Franz Werfel Commemorative Plaque
Hotel Elisabeth, Pfarrgasse 2. Note: this plaque is dedicated to three writers: Theodor Herzl, Mark Twain, Franz Werfel
Hotel Elisabeth, Pfarrgasse 2. Note: this plaque is dedicated to three writers: Theodor Herzl, Mark Twain, Franz Werfel
Werfel was born into a German-Bohemian Jewish family and grew up in Prague at the turn of the century, then a center of the German-language literature.
He had a lifelong friendship with Franz Kafka and Max Brod, all members of the Prague linguistic circle.
First celebrated as a poet, Werfel went to Leipzig before World War One, where he published the then famous expressionist anthology The Last Day (Der jüngste Tag). After a frontline deployment in Galicia, Werfel was transferred to the war press quarters in Vienna, where he witnessed the revolution in the ranks of the Red Guards in November 1918; he portrayed the happenings in his novel The Pure in Heart (Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit)). After the war, he met Gustav Mahler's widow, Alma Mahler-Gropius, and later married her.
In addition to poems and dramas -- including Jacobowsky and the Colonel (Jacobowsky und der Oberst, 1942, filmed in 1958 with Curd Jürgens) -- he primarily wrote narrative texts.
Noteworthy are his novellas The Man Who Conquered Death (Der Tod des Kleinbürgers, 1927), Not the Murderer, but the Victim is guilty (Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig, 1920) and Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand (Eine blaßblaue Frauenhandschrift, 1941, filmed in 1984 by Axel Corti). Of his novels [...] Class Reunion (Der Abituriententag, 1928) and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh, 1933), which is about the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman government in 1915 and 1916.
Franz Werfel fled from the National Socialists in 1938, going to the south of France, and in 1940 he went on to the US by way of an adventurous route across the Pyrenees to Spain. His last works were written in exile, including the novels The Song of Bernadette (Das Lied von Bernadette) and The Star of the Unborn (Stern der Ungeborenen). He died shortly after the end of the war in 1945 in Beverly Hills, California.
Reference to Ischl
According to the list of spa guests of 16 June 1936, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel stayed at the Hotel Elisabeth for a few days in the summer of 1936. For Werfel, it was probably the first visit to the Salzkammergut, but his wife knew the area quite well.
