Franz Werfel

...The Notes contain treasures, including Milan Kundera's sympathetic judgment on Werfel's political naivete...

...The mistrust was not merely jejune, but lifelong a condition of Werfel's being...

...Werfel was twenty-nine years old...

...Such contradictions ran through Werfel's nature and his experience, but he lived in a time and a place that could not allow their embrace, as his childhood hero Walt Whitman was allowed the embrace, even the exaltation, of contradiction...

...Crystal Gromer In the autumn of 1919, Franz Werfel confessed to his future wife, Alma, the widow of Gustav Mahler, the former mistress of Oscar Kokoschka, and at that time the wife of Walter Gropius, "I'm full of mistrust of myself...

...comes closest to the period of primitive Christianity...

...Each chapter ends with a brief italicized passage in which Jungk accounts for his method, whether interview or archive...

...A glance at Jungk's acknowledgments shows that he was indeed blessed or lucky in finding a number of long-lived friends, relatives, acquan-tances of Werfel's, the foremost among them Anna Mahler, Werfel's stepdaughter, her husband, Albrecht Joseph, Werfel's secretary, and Golo Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, and with his uncle, Heinrich, a fellow adventurer with the Werfels over the Pyrenees in 1940...

...Because the world he lived in was divisive rather than cohesive, because his works were variously confiscated, banned, and, together with the works of Freud and Marx, burned for their "un-German spirit," Werfel found himself as a German author "suspended in empty space...

...A fat, bow-legged Jew" was his anti-Semitic wife's first impression of Franz Werfel...

...Most of all, the biography benefits from the decision Jungk made to tell Werfel's story both from the inside and from the outside...

...Want to produce something decisive, at long last-It is terrible...

...It is a gripping story, which includes an arduous escape from occupied France over the Pyrenees to Spain and finally to New York, where Werfel had a couple of months before been reported as dead on the front page of the Post shot while attempting to escape the Nazis, as he might well have been...

...Imbued from his childhood with a love of music, in particular a love of opera and especially Verdi, about whom he wrote a novel Werfel thought in terms of opuses, not books...

...I believe I would be happiest in a world that...

...From the moment of his birth, at just before midnight on September 10, 1890, until the moment of his death, at a few minutes before six in the evening on August 26, 1945, Werfel was caught between worlds: he was born in Prague, but he was not a Czech, his ancestry being German...

...The San Francisco Herald Examiner serialized it as a daily comic strip...

...So was the indecision, and so was the longing...

...Then, Jewish and Catholic ethics were joined in one wonderful idea," Werfel said to a reporter in 1930...

...It is not surprising that Werfel's favorite contemporary American author was Thomas Wolfe, and a reader of Peter Stephan Jungk's excellent biography can't help but wonder if Werfel's place in twentieth-century German literature isn't somewhat analogous to Wolfe's place in American literature...

...The book is rewardingly well-researched: passages from unpublished letters, notebooks, journals enliven the text with a sense of the present and the presence of the many contemporaries cited...

...in 1944 the army bought fifty thousand copies of The Song of Bernadette, which sold a million copies that year...

...When he did write an occasional brief work, such as the critically and popularly successful novella, The Man Who Conquered Death, he urged his publisher to print the book on thick stock and to use large print, lest his public think the book merely a "stopgap...

...Thus we have the story of Werfel from his birth to his death, recorded compassionately but not uncritically, and at the same time, we have the story of Jungk's finding the story...

...Heinrich's so regularly that he played Mass in his bedroom with brooms, hatboxes, newspapers to make up the altar, beginning a lifetime's fascination with Catholicism though he was never a Catholic...

...Even in death, it is not clear whether Alma Mahler had a "baptism" performed on Werfel, causing the priest to be so late for the funeral that after Bruno Walter played Bach and Schubert, Lotte Lehmann sang songs of Schubert twice...

...Each chapter, then, ends in a coda of aged voices recalling a time fifty or more years before...

...He declared his Jewishness openly at the same time that he petitioned for membership in the Reich Association for German Writers...

...Hence he was still searching for that "one wonderful idea" when, in ill-health and amid premonitions of his death, he undertook his last work, a "travel novel" set a hundred millennia in the future whose hero, F.W., wanders out of death and into a Utopia in which only two certainties have been carried over from the world he knew in 1943: Judaism and Catholicism, "two antitheses that had to fight to a finish because they were really two identities...

...Jungk tells the story of it both well and carefully...

...In the United States, Werfel became a Book-of-the-Month Club author and a best seller...

...Though he sought it in work after work, that idea and perhaps consequently that happiness as well eluded him...

...He wrote huge books, at which he labored eight and twelve hours a day, producing in months manuscripts of eight hundred to a thousand pages, which he then fell to revising at the same rate...

...Werfel might well have been pleased by the operatic sense of so many voices making one production.one production...

...Richly, and not always on the same key or with the same facts, the voices of the past chime in...

...Forced to take sides in the exigencies of the German intellectual world and the German political condition of the thirties, Werfel skirted into religious mysticism and political naivete...

...a friend God has sent" was the accolade of the Armenian community after The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, in which Werfel recorded the extermination of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I; a convert...

...the Catholic archbishop of New Orleans inquired after the enormous, indeed astounding, success of Werfel's The Song of Bernadette, whose film adaptation made an Oscar-winning star of Jennifer Jones, her portrait of Bernadette reproduced in a Norman Rockwell poster and in a soap figurine distributed by a manufacturer in Alabama...

...I still haven't written my Op[us...

...Both men produced enormous volumes in their time successful, in our time no longer read...

...he was born a Jew, but his beloved nursemaid, Babi, took him to Mass at St...

...From Prague to Vienna to Hollywood, via Berlin, Venice, Sanary-sur-Mer, this is a fascinating life, which touches many fascinating lives, for Werfel knew everybody, and if he didn't, Alma Mahler did...

...Jungk's biography of Werfel, published in Germany in 1987 and recently, apparently seamlessly, translated into English by Anselm Hollo, provides a carefully detailed portrait of a man whose life story was a struggle between antitheses, between identities...