Franz Werfel

Franz Viktor Werfel (German: [fʁant͡s ˈvɛʁfl̩] ; 10 September 1890 – 26 August 1945) was a Czech novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. 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 in Kingdom of Bohemia, which was part of Austria-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 were Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (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 bnei mitzvah. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 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.

Franz Werfel died of heart failure in Los Angeles in 1945 and was interred there in the Rosedale Cemetery. However, his body was returned in 1975 to Vienna for reburial in the Zentralfriedhof.

According to John J. Devlin, pastor of Saint Victor Parish in West Hollywood, Franz Werfel received baptism on his deathbed from a German priest. The matter, however, was not made public out of consideration for his Jewish father and mother.

1937 Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class

1949 Naming of Werfelstrasse in Hernals (Vienna)

1975 Grave of honor (German: Ehrengrab) in the Zentralfriedhof (Vienna)

1990 Stamp Austria, Franz Werfel 1890–1945

1995 Stamp Germany, Franz Werfel, 50th anniversary of Werfel's death

Juarez and Maximilian, directed by Miguel Contreras Torres (1934, based on the play Juarez and Maximilian)

Juarez, directed by William Dieterle (1939, based on the play Juarez and Maximilian)

The Song of Bernadette, directed by Henry King (1943, based on the novel The Song of Bernadette)

Me and the Colonel, directed by Peter Glenville (1958, based on the play Jacobowsky and the Colonel)

Embezzled Heaven, directed by Ernst Marischka (West Germany, 1958, based on the novel Embezzled Heaven)

Die wahre Geschichte vom geschändeten und wiederhergestellten Kreuz, directed by Tom Toelle (West Germany, 1963, TV film, based on the eponymous story)

Jacobowsky and the Colonel, directed by Rainer Wolffhardt (West Germany, 1967, TV film, based on the play Jacobowsky and the Colonel)

The Man Who Conquered Death, directed by Hans Hollmann (West Germany/Austria, 1974, TV film, based on the story The Man Who Conquered Death)

Class Reunion, directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz (West Germany, 1974, TV film, based on the novel Class Reunion)

Cella oder Die Überwinder, directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz (West Germany/Austria, 1978, TV film, based on the unfinished novel Cella oder Die Überwinder)

Jacobowsky and the Colonel, 1944, adaptation of Jakobowsky und der Oberst by playwright S. N. Behrman. Opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City.

The Grand Tour, 1979, Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, based on the play Jacobowsky and the Colonel (Jakobowsky und der Oberst)