ABSTRACT
Born in Prague, son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, Werfel became a publisher’s reader in Leipzig in 1910 and quickly established himself at the centre of a group of early expressionist writers. The publication of his first collection, Der Weltfreund, in 1911 made an enormous impact; it has been claimed that the expressionist movement began with these poems. The last of them, ‘An den Leser’, represents the declamatory, rhetorical aspect of the movement. Wir sind (1912) continues, and exceeds, the ecstatic tone: the attempt at sublimity dangerously teeters upon the bathetic. Werfel fought on the Russian Front during the First World War; his pacifist play Die Troerinnen (1915, based on Euripides) caused a sensation. Werfel settled in Vienna after the war and married the widow of Gustav Mahler. His story Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig (1920) is typical in its attack on authority, on the patriarchal principle above all, cause (in Werfel’s eyes) of war and oppression. The important play Spiegelmensch dates from this time: it is a criticism of the solipsistic aspects of expressionism, the cult of subjectivity. Werfel achieved great popularity during the 1920s, despite the strictures of Karl Kraus and Kasimir Edschmid, the latter sharply criticizing the ‘prophetische Umarmungsrufe’ with the ‘weltlichen Hosiannas und den Caféhaus-Gebärden’. Der Abit-uriententag (1928) is a short novel dealing with failure at school and culpability; Barbara oder Die Frömmigkeit (1929) is a roman-à-clef dealing with Werfel’s own experiences in the war, and conditions prevailing in Vienna immediately afterwards; Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933) describes an episode from the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. Werfel’s humanitarianism became increasingly marked, even obtrusive; he travelled frequently, often to Italy (the novel Verdi (1924) had praised the sanity of the Italian as opposed to Wagner’s dangerous imperiousness). In 1938 Werfel fled Austria; in Lourdes he vowed he would write a novel on Bernadette Soubirous should he escape the Nazis (his interest in Catholicism was always fervent, although he was never baptized). He escaped to the USA: Das Lied von Bernadette (1941) became a best-seller. Later novels are avowedly Utopian (Stern der Ungeborenen (1946)). The collection of essays Zwischen Oben und Unten (1946) expresses the tensions felt between Werfel’s Jewishness and the Catholic faith. Gesammelte Werke (eight vols) appeared between 1921 and 1936; Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben appeared from 1975.
