Between 1924 and 1950, the children’s book-writer Lisa Tetzner  kept a guest and photo book at her summer house in Switzerland, which became her primary residence after 1933. The book documents not only the visits of numerous German émigrés but also important events in the life of the couple. One of those events was the farming of their first own tracts of land in 1939: the same year, the two had, to their great surprise, received a small bequest from Maria Klöpfer, the divorced wide of the German actor Eugen Klöpfer. She had bequeathed her entire fortune to a small group of émigrés.

Kurt Kläber knew immediately that he wanted to use the money to buy land and farm it. He had reportedly scribbled the rhyme that Lisa Tetzner wrote under the first pictures of their farming on a napkin after the will was read. 

The publicist Kläber, who was subject to a publication ban in exile, applied himself to the work with enthusiasm, and the Berlin Dadaist Hans Richter was called in as a “farmhand”. And the couple was indeed able to support itself through the Second World War from its farming earnings.

After the success of Die rote Zora und ihre Bande (The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle, 1941), Kurt Kläber's first children's novel published under the pseudonym Kurt Held, the two built themselves a house on the land. The “Casa Pantrovà” is still available to artists for work residencies to this day as stipulated in the couple's will.