Understanding Franz Werfel

Understanding Franz Werfel
Author: Hans Wagener
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780872498839

Describes the life & work of the Austrian poet & novelist who heralded the German Expressionist movement in 1911, wrote some of Europe's most widely read novels in the 1930s, & enjoyed popular success in the 1940s with the film adaptations of his best-selling novels.

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand
Author: Franz Werfel
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1567924085

This story is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov.

Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel
Author: Peter Stephan Jungk
Publisher: Fromm International
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1991
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780880641302

Between Heaven and Earth

Between Heaven and Earth
Author: Franz Werfel
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-06-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1787204995

First published in its English translation during World War II in 1944, the first part of this book is composed of lectures originally delivered (in German) during the pre-war period, whilst the second part of the book represents author Franz Werfel’s present point of view, arriving at the difficult conclusion that “complete human detachment is the first psychological symptom of spirituality...” “The outstanding contribution of this book is its frank rejection of the materialistic philosophy and an emphasis in favor of the spiritual interpretation of life. There are beautiful passages written with characteristic artistry.”—Kirkus Review

Forbidden Music

Forbidden Music
Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0300154313

DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div

Manon's World

Manon's World
Author: James Reidel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780857427496

Manon Gropius had three parents. She was the daughter of Alma Mahler (the widow of Gustav Mahler) and her second husband, Walter Gropius (the architect and founder of the Bauhaus school), and also was the stepdaughter of Alma's third husband, Franz Werfel. Manon's World explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. Not just a narrative biography, Manon's World is a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and an intimate cultural history of the aspirations projected on her, as seen by the Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canette who devoted two chapter of his memoirs to his encounters with Manon. In the same spirit, the composer Alban Berg dedicated his Violin Concerto to her. Reidel reveals a complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel. -- Adapted from dust jacket.

Embezzled Heaven

Embezzled Heaven
Author: László Bús-Fekete
Publisher:
Total Pages: 114
Release: 1945
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Dramatic adaptation of Werfel's novel about a good-natured, naive, and religious woman who believes in the reward of heaven if she sends all her earnings to her nephew so that he can become a priest.

Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile

Franz Werfel: The Faith of an Exile
Author: Lionel Steiman
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2010-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1554587964

Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890 and died in Beverly Hills in 1945, a popular and artistic success in Europe and America. Despite his Jewish birth and upbringing, he was attracted to Christianity at any early age, and although he never formally converted, he celebrated his own vision of it in his entire life's work. The origina sof that peculiar faith and the response it engendered in Werfel's work as he lived thorough the horrific end of Jewish life in Europe are treated here. Werfel was not a systematic thinker, and, while his writing contains much that is philosophical and theological, his eclecticism and idiosyncracy render any attempt to trace the specific origins of his thought or its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers and theologians highly problematic. Thus, this work is neither biography nor intellectual history in the strict sense—it goes beyond, melding the concerns of both genres into a thoughtful, comprehensive portrait of faith at work. Of interest to historians of the twentieth century as well as to students of that intriguing zone that lies between faith and art but is neither—or both.