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“... envy the swans, Who get Gustav and Walter – you never did falter – With Gustav and Walter and Franz. Franz Werfel may not have been quite up to the standard of Gustav Mahler or the architect Walter Gropius, but at the time of their first meeting in 1917 he was a hot literary property – and again in 1941 when he ...”

“... forgotten by everyone except the Armenians, it was taken up by the poet, playwright and novelist Franz Werfel. He transformed it into The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the enormous, grand-manner novel which many considered his finest work. Werfel, who died in Californian exile in 1945, is now in the ‘almost ...”

“... Alma Mahler Werfel​ celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out ...”

“... labour later, Thomas Mann, now in exile in California, was summoned to the deathbed of his friend, Franz Werfel, to hear Werfel express his delight and wonder at being in the presence of ‘the author of that immortal masterpiece’. ‘I wonder,’ Thomas Mann noted, ‘whether after all it is not this book, among all ...”

“... by his pen. He was a fine translator as well as writer, and brought some works of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel into English. Only a paltry nickel-and-dime dispute lost him the commission to complete Scott-Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu. (As you reel from this thought, reflect that instead he attained immortality by his translation ...”

“... daughter Manon Gropius, she produces giant, perfectly-formed tears like pearls. Her new husband Franz Werfel sighs and fidgets through one of Canetti’s readings before finally stalking out, to be damned as a philistine as well as a non-stop, vacuous talker and, worst of all, a popular novelist. James Joyce makes a brief appearance at another ...”

“... Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude Lévi-Strauss … A band of surrealists led by Max Ernst (Tristan Tzara, Wifredo ...”

“... Casals is probably worth 100,000. Picasso 50,000. Your trio [Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel] brought in 35,000. Since their arrival we have had nothing good to offer the public and they are pretty shopworn by this time. See if you can dig up something big. Marino gives most space to the Manns and the Werfels. For the crossing into ...”

“... bank accounts, selling their furniture.’ They left in September 1940 with Thomas’s son Golo, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler (who had sent ahead a dozen or so suitcases which contained Mahler’s scores and the manuscript of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, ‘as well’, Juers adds, ‘as her extensive wardrobe’). They had to walk across the ...”

“... then became the sounding board for his feelings of rejection; the work, in the words of Franz Werfel, who was shown an early draft of the piece, of the ‘Jew who suffers from himself’. With a work on this scale, Schoenberg felt that the expression of emotion was no longer a sufficient structuring principle: he was worried that long passages ...”

“... something unspeakably diabolic; he turned out to be Leon Feuchtwanger, only I thought he was Franz Werfel.’ In Venice in Harry’s Bar in 1950 he meets a man whom he introduces to all as Henry Green: He asked me to lunch the next day. I was surprised to find him accompanied at lunch by an obvious piece of Limehouse trade: I’d not thought ...”

“... Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where ...”

“... escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel. Isherwood, who was in the habit of thinking well of people, thought Klaus ‘without vanity or self-consciousness’; ‘his great charm,’ Isherwood said, ‘lay in this openness, this eager, unaffected approach.’ Others didn’t share his ...”

“... Jewish family, seeks post as Chauffeur, Gentleman Servant, &c.: well informed in automechanics – Franz Leeb, Vienna XIV, Pillergasse 5.’4 July 1938: ‘Very efficient Viennese Cook (non-Aryan) of good family seeks position as Housekeeper; 17-year-old daughter seeks position as Nursemaid; both experienced in all household duties. Friedlander, 44 ...”