After the war, troubled by a sense that the best years of his creative life were slipping away, he sketched out no fewer than twenty new works, including a series of satirical novels. A play, The Visionaries(1921), and a set of stories, Three Women (1924), won awards. He was elected vice-president of the Austrian branch of the Organization of German Writers. Though not widely read, he was on the literary map. 

Before long the projected satirical novels had been abandoned or absorbed into a master project: a novel in which the upper crust of Viennese society, oblivious of the dark clouds gathering on the horizon, discusses at length what form its next festival of self-congratulation should take. The novel was intended to give a ‘grotesque’ (Musil’s word) vision of Austria on the eve of the World War. Supported financially by his publisher and by a society of admirers, he gave all his energies to The Man without Qualities. 

The first volume came out in 1930, to so enthusiastic a reception in both Austria and Germany that Musil — a modest man in other respects — thought he might win the Nobel Prize. The continuation proved more intractable. Cajoled by his publisher, yet full of misgivings, he allowed an extended fragment to appear as the second volume in 1933. He began to fear he would never complete the work. 

A move back to the livelier intellectual environment of Berlin was cut short by the coming to power of the Nazis. He and his wife returned to the ominous atmosphere of Vienna; he began to suffer from depression and poor health. In 1938 Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. The couple moved to Switzerland. Switzerland was meant to be a staging-post en route to a home offered by Martha’s daughter in the United States, but the entry of the United States into the war put paid to that plan. Along with tens of thousands of other exiles, they found themselves trapped. 

‘Switzerland is renowned for the freedom you can enjoy there,’ observed Bertolt Brecht. ‘The catch is, you have to be a tourist.’ The myth of Switzerland as a land of asylum was badly damaged by its treatment of refugees during World War Two, when its first priority, overriding all humanitarian considerations, was not to antagonize Germany. Pointing out that his writings were banned in Germany and Austria, Musil pleaded for asylum on the grounds that he could earn a living as a writer nowhere else in the German-speaking world. Though allowed to stay, he never felt at home in Switzerland. He was little known there; he had no talent for self-promotion; the Swiss patronage network disdained him. He and his wife survived on handouts. ‘Today they ignore us. But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum,’ remarked Musil bitterly to Ignazio Silone. Depressed, he could make no headway with the novel. In 1942, at the age of sixty-one, after a bout of vigorous exercise on the trampoline, he had a stroke and died. 

‘He thought he had a long life before him,’ said his widow. ‘The worst is, an unbelievable body of material — sketches, notes, aphorisms, novel chapters, diaries - is left behind, of which only he could have made sense.’ Turned away by commercial publishers, she privately published a third and final volume of the novel, consisting of fragments in no hard and fast order.

Musil belonged to a generation of German intellectuals who experienced the successive phases of the breakdown of the European order between 1890 and 1945 with particular immediacy: first, the premonitory crisis in the arts, giving rise to the various Modernist reactions; then the war and the revolutions spawned by the war, which destroyed both traditional and liberal institutions; and finally the rudderless post-war years, culminating in the Fascist seizure of power. The Man without Qualities — a book to some extent overtaken by history during its writing — set out to diagnose this breakdown, which Musil more and more came to see as originating in the failure of Europe’s liberal elite since the 1870s to recognize that the social and political doctrines inherited from the Enlightenment were not adequate to the new mass civilization growing up in the cities. 

To Musil, the most stubbornly retrogressive feature of German culture (of which Austrian culture was a part - he did not take seriously the idea of an autonomous Austrian culture) was its tendency to compartmentalize intellect from feeling, to favour an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He saw this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked, men of intellect living coarse emotional lives. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seemed to him to hold the most immediate promise of lifting society to a higher ethical plane. He deplored the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois mores laid down for women and men. ‘Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged as a consequence,’ he wrote. 

Because of the concentration in his work, from Young Törless onwards, on the obscurer workings of sexual desire, Musil is often thought of as a Freudian. But he himself acknowledged no such debt.