Franz Werfel was born in Prague where he was raised. Among his friends were Max Brod and Franz Kafka. His father had hoped that he would join the family industry. Werfel had no interest in this and chose literature instead. Their disagreement is well reflected in his story ‘Not the murderer but the murdered is guilty’. He moved to Leipzig, Germany, in 1911 where he attended the university. While studying he worked as a publisher’s reader. During this time he became more prolific in his writing. His earliest verse collections: ‘Friend of the world’ (1911), ‘We are’ (1913) and ‘Together’ (1915) attest to his inclination towards religious mysticism as opposed to the skepticism and sophistry typical of his contemporaries in Viennese cultural circles. Werfel was deeply influenced by Christian Catholic beliefs and morality but never officially left his Jewish faith. During World War I he served for three years in the Austrian army on the Russian front. His war experiences confirmed his pacifism. His literary works reflect his yearning for love and universal brotherhood in harmony with nature.
After the World War I Werfel became a freelance writer in Vienna and Berlin. Werfel and Alma (Schindler) Mahler (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) were married in 1918. She is largely responsible for introducing him to Viennese cultural society. Among Werfel’s theatrical works are: the trilogy ‘Spiegelmensch’ (“Mirrorman”), ‘Paul among the Jews’ (1928), ‘The Eternal Road’ (1935), a biblical play set by Kurt Weil and staged in New York by Max Reinhardt. ‘Verdi’, a novel of the opera (1925) promoted a Verdi revival in Germany. Werfel mainly portrayed the lowly and the defeated. His epic novel the ‘Forty days of Musa Dagh’ (1933) depicts the Armenians’ hopeless struggle against their Turkish perpetrators of their massacre. The idea came to him when he met Armenian refugees in Jerusalem during a visit to Palestine.
The Werfels were in Italy at the time of the Anschluss (annexation of Austria to Germany 1938), when they fled to France. In Paris, Werfel, with other émigré writers, founded the League de l’Autriche Vivante as a forum for Austrian anti-Nazi intellectuals. When the Germans invaded France, Werfel and his wife moved southwards. In 1940 they managed to reach the USA and settled in California. His book The Song of Bernadette about the girl saint, Bernadotte Siborius, of Lourdes, France (1941), and the film based on it brought him fame in the English-speaking world. Geschichte aus den Jahren 1908-1945, a collection of Werfel’s best poems was published in 1946.