Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel: Prague's Expressionist Who Wrote a Saint

In September 1940, a heart-weakened, overweight Jewish novelist from Prague scrambled across a mountain pass into Spain one step ahead of the Gestapo, then hid for five weeks in the Catholic pilgrimage town of Lourdes. He would spend the rest of his life a naturalized refugee in Los Angeles, and the strangest debt of his career would be to the peasant girl whose story sheltered him: he turned her legend into the best-selling American novel of 1942.

Prague, and a Governess's Cathedral

Franz Viktor Werfel was born on September 10, 1890, in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, to a prosperous Jewish glove manufacturer and a mother from a mill-owning family. It was an unlikely household to produce Christian mysticism as a lifelong literary preoccupation, but Werfel's Czech Catholic governess, Barbara Šimůnková, regularly brought the boy to mass at Prague's cathedral, and his Piarist schooling mixed Catholic instruction with Jewish religious study. That double exposure to comparative faith — Catholicism, Judaism, and later Theosophy and Islam — became the engine of nearly everything he wrote.

The Café Arco Generation

Werfel entered literature early and fast. His 1911 debut poetry collection, *Der Weltfreund* ("The Friend of the World"), announced an Expressionist voice steeped in humanist enthusiasm, and it won him entry to Prague's German-Jewish literary circle at the Café Arco, where he sat alongside Franz Kafka and Max Brod. The critic Karl Kraus championed his early verse in his journal *Die Fackel*. In 1912 Werfel moved to Leipzig to edit for the publisher Kurt Wolff, where he promoted the poet Georg Trakl and moved among Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Service on the Russian, Italian, and Galician fronts during the First World War hardened him into an outspoken pacifist — he reportedly performed antiwar poetry in cafes until he was arrested for it — before he was reassigned to Vienna's Military Press Bureau alongside Robert Musil and Hofmannsthal.

Alma, and the Making of a Novelist

It was in Vienna that Werfel met Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler and, at the time, still married to the architect Walter Gropius. Their affair produced a son, Martin, in 1918, who died the following year; Alma withheld marriage from Werfel for nine years even after her divorce from Gropius, finally marrying him in 1929. Whatever the private cost, the relationship reshaped Werfel's ambitions as a writer, pushing him from poetry and drama toward the long historical novel. *Verdi: A Novel of the Opera* (1924) established that new reputation, and by the late 1920s, having collected the Grillparzer Prize and the Czechoslovak State Award, Werfel ranked among the most prominent novelists writing in German.

Musa Dagh and the Weight of Witness

His most consequential book came from a 1930 journey to Palestine with Alma, where encounters with Armenian genocide survivors in Jerusalem set him to work on *The Forty Days of Musa Dagh* (1933), an epic account of an Armenian village's mountain resistance against Ottoman forces. The novel became an act of testimony years before the world had a vocabulary for genocide, and the Nazi press took direct notice: the SS newspaper *Das Schwarze Korps* denounced Werfel by name as a propagandist of "alleged Turkish horrors" and attacked American Armenian and Jewish readers for embracing the book. He was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, and his books were burned.

Flight, Lourdes, and an Unlikely Bestseller

After the 1938 Anschluss, Werfel fled Austria for France; after France fell in 1940, he and Alma faced the deportation trains bearing down on French Jews. The American journalist-turned-rescuer Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee smuggled the couple over the Pyrenees on foot, through Spain and Portugal, and onto a ship to New York, where they arrived in October 1940. In between, the pair sheltered for five weeks in Lourdes, hidden and fed by Catholic religious orders, in the very town where a peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous had reported visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Werfel later said he vowed, if he escaped Europe alive, to tell her story. *The Song of Bernadette*, published in 1941 once he had reached American safety, became a runaway bestseller and, as the 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones, won four Academy Awards.

Hollywood's Émigré Colony

Werfel spent his final years in Los Angeles among a concentrated émigré community that included Thomas Mann, Max Reinhardt, and the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. There he finished his last play, *Jacobowsky and the Colonel* (1944), a tragicomedy of a Jewish refugee and a Polish officer fleeing occupied France together, later adapted into the film *Me and the Colonel* and the Broadway musical *The Grand Tour*. He completed the manuscript of his final, genre-defying work, the science-fiction novel *Star of the Unborn*, shortly before his death.

Why Franz Is Called a Genius

Werfel's claim to genius is a literary one grounded in range and moral seriousness rather than any single technical innovation: he moved fluidly across poetry, Expressionist drama, and the historical novel, and used the novel specifically as an instrument of witness — turning a nearly unknown Armenian massacre and, later, a French visionary's obscure life, into internationally read testimony. Martin Buber, defending him against critics who resented his lack of interest in Zionism, put the underlying judgment plainly: "I am not putting a value on a poet, only recognizing that he is one." That recognition was widespread among his contemporaries — Kraus's early sponsorship, Reinhardt's staging of his plays, the scale of *Musa Dagh*'s and *Bernadette*'s public reception — but the honest counter-case matters too: Werfel's prose, even admirers concede, could run sentimental and diffuse, and his reputation has faded compared with contemporaries like Kafka or Mann, in part because his religious universalism sat awkwardly with both Jewish and secular literary establishments. His genius, such as it is, lies in narrative empathy and historical instinct rather than formal originality.

Legacy

Werfel died of heart failure in Los Angeles on August 26, 1945, having reportedly received a private deathbed baptism kept quiet out of respect for his Jewish parents. His body was returned to Vienna in 1975 for reburial in the Zentralfriedhof, and Austria, Germany, and Armenia have all issued commemorative stamps in his honor; Armenia granted him posthumous honorary citizenship in 2006. *The Forty Days of Musa Dagh* remains a landmark of Armenian genocide literature, still read as one of the earliest and most widely translated fictional accounts of that history, and *The Song of Bernadette* endures as a small, strange monument to the debt a refugee felt he owed to the town that hid him.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Man Who Conquered Death
• Notable work: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
• Notable work: The Song of Bernadette
• Notable work: Star of the Unborn
• Worked as writer, poet and playwright