This chapter presents an analytic autoethnographic account of techno production within the Berlin electronic dance music scene. The discussion analyses the composition, production, and creative processes underpinning several commercially successful techno records: ‘Ellipse’, ‘Pulse Train’, and ‘Cognitive Resonance’. Observations of the production practice reveal several rhythmic principles underpinning techno music: sixteenth notes flow in uninterrupted ‘pulse trains’, kick drums articulate 4/4 beats; groupings in powers of two predominate; polymetricity enables non-binary groupings. Describing a process of integration in the global techno scene and its Berlin focal point, the chapter is written in the first person to show the author’s presence. Links are drawn between personal experience and rhythmic structures in techno music. Three insights emerge: pulse trains as central rhythmic structure of techno music; interiorising production techniques and immersing oneself in scene-specific aesthetic codes; and using embodied knowledge, gained through listening and dancing, is a significant component of producing techno.

Fanny Hensel inherited a tradition of powerful salonnières and redefined it for her time. She navigated gendered constraints on her music career via her Sonntagsmusiken, which were private yet highly curated performances that prioritized music just as much as conversation. Hensel’s social and religious concerns shaped many of her choices, initially confining her to informal settings and to a secondary role as her parents launched her brother’s career. However, her early exposure to Berlin’s elite musical circles allowed her to analyze areas for improvement in Berlin’s musical culture, and she embarked on a mission to raise the level of musical excellence and taste in her circle. This study examines key milestones in Hensel’s journey, highlighting shifts in the number of performers, performance formats, genres, and complexity. Hensel’s evolving approach to musical gatherings reflected broader nineteenth-century tensions between domesticity and professionalization, and shaped her eventual legacy far beyond her Berlin salon.

Among the Jewish salonnières of post-Napoleonic Berlin, Amalie Beer (1767–1854) was one of the few to remain a committed Jew throughout her life. The home where she regularly entertained her friends and musical celebrities was also host to a popular yet controversial Sabbath service known as the Beer Temple, an early attempt to align Jewish worship more closely with the surrounding German culture. This essay investigates points of contact and exchange between the Beer Temple and the salon of Amalie Beer, placing the aesthetics of the musical salon in conversation with “bourgeois Judaism” and early Jewish reform. Though the organ, choir, and chorales characteristic of the Beer Temple are commonly framed as adaptations of contemporary Lutheran practice, I find that the Temple was equally marked by its parallels with the salon – not only its domestic location, but its visual trappings, sociability, gender politics, and musical functions.

Based on ethnographic research in Berlin and further research into early rave cultures, this chapter addresses the commercialisation of the techno rave in Berlin as part of wider transformational processes, and as a source for protests movements that promoted alternative visions, economies, and practices of rave such as free parties, teknivals, and parades. That Berlin was ‘poor but sexy’ became the city’s leitmotif from 2003 onwards, when Berlin was still cheap and grimy. Rich with creative potential, it was just starting to attract foreign investors. In the aftermath, Berlin was embedded in a global tourism industry to market its urban identity, also through its electronic dance music cultures. The discussion shows how music and culture are entangled with political-economic processes of neoliberal capitalism and how these are contested through counter cultural practices linked with electronic dance music. Gentrification and commodification of culture continue to be pressing topics in urban Europe at large and reverberate in the musical genres at stake.

This chapter focuses on a relatively unknown Jewish/German jurist, Dr Walter Schwarz. Schwarz returned to Berlin in the 1950s and practiced as a restitution lawyer. He was one of only a few Jewish lawyers working in Berlin at this time. Schwarz set up a legal journal, where he also published ‘glosses’ under pseudonyms. Found in a library in Berlin, I translate and analyse a selection of these glosses written by Schwarz. Going beyond the legal representation he could offer to his clients, I contend the writing of the glosses is a different method for Schwarz to take responsibility for the conduct of the restitution program. This chapter sets up the way giving an account of restitution can be an ethos – of writing, but also of conduct, of practice.

