Abstract

The Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel (1890 – 1945) was part of a group of writers and thinkers that were inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s works. While some attention has been paid to Werfel’s religious thinking, there’s a lack of studies that treat his at the time highly successful literary works. After discussing the context in which Werfel’s reception took place, this paper analyzes three novels in which Werfel implicitly refers to Kierkegaardian concepts. At stake is the idea of becoming (or failing to become) a self and the ensuing types of despair or fear, concepts that also captivated Werfel’s literary contemporaries such as Max Brod and Franz Kafka.