Capital and Culture: Musil's Politics

At the age of fifty-six, Robert Musil was already writing of his career in valedictory terms. That year he published the short prose collection Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in Zurich. It was that same year that Musil suffered his first stroke. If the author felt he was scrambling to publish against borrowed time, this was more than presumption. Historical circumstances, too, had conspired to wrongfoot his literary reputation and livelihood. The extant volumes of Musil’s masterpiece, The Man without Qualities, appeared in 1930 and 1932 – hardly time for the reading public to absorb their impact before he and his wife Martha were forced to flee first Berlin and then Austria, following the Anschluß. In 1942, he died destitute in Swiss exile, working until his last day to bring one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious novels to a satisfactory conclusion.