Born in Prague of Jewish parents, Werfel served in World War I, then lived and wrote in Vienna until driven out by the Nazi occupation of Austria. And the Bridge Was Love: Memories of a Lifetime, by his wife, Alma Werfel, in collaboration with E. B. Ashton, is a deeply personal autobiography of a remarkable life in Vienna by the woman who was also married to the composer-conductor Mahler and the architect Gropius. Werfel escaped to the United States after the fall of France in 1940, where he won international recognition for his fiction. The most popular of Werfel's works was the novel The Song of Bernadette (1942), recounting the miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary granted to the young girl who founded Lourdes. Werfel said he wrote the story in honor of his "miraculous" escape from the Nazis but neither affirmed nor denied the miracle at Lourdes.
Werfel also wrote lyrical poetry and drama. His comedy Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944) was successfully produced in New York in 1944. In 1967 the Hamburg Opera presented Giselher Klebe's operatic version of the play at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
020