Franz Werfel

The Austrian poet, novelist, and playwright Franz Werfel (1890-1945) was a leading representative of the expressionist movement in German literature.

Franz Werfel was born on Sept. 10, 1890, in Prague, the son of a Jewish businessman. He studied at the universities of Prague, Leipzig, and Hamburg and then worked (1912-1914) as a reader for a publishing house. After service in World War I (1915-1917) he lived and worked as a professional writer.

Werfel's first achievement was a play, Besuch aus dem Elysium (1909), which was followed by Die Troerinnen (1915), an expressionistic reworking of Euripides's The Trojan Women. However, his reputation was made by his lyric poetry, which he published in such collections as DerWeltfreund (1911) and Wir Sind (1913). His lyric poetry is distinctive and of considerable quality; like his plays, it is passionate, often ecstatic and rhapsodic, but equally often inclined toward the abstruse and the ratiocinative; tightly knit and full of rhetorical figures, it suffers from a certain lack of color and tactile quality.

A strong vein of religious feeling runs through Werfel's poems. In his earlier work this ardor is less overtly religious than philanthropic and humanitarian. The struggle to overcome selfishness is the theme of his trilogy of dramas in verse, Spiegelmensch (1920), a work that fluctuates between the profound and the trivial, the pithy and the diffuse. The element of social criticism in Werfel's work, often pungent, is well exemplified by his novel Der Abituriententag (1928), which deals with the problem of sadism in a school. His novellas, such as Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig (1920) and Der Tod des Kleinbürgers (1926), reveal their author as a gifted narrator, a scholar of psychoanalytic lore, a shrewd psychologist, and the possessor of an acerbic and cynical wit.

In his later career the novel became Werfel's primary field of endeavor, and he developed for the most part a conventional but sophisticated realism. Verdi (1924), one of his most interesting and evocative novels, attacked the cult of the musical genius established in the German mind by the example of Richard Wagner. In Barbara, oder die Frömmigkeit (1929) Werfel combined an impressive portrayal of postwar Viennese life with the development of a moral theme. Die Geschwister von Neapel (1931; ThePascarella Family) studied the effects of fascism upon a small-time Italian banker, a pillar of austerity and morality.

Werfel fled from Nazi-occupied Austria to France and after the fall of France to the United States. Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The Song of Bernadette) was written to fulfill a vow he had made when he found temporary refuge in Lourdes. The novel is a fictionalized history of the life and experiences of Bernadette Soubirous, and his choice of theme enabled him to illuminate that essential supremacy of the spiritual over the material that his writings constantly sought to assert. Werfel's posthumously published novel, Stern der Ungeborenen (1946), is a fantastic, futuristic vision of a world in which the intellect succumbs to the profusion and vitality of instinctive life. He died on Aug. 26, 1945, in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Further Reading

Biographical material may be gleaned from Alma M. Werfel, And the Bridge Is Love (1958). The only booklength literary study of Werfel in English is Gore B. Foltin, ed., Franz Werfel, 1890-1945 (1961). Werfel's dramatic work is discussed in Hugh F. Garten, Modern German Drama (1959). For material on the expressionist background see Richard Samuel and R. Hinton Thomas, Expressionism in German Life, Literature and the Theatre, 1910-1924 (1939), and Walter H. Sokel, The Writer In Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-century German Literature (1939).

Additional Sources

Giroud, Francoise, Alma Mahler, or, The art of being loved, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Jungk, Peter Stephan, Franz Werfel: a life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

Steiman, Lionel B. (Lionel Bradley), Franz Werfel, the faith of an exile: from Prague to Beverly Hills, Waterloo, Ont., Canada: W. Laurier University Press; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Distributed in the U.S.A. by Humanities Press, 1985. □

Werfel, Franz (1890–1945), Austrian dramatist and novelist, who first became known as one of the early poets of Expressionism. His first theatrical success was Die Troerinnen (1916), an adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women acclaimed as a disguised protest against war, but his main contribution to Expressionist drama was the ‘magic trilogy’ Der Spiegelmensch (The Mirror Man, 1921), a modern version of the Faust-Mephistopheles theme, showing in symbolic images man in constant conflict with his alter ego. This was followed by Bocksgesang (also 1921), produced in New York as Goat Song by the Theatre Guild in 1926. In it man's rebellion against the established order is symbolized by a monster, half-goat half-man, who leads a peasants' revolt in the 18th century. In his later plays Werfel turned to historical themes presented in a more realistic manner, his greatest theatrical success being Juarez und Maximilian (1924) on the tragedy of the Habsburg Emperor of Mexico. Two further historical plays proved less successful: Paulus unter den Juden (1926), which centres on the conflict between inspired prophecy and established religion among early Christians, and Das Reich Gottes in Böhmen (1930). Roused by the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Werfel then wrote a verse play, Der Weg der Verheiβung, illustrating the tragic history of Judaism through the ages. It was staged in New York in 1936 in a spectacular production by Reinhardt. Werfel's last play, written after he had left Germany for the USA, was, unexpectedly, a comedy, Jacobowsky und der Oberst (set in 1940, after the fall of France), in which a Jewish refugee contrives to smuggle an anti-Semitic Polish officer through the German lines to safety. Translated by S. N. Behrman, this was successfully staged in New York in 1944 as Jacobowsky and the Colonel (London, with Michael Redgrave, 1945).

Franz Werfel , 1890-1945, Austrian writer, b. Prague. He expressed his belief in the brotherhood of man in lyric verse, in expressionist and conventional plays, and in novels. He fled from Nazi-occupied Austria to France and then to the United States. Besides several volumes of poems, his work includes the dramas Bockgesang (1921, tr. Goat Song, 1926), Juarez und Maximilian (1924, tr. 1926), Paulus unter den Juden (1926, tr. Paul among the Jews, 1928), and the comedy Jacobowsky und der Oberst (1945; adaptation by S. N. Behrman, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, 1944). He is best known in the United States for the novels Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933, tr. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, 1934), recounting the struggle of the Armenians against the Turks in World War I, and Das Lied von Bernadette (1941, tr. The Song of Bernadette, 1942), about the saint from Lourdes.

Werfel, Franz (1890–1945) Austrian dramatist, novelist, and poet. His religious, historical, and modernist dramas include The Trojan Women (1915), Paulus Among the Jews (1926), and Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1943). The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), Embezzled Heaven (1939), The Song of Bernadette (1941) and Star of the Unborn (1946) are among Werfel's most famous novels. His popular expressionist poetry, found in The Friend of the World (1911) and Each Other (1915), expressed his love for mankind.