In 1922, the year of Bulgarian screenwriter and novelist Angel Wagenstein’s birth, the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees introduced the “Nansen passport.” It was intended for stateless refugees and migrants, whose numbers had soared after World War I and the attendant revolutionary upheavals. Yet just a few days before Wagenstein’s death last June 29, the current United Nations high commissioner for refugees announced that there had never been so many people seeking similar protection. A century of life had passed, but the age of refugees had not.

In “Landscape of Exile,” his first poem upon arriving in California, Bertolt Brecht called his peers “messengers of misfortune.” The overlapping crises and contradictions of the twentieth century are evident in their stories and lives — some of which Wagenstein told in his own films and books. Yet upon his passing, many of the misfortunes from the era of his birth remained unanswered. Even the question of the best political-economic system — a problem many believed had been resolved by the time Wagenstein reinvented himself as a novelist in the 1990s — seemed open once again.

When Wagenstein came into the world, the aftermath of the Great War was everywhere. When he left it, what Pope Francis called a “world war in installments” raged, exacerbating the climate catastrophe. Even in the twenty-first century, art cannot extricate itself from the conflicts of the age. But whether “art is a weapon,” as one film about Wagenstein is called, remains to be seen. What is certain, however is that Wagenstein’s work is what Shakespeare’s Hamlet called an “abstract and brief chronicle of the times.”