Robert Musil

Robert Musil was bon in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria-Hungary, on 6 November 1880. He was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels. 

The last years of Musil's life were dominated by Nazism and World War II: the Nazis banned his books. He saw early Nazism first-hand while he was living in Berlin from 1931 to 1933. In 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, Musil and his Jewish wife, Martha, left for exile in Switzerland, where he died at the age of 61, on 15 April 1942. Martha wrote to Franz Theodor Csokor that he had suffered a stroke.

Only eight people attended his cremation. Martha cast his ashes into the woods of Mont Salève. From 1933 to his death, Musil was working on Part III of The Man Without Qualities. In 1943 in Lausanne, Martha published a 462-page collection of material from his literary remains, including the 20 galley chapters withdrawn from Part III before Volume 2 appeared in 1933, as well as drafts of the final incomplete chapters and notes on the development and direction of the novel. She died in Rome in 1949.

Robert Musil (1880 -1942)