An Enchanted House? Martha Musil and Matthäikirchstraße 1

Lecture Series: Art History(ies) of the Tiergarten District

Matthäikirchstraße 1 – Martha Musil

Rise, Glory, and Fall—Stories of the Houses on Tiergartenstraße
The house at Matthäikirchstraße 1, where the Berlin illustrator and painter Martha Musil was born in 1874, was one of the first beautiful townhouses in the Tiergarten neighborhood. Designed and built in 1843 by the wealthy Jewish silk manufacturer Joel Wolff Meyer as a spacious country house modeled after French architecture, it soon became the home of the growing Meyer family, whose descendants also settled in the surrounding streets of the neighborhood over the course of the 19th century.
Margarete Mauthner, another great-granddaughter—an art collector and translator—recorded the family’s history in a memoir between 1915 and 1917, 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 1921 play “Die Schwärmer” (The Dreamers). But what became of the house, and what was “enchanted” about it?
A lecture by Dr. Gesine Bey: literary scholar, editor, and curator
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Free admission.
No registration required.Translated with DeepL

Price info: Free of charge

Next date:

• Date Sunday, 18/October/2026 11:15 bis 13:00
• Venue Kulturforum
• Address Matthäikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten