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

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.

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 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.

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.

A satiric fantasy predicting the shape of things to come.

Viennese magistrate misidentifies a prisoner charged with a particularly unsavory murder.