TTS Research Technology’s GIS & Data Lab Services Manager, Carolyn Talmadge, and Chris Barnett, Principal Software Engineer, had the honor of working with Professor Joseph Auner, Professor in the Department of Music at Tufts University, to help create three maps of Arnold Schoenberg’s life in Berlin during three distinct time periods. These maps are featured in Chapter 3 of the edited collection titled Schoenberg in Context, edited by Alexander Carpenter, which is set to release in July 2025.
Joseph Auner, “Schoenberg’s Three Berlins,” Schoenberg in Context, ed. Alexander Carpenter, Cambridge University Press, in production, 2025, 18-30.
Here is a short excerpt of the text along with the three maps created for this publication.
Schoenberg’s years in Berlin can be written on the city as an evolving network of people, places and institutions that shifted from the margins to the centres of cultural life, only to be erased when he left for the last time in 1933. Schoenberg’s sojourns there marked three very different periods in his career. He first moved to Berlin from his birthplace in Vienna from 1901–3, as a twenty-seven-year-old unpublished composer with no firm employment. When he returned, from 1911–15, he was a leading modernist, notorious for breaking with tonality, though his financial situation remained precarious. Schoenberg’s third and longest period in Berlin (1926–33) was as professor at the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts (PADK), by then famous for his twelve-tone method but also a lightning rod for attacks on the Weimar Republic and everything it stood for. These decades were, of course, marked by enormous transformations for Berlin, and for Germany as a whole, spanning Imperial Berlin at its heyday, the ‘Great War,’ the end of the empire and the arc of the Weimar Republic.
This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the dramatically expanding spheres in which he operated. My starting point is the innovative ‘Schoenberg World Map,’ hosted online by the Arnold Schönberg Center (ASC) in Vienna, which situates diverse archival documents (photographs, paintings, concert programmes, etc.) on their locations around the globe. Building on the ASC selections for Berlin, the addition here of the chronological dimension can further illuminate the interrelations of these sites, listed in full in the chapter appendix, and categorized as follows: 1. Residence; 2. Workplace; 3.Performance Venue; 4. Colleague; 5. Student; 6. Business. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with those around him. The maps can illuminate how these interactions, including many that provided crucial support along the way, were shaped by the changing locales of his life in the city.
Berlin1: December 1901–September 1903
The scattered locations and relationships that define Schoenberg’s first years in Berlin illustrate his tenuous foothold in the city.
Berlin 2: October 1911–September 1915
The map of Schoenberg’s second period in Berlin charts an expanding range of associations, as he wrote to Emil Hertzka, director of Universal Edition in Vienna: ‘You cannot imagine how famous I am here . . .People know my ‘biography’, all about me, all about the ‘scenes’ I have occasioned’.5
Berlin 3: January 1926–May 1933
Schoenberg’s third period in Berlin was anchored by his appointment as Busoni’s successor at the PADK, joining Pfitzner and Georg Schumann (Figure 3.3: 3.4.4) as a director of a masterclass in composition.
