Author Franz Werfel (1890-1945) was born in Prague to the glove merchant Rudolph Werfel. He had two sisters, playwright Marianne Amalie Rieser (1899-1965) and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (1896-1964). Werfel was educated in Prague, and from 1915 to 1917 he served in the Austrian army on the Russian front. After the war he settled in Vienna and worked as a full-time writer. His novels were especially popular in England and in the United States. In Vienna he met Alma Mahler-Gropius (1879-1964), the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. At that time she was married to the architect Walter Gropius. She divorced Gropius and went to live with Werfel; they were married in 1929. The Werfels lived in Austria until 1938, when the Anschluss forced them into exile. After travelling from France to Spain, they settled in the United States in 1940. Franz Werfel died in Beverly Hills, California, on August 26, 1945, in the middle of his work, correcting galley proof of his last book of verse. Alma Mahler Werfel died in New York in 1964.
From the guide to the Franz Werfel Family Collection, undated, 1925-1947, bulk 1940-1944, (Leo Baeck Institute)
