Franz Viktor Werfel

Czech-born, Austrian-Jewish novelist, playwright and poet. Werfel had identified himself as being an atheist and anarchist by the time of his bar mitzvah (i.e. 13-years-old), although his anarchism, like many of his fellow Expressionists, had a distinctly messianic or mystical edge to it and ended up veering towards a Tolstoyian pacifist anarchism. He was also one of the many Expressionists who fell under the influence of the Austrian psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross. Werfel began writing at an early age and published his first book of poems, 'Der Weltfreund', (The Friend to the World) in 1911, and had befriended other German Jewish writers who frequented Prague’s Café Arco, chief among them Max Brod and Franz Kafka, the latter himself being on the periphery of the city's anarchist movement at the time.

At the outbreak of WWI, Werfel served in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Russian front in relative safety as a telephone operator, and he continue writing Expressionist poems, plays and kept up a voluminous correspondence. In 1917 he left the front-line for the Military Press Bureau in Vienna, where he joined other notable Austrian writers serving as propagandists, among them Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan Zweig. After the war he continued writing, publishing amongst others: a poetry collection; 'Der Gerichtstag' (Judgment Day; 1919); the short story collections 'Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist Schuldig' (Not the Murderer, it is the Victim who is Guilty; 1920) and 'Der Tod des Kleinbürgers' (The Death of the Petty Bourgeois aka 'The Man Who Conquered Death'; 1928); novels such as 'Der Abituriententag: Geschichte einer Jugendschuld' (Class Reunion: History of a Boy's Guilt; 1928) and 'Der Veruntreute Himmel' (Embezzled Heaven; 1939); and a large number of plays, which included 'Paulus unter den Juden' (Paul among the Jews; 1926) and 'Das Reich Gottes in Böhmen' (The Kingdom of Bohemia; 1930).

He married Alma Mahler (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) in 1929, with whom he journeyed to the Middle East in 1930, encountering starving refugees which inspired his 2 volume novel 'Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh' (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) which drew world attention to the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Turks. After the Anschluss, Franz and Alma fled Vienna for France, only to have to flee in 1940 on foot across the Pyrenees to Spain, accompanied by Heinrich Mann, and from there to the United States. While living in Southern California, Werfel completed his most famous novel 'The Song of Bernadette' (Das Lied von Bernadette; 1941), fulfilling a vow made in 1940 in Lourdes for a safe escape. The novel was made later into the 1943 film of the same name.

Franz Werfel died in Los Angeles on August 26, 1945 and was buried there in the Rosedale Cemetery. In 1975, his body was returnedto Vienna for reburial in the Zentralfriedhof.