Franz Werfel

born Sept. 10, 1890, Prague [now in Czech Republic]
died Aug. 26, 1945, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.

German-language writer who attained prominence as an Expressionist poet, playwright, and novelist and whose works espoused human brotherhood, heroism, and religious faith.

The son of a glove manufacturer, Werfel left home to work in a Hamburg shipping house. Shortly afterward he published two books of lyric poems, Der Weltfreund (1911; “The World’s Friend”) and Wir sind (1913; “We Are”). After fighting on the Italian and Galician fronts in World War I, he became antimilitary, recited pacifistic poems in cafés, and was arrested. His playwriting career began in 1916 with an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women, which had a successful run in Berlin. He turned to fiction in 1924 with Verdi, Roman der Oper (Verdi, A Novel of the Opera). In 1929 he married Alma Mahler. International fame came with Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933; The Forty Days of Musa Dagh), an epic novel in which Armenian villagers resist Turkish forces until rescued by the French.

When the Nazis incorporated Austria in 1938, Werfel, a Jew, settled in an old mill in southern France. With the fall of France in 1940 (reflected in his play Jakobowsky und der Oberst, written in 1944 and successfully produced in New York City that year as Jakobowsky and the Colonel), he fled to the United States. In the course of his journey, he found solace in the pilgrimage town of Lourdes, France, where St. Bernadette had had visions of the Virgin. He vowed to write about the saint if he ever reached America and kept the vow with Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The Song of Bernadette). His novel was the basis for a popular film (1943) that won four Academy Awards.