Introductory Remarks

There is no doubt that Martha Musil was devoted to her husband and subordinated her personal interests to his writing; this devotion extended to her concern to pass on to posterity the unpublished sections of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and other manuscripts that help to provide a more rounded view of his achievement, including the extent to which the roots of his art reach down into his life. But Martha was also concerned with her own image as transmitted in Musil's writings. When we look through the papers in Musil's Mappen (folders) and the diary notebooks, it appears highly likely that, probably after Musil's death, Martha Musil carried out some acts of censorship. In a manuscript entitled “Rabe” (Raven), which is concerned with Martha's dubious past, references to her former lovers have been blacked out. But since the censor was rather unpredictable the emendations were not systematic, and where at one point only the first letter of the name of a former boyfriend remains, a few lines later the first syllable “Cass.” has been left intact. Thus it is possible to work out unequivocally that the man in question was the Berlin art gallery owner Paul Cassirer. Attempts by Martha to withhold further facts from posterity were circumvented by Viennese detectives using intense light to reveal what lay beneath her deletions; a doctor's report on Musil from the First World War shed light on one of the most baleful secrets of Musil's life — his being infected with syphilis, which, according to circumstantial evidence, led around 1906 to the miscarriage suffered by his partner Herma Dietz and ultimately to her death in November 1907. A doctor's report on Musilfrom the time of the First World War actually refers to the much earlier “abortus” or miscarriage, for which he may have been indirectly responsible.Throughout his life Musil feared that, like Nietzsche, he might go mad and die in delirium.

In the case of a third kind of censorship, the use of a pair of scissors, research was powerless. In the diaries, for example in Notebook 7, perhaps the lower half of one page would be missing or the upper third of another. In one instance where the text broke off in mid-sentence a problematical situation had evidently emerged between Musil and his stepdaughter Annina; the entry had evidently fallen victim to Martha's scissors.