An Enchanted House? Martha Musil and Matthäikirchstraße 1

The house at Matthäikirchstraße 1, where the Berlin illustrator and painter Martha Musil was born in 1874, was one of the first fine townhouses in the Tiergarten district. Designed and built in 1843 by the wealthy Jewish silk manufacturer Joel Wolff Meyer as a spacious country house modelled on French architecture, it soon became the home of the growing Meyer family, whose descendants also settled in the surrounding streets of the neighbourhood during the 19th century.

Margarete Mauthner, another great-granddaughter – an art collector and translator – recorded the family’s history between 1915 and 1917 in a memoir, which was published in 2004 under the title *Das verzauberte Haus* (*The Enchanted House*). Both Martha and Margarete died in exile, in Rome and Johannesburg respectively.

Martha’s husband, the world-renowned Austrian writer Robert Musil, had made this house the setting for his play *Die Schwärmer* in 1921. But what has become of the house, and what was it about it that was ‘enchanted’?

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