Franz Werfel, born in Prague in 1890, was friends with Max Brodt and Franz Kafka, was drafted into the army in the First World War and lived in Vienna after the war. In 1930 he travelled to the Middle East where he met Armenian refugees and began writing Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh. In 1933 his books were burned in Germany, and in 1940 he attempted to flee to Spain before finally travelling through Marseilles and Lisbon to the USA, where he died in 1945.