This chapter imposes the structure of a walking tour of Berlin’s memorial art onto the text, continuing to stage moments of individual viewing of art. My argument about the material practices of taking responsibility for restitution is turned into a grounded methodology: a shoe-on-the-footpath mode of writing. Beginning in Bebelplatz, I visit recent responses to the past as they are represented in memorial art in different areas of Berlin, including the national Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. I visit Schöneberg where the Places of Remembrance memorial consists of signs of law from the NS regime mounted in the streetscape. I also analyse Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling-stones, which are small memorial stones set into the footpath. This chapter is a plaidoyer for paying attention to the way we craft and take responsibility for our legal landscapes through our conduct – our movement and posture – resulting from our interaction with the street and its objects.

Part of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s ‘monarchical project’ following his ascension to the throne in 1840 included his goal of establishing Berlin as a leading centre of culture and the arts on par with other European capitals. Berlin had remained Fanny Hensel’s home throughout her life, where her musical salon formed one of the city’s cultural highlights. In the 1840s, at the urging of the king, her brother gave Berlin another chance; his appointment at the Prussian court brought him closer to his family once more, but placed different expectations on him, not least in the composition of new genres for the court (incidental music, liturgical music). Ultimately Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s project must be judged something of a political failure, while Mendelssohn left after an unsatisfactory and frustrating period. Yet while neither Hensel nor Mendelssohn lived long enough to witness the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, each in their own way played an important role in shaping the contours of everyday life in Berlin of the 1840s.

The chapter explores the Jewish connections, social status, and musical involvement of the extended family on both their maternal and paternal sides, outlining the role in Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives, and in wider society, of their various aunts, uncles and cousins, as well as their grandparents and great-grandparents. The contexts in which these family members functioned ranged from contributions to Jewish learning (as with Moses Mendelssohn, the siblings’ grandfather), and to the Jewish community (as with their maternal great-grandfather Daniel Itzig), to the influential musical salons of their great-aunts, such as those of Fanny von Arnstein and Cäcilie von Eskeles in Vienna, and Sara Levy in Berlin. The residence at 3 Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin inhabited by Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn and their children was considered by the family, as Sebastian Hensel recorded, not merely as ‘bricks and mortar’, but rather as one of them, sharing their lives.

The city of Berlin was formative for the musical development of the young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Although in the early decades of the nineteenth century the city suffered from a degree of cultural insecurity compared to some of its peer capitals in Europe, Berlin’s historicist tendencies, burgeoning musical life, and strong participatory culture of choral music gave the city a unique profile. This chapter traces the Mendelssohns’ interactions with musical historicism, trends in operatic and concert life in Berlin (including leaders in those areas, such as Gaspare Spontini and Carl Möser), other important local music figures in performance and journalism, and – last but not least – with their teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, head of the Singakademie zu Berlin. It shows how the Mendelssohns’ often historicist musical values formed in this special environment, even as both artists would grow beyond these roots as they matured.

The circles of friendship within which Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn moved during their childhood and youth very much revolved around the family; to a large degree their early friends (often slightly older) were selected or encouraged by their parents according to how they might contribute to their personal or intellectual growth. Not a few of these friends shared the children’s passion for music, such as Ignaz Moscheles, Eduard Ritz (or Rietz), Ferdinand David, Eduard Devrient, and Adolf Bernhard Marx, but also included academics, lawyers and artists (notably Fanny’s husband-to-be, Wilhelm Hensel). The physical and spiritual centre of all these friendships was the family home in the Leipziger Strasse 3, the closest group of friends and their relaxed, cheerful and witty intercourse symbolised by Wilhelm Hensel’s drawing Das Rad (‘the Wheel’) with Felix at its centre.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

The Mendelssohn family Sunday musicales were and are one of the most prominent examples of private music making from nineteenth-century Germany. Yet their importance lies not so much in their singularity, as in the way that they were an especially successfully representative of a much larger set of private music-making practices throughout Berlin and German-speaking cities more generally, some of which took place in Jewish-women-led salons. This chapter looks at a diverse range of private music-making practices during the period, many of which were important to the Mendelssohn family’s musical activities. Private music-making offered musicians and listeners an alternative to the public concert hall; travelling virtuosi chances to get to know the local music scene; and composers like Felix and Fanny