An enchanted house? Martha Musil and Matthäikirchstraße 1

The house in which the Berlin illustrator and painter Martha Musil was born in 1874, Matthäikirchstraße 1, was one of the first beautiful town houses in the Tiergartenviertel. Planned and built in 1843 by wealthy Jewish silk manufacturer Joel Wolff Meyer based on the French model as a spacious country house, it soon became the residence of the growing Meyer family, whose descendants also settled in the surrounding streets of the district over the course of the 19th century.

Margarete Mauthner, another great-granddaughter, an art collector and translator, wrote down the family's history from 1915 to 1917 in a memory book that was published in 2004 under the title “The Enchanted House.” Both Martha and Margarete died in exile in Rome and Johannesburg.

Martha's husband, the world-famous Austrian writer Robert Musil, had made this house the setting for his drama “Die Schwärmer” in 1921. But what happened to the house and what was “enchanted” about it?

A presentation by Dr. Gesine Bey: literary scholar, editor and curator

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Free admission.