The prestigious journal "Cultura tedesca" dedicates a monographic issue to the proceedings of the conferences: "Musil al MUSIL". With this initiative, the museum aimed to develop the non-random homonymy into a fruitful dialogue with an author who addressed particularly acutely themes at the core of the mission of an institution dedicated to the dissemination of technical culture: the relationship between science and society, the impact of technological innovation on people's lives, the relationship between common language and the codes of scientific knowledge.
Special thanks from Fondazione MUSIL to Prof. Micaela Latini, passionate scientific coordinator of the two conferences and essential interlocutor for the publication in such a prestigious journal.
The conferences were organized in collaboration with the University of Ferrara (Department of Humanities) and with the patronage of the “Robert-Musil-Institut für Literaturforschung” of Klagenfurt, the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies, the Austrian Cultural Forum (of Milan and Rome), the Italian Association of German Studies, the Catholic University of Milan, Brescia campus.
The first meeting dates back to September 30, 2022, the year marking the eightieth anniversary of Robert Musil's death. This event focused on the writer's passage through Italy, following some particularly significant stages: the area between South Tyrol, Trentino, and the Isonzo during the First World War; the city of Rome, to which his wife Martha Heimann was linked and which represents the setting for several writings; and finally Edolo, in Val Camonica, precisely where the hydroelectric energy museum that hosted the first conference is located. In these surroundings, the writer stayed for several weeks during his dramatic exile journey that would take him to Switzerland on September 2, 1938.
The second meeting, held at the Iron Museum in Brescia in May 2024, instead focused on the theme of science and technology, always in continuity with the museum's mission. Specifically, the conference concentrated on the relationship between science and society, and on the codes of scientific knowledge. This is, as is known, a fundamental aspect of Musil's literature, a “mathematical man” who first graduated in mechanical engineering from the Brno University of Technology and then dedicated himself to philosophy, discussing a thesis on the theories of physicist Ernst Mach and particularly on his analyses of sensations.
The two Brescia conferences were organized and conceived under the banner of interdisciplinarity and brought together Germanists, philosophers, historians of science, and essayists from Italy and Austria. As emerges from the pages of the work, each contribution analyzed a different aspect, shedding new light on an author with a very complex and varied physiognomy.
The journal will be presented in Rome, on October 29, at the Moby Dick cultural center, in the presence of the two curators and two authors, Prof. Marina Freschi and Prof. Franz Haas.