The Song of Bernadette (novel)
The Song of Bernadette is a 1941 published novel by Franz Werfel, who describes the life of Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes.
Preliminary
Franz Werfel had found on the run from the Nazis with his wife Alma in the summer of 1940 for several weeks hostel in Lourdes before they were able to flee over the Pyrenees and on to America. Franz Werfel writes in his preface to the novel, that he met the miraculous story of the girl Bernadette Soubirous in this way. In his great distress he had one day made a vow that if he reach the saving coast of America, he would be the first " sing the song of Bernadette " before any other work as well as he could, it:
"I have dared, The Song of Bernadette to sing, although I am not a Catholic but a Jew. The courage this company gave me a far older and much unbewußteres vows. Even in the days when I wrote my first verse, I swore to me, always and everywhere to glorify through my writings the divine mystery and human sanctity - of the age notwithstanding that deals with scorn, anger and indifference turn away from these last values our lives. "
Arrived in America, Werfel wrote the novel down in just five months. He was Werfel's ' most commercially successful work.
Dedication
The book is dedicated to Manon Gropius. She was the child of Alma Mahler -Werfel and her second husband, Walter Gropius. The girl died in 1935, after Alma Mahler -Werfel and Franz Werfel had it for almost a year maintained sacrificially to polio. Alma Mahler, who already had two daughters from her first marriage to the composer Gustav Mahler and one of which also died early, had loved her third child and it took many years until she could overcome her death.
Action
Bernadette Soubirous is the eldest child of the spouses Soubirous, who after losing their mill found in great financial hardship in the former prison of the place to stay. Bernadette suffers from asthma, and therefore often missing in the classroom. After she was with her younger sister and a friend from school to the wood looking outside the resort, Bernadette remains near the Gave de Pau River alone. The site is used as a kind of landfill site and is called Massabielle. Here it appears suddenly and unexpectedly in a niche of the grotto " a lady ". She wears a white dress with a blue belt. She is barefoot and has on each foot a golden rose. When Bernadette " the lady " the next day again sees these wishes that she should come back the next fifteen days.
Franz Werfel now describes the sequence of phenomena to Massabielle. Bernadette remains over praise or blame with equanimity, but her desire to see the " lady " again, is overpowering. So powerful that it threatens to die than be denied their visits. During one of the apparitions, the " lady " Bernadette gives the order to dig according to a source Massabielle. And indeed, there is water that has a salvific, yes wonderful effect, which attracts people from near and far.
As adults Bernadette in the convent of Saint- Gildard enters the Sisters of Charity in Nevers, where the novices Mére Vauzous, who was her Religonslehrerin in Lourdes, is plagued again and again by doubts about the supernatural character of the apparitions and the " worthiness " of the simple girl. Bernadette dies at age 35 of bone tuberculosis.
The last chapter of Romas The fiftieth Ave, an allusion to the Rosary, reported by the canonization Bernadette Soubirous ' in Rome.