannedWorld War I, theInterwar period, andWorld War II. He is primarily known as the author ofThe Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933, English tr. 1934, 2012), a novel based on events that took place during theArmenian genocide of 1915, andThe Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saintBernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the samename.
Born inPrague, then inKingdom of Bohemia, which was part ofAustria-Hungary, 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. His two sisters wereHanna Fuchs-Robettin (born 1896) and Marianne Amalie (born 1899).[1] His family wasJewish. As a child, Werfel was raised by his Czech Catholic governess, Barbara Šimůnková, who often took him tomass 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 thePiarists, a teaching order that allowed for arabbi to instruct Jewish students for theirbnei mitzvah.[1] This, along with his governess's influence, gave Werfel an early interest (and expertise) inCatholicism, which soon branched out to other faiths, includingTheosophy andIslam, such that his fiction, as well as his nonfiction, provides some insight intocomparative 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.[1] By this time, Werfel had befriended other German Jewish writers who frequented Prague'sCafé Arco [de;cs], chief among themMax Brod andFranz Kafka, and his poetry was praised by such critics asKarl 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 forKurt Wolff's new publishing firm, where Werfel championed and editedGeorg Trakl's first book of poetry. While he lived in Germany, Werfel's milieu grew to includeElse 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 theAustro-Hungarian Army on theRussian front[2] as a telephone operator. His duties both exposed him to the vicissitudes oftotal war as well as provided him with enough of a haven to continue writingExpressionist poems, ambitious plays, and letters voluminously. His eclectic mix ofhumanism,confessionalism, autobiography, as well as mythology and religiosity developed further during this time. His poems and plays ranged from scenes ofancient Egypt (notably thepotentially monotheistic religion ofAkhenaton) to occult allusions (Werfel had participated in séances with his friends Brod andKafka) and incorporate a parable from theBaháʼí Faith in the poem "Jesus and the Carrion Path". His bias for Christian subjects, as well as his antipathy forZionism, eventually alienated many of his Jewish friends and readers, including early champions such asKarl Kraus. 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., animaginarium] 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.[3]
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 themRobert Musil, Rilke,Hugo von Hofmannsthal, andFranz Blei. Through the latter, Werfel met and fell in love withAlma Mahler, widow ofGustav Mahler, the former lover of the painterOskar Kokoschka, and the wife of thearchitectWalter 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.[1] 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. 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.[1] 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. They married on 6 July 1929.
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 playJuarez and Maximilian (depicting the struggle in 1860'sMexico between the Republican leaderBenito Juárez and the French-backedEmperor 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.
Werfel's journey (with his wife Alma) in 1930, toBritish-ruled Palestine, and his encounter with the Armenian refugee community in Jerusalem, inspired his novelThe Forty Days of Musa Dagh which drew world attention to theArmenian genocide by theOttoman government.[4] Werfel lectured on this subject across Germany. The Nazi newspaperDas 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 laterJewish genocide, condemned "America's Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel's book".[5]
Werfel was forced to leave thePrussian Academy of Arts in 1933. His books were burned by the Nazis.[2] Werfel left Austria after theAnschluss in 1938 and went to France, where they lived in a fishing village near Marseille. Visitors to their home at this time includedBertolt Brecht andThomas Mann. After the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II, and the deportation of French Jews to theNazi concentration camps, Werfel had to flee again. With the assistance ofVarian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee inMarseille, he and his wife narrowly escaped the Nazi regime,[1] finding shelter for five weeks in the pilgrimage town ofLourdes.[2] He also received much help and kindness from the Catholic orders that staffed the shrine.[1] He vowed to write about the experience and, safe in the United States, he publishedThe Song of Bernadette in 1941.[6]
Fry and UnitarianWaitstill Sharp organized a secret crossing over the Pyrenees on foot. Assisted byJustus Rosenberg, they went to Madrid and then traveled on to Portugal. They stayed in Monte Estoril, at the Grande Hotel D'Itália, between 8 September and 4 October 1940.[7] On the same day they checked out, they boarded theS.S. Nea Hellas headed for New York City, arriving on 13 October.[8]
Werfel and his family settled in Los Angeles, where they met other German and Austrian emigrants, such as Mann, Reinhardt, andErich Wolfgang Korngold as well as Czech (as Werfel was a Czechoslovak citizen). In southern California, Werfel wrote his final play,Jacobowsky and the Colonel (Jacobowsky und der Oberst) which was made into the 1958 filmMe and the Colonel starringDanny Kaye;Giselher Klebe'soperaJacobowsky und der Oberst (1965) is also based on this play. Before his death, he completed the first draft of his last novelStar of the Unborn (Stern der Ungeborenen), which was published posthumously in 1946.[1]
Franz Werfel died of heart failure in Los Angeles in 1945 and was interred there in theRosedale Cemetery. However, his body was returned in 1975 to Vienna for reburial in theZentralfriedhof.[9]
In English (some of these titles are out of print):
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