Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel wrote the novel that told the world about the Armenian genocide and then the novel that made him rich in the country that took him in. He was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, part of the circle around Kafka and Max Brod, and made his name first as an Expressionist poet. He served on the Russian front. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933, reconstructs the resistance of Armenian villagers on a mountain in 1915; he had seen refugee children in Damascus and spent years in the archives, and the book was read across Europe as a warning about what was beginning in Germany, banned there almost at once, and smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto. He married Alma Mahler in 1929. In 1940 the two of them crossed the Pyrenees on foot with the Mann brothers, having sheltered at Lourdes, and he vowed that if he reached safety he would write about Bernadette Soubirous. The Song of Bernadette was a bestseller in America and an Academy Award-winning film. He died in Los Angeles of a heart attack at fifty-four, correcting proofs. Musa Dagh has been credited by survivors with sustaining resistance in the Bialystok and Warsaw ghettos, where copies circulated in secret. Turkish diplomatic pressure stopped MGM from filming it in 1935 and the film was not made until 1982. Alma had him baptised in intention but he declined to convert, saying he would not leave Judaism while Jews were being killed. Jacobowsky and the Colonel, a comedy about escaping France, was finished in America and staged on Broadway. His Star of the Unborn, a long utopian novel, was published after his death.

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