Robert and Martha left Austria about five months after the Anschluss with the German Reich, carrying with them only the necessary manuscripts to continue writing the unfinished Man Without Qualities, some clothes and small valuables—and left behind their entire Vienna apartment on Rasumofskygasse, filled with books, photographs, furniture, family heirlooms, the manuscript of The Confusions of Young Toerless, the first version of Musil’s doctoral dissertation on Ernst Mach, and scores of other papers, newspaper clippings, and precious memorabilia. They told all their friends that they were going to Italy so that Robert could work on some Italian scenes in his book and to visit Martha’s son, Gaetano. But they knew they were fleeing. Martha regretted soon after not having taken the typewriter or enough shirts for Robert (they bought a very Italianate striped one for him in Edolo, where they had met her son). They also bought Robert his first fountain pen—a fitting symbol for their new life on the run.
They kept up the fiction of not being emigrants or “Fluechtlinge” (fleeing persons) for years, slightly altering the story to include a sudden illness of Robert’s that kept them from returning to Vienna and necessitated them staying in Switzerland (first Zurich and then Geneva) instead. Some friends in Vienna (Valerie and Franz Petter-Zeiss) made sure that the apartment was preserved for them, helping to pay the rent whenever the Musils were not able to send money gleaned from various aid organizations. Occasionally, Martha would write to Valerie using cover names and coded puzzles, asking for certain manuscripts and books to be sent over. It was of course dangerous for anyone still within the Nazi realm to communicate at all with emigrants who were likely enemies of the Reich, so Martha would ask in round about ways for what was needed, using fake names and inventing odd scenarios.
One of the saddest elements of this continuing subterfuge (which included the attempt of Martha and Robert to hide Martha’s Jewishness—see post above) was that Martha did not dare have direct contact with her sister, Johanna Casper, who was still living in Berlin and managing an art gallery when the Musils escaped to Switzerland. Martha sent her sister things (coffee, sugar, chocolate), when possible, and messages—but never directly. Instead, she communicated with her through Martha’s daughter Annina, in Philadelphia. Further, assuming the censors would look at her letters, she wrote to her daughter “correcting” a rumor that she had a sister, Johanna Casper. It must be a mistake, she said. For how could a non-Jewish woman have a sister who was Jewish? “Frau Tuzzi,” she writes, using a code name for herself taken from her husband’s novel, “says that she has no sister. Nevertheless she is often asked about it because a lady, Johanna, who lives abroad, has suddenly started asking after her when she writes to acquaintances.” Johanna had been able to leave the Third Reich twice: once in 1934/5 to meet with Annina and her husband Otto in Amsterdam, and once in 1937 to visit them in Philadelphia (she had to return when her visa ran out). By the 23rd of October, 1941, the Nazis had banned any emigration by Jews from the Reich. Tragically, Johanna was transported to Theresienstadt either in 1941 or 1942 (reports vary). While the family later believed that she had killed herself in order to avoid being taken to the camp, the memorial at Theresienstadt records that she was incinerated on October 26, 1944. Did Martha know? There is no record of her commenting upon it.
As to the apartment in Rasumofskygassse, in March of 1941, about a month before Musil’s death, the Nazi officials demanded the apartment be cleared out, at which point the Musils’ friends in Vienna helped to clear it out and brought the books, manuscripts, sets of dishes and glasses, typewriter, victrola, record albums, paintings, photo albums, etc. to a storage space for safe keeping. But there was no safe keeping.
The storage space was bombed and set afire. When Valerie and Franz Petter-Zeiss, the friends who had been taking care of the apartment and its contents went to the site of the fire, in hopes that they might salvage something, they discovered nothing but ashes and paper fragments. A fireman who was standing there told them that any half-burnt books had been taken away by people who needed something, anything, to burn to heat their apartments.