Location: Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery), Vienna, Austria Plot: Group 32 C, Number 39
Cause of Death: Heart Attack / Failure
Photo taken by: DeadGoodBooks
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Austrian-Czech novelist, playwright and poet. He was born and educated in Prague and worked for a publishing company. His first collection of poetry was published in 1911. During the First World War he served with the Austrian army on the Russian front, before being transferred to work in the press bureau. He was charged with treason and discharged due to his outspoken pacifism. In 1919 he published The Day of Judgment, a collection of his poems about the war. He met and married Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.
He continued to write and in 1929 he went on a trip to the Middle East which inspired his best known work The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which deals with the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks. As a Jew he was forced into exile in France, Spain and the USA due to the Nazi occupation. While in France he visited Lourdes which inspired him to write The Song of Bernadette which was made into an Oscar winning film in 1943. He died whilst living in Los Angeles and was interred at the Rosendale Cemetery. His body was later exhumed and returned to Vienna for reburial.
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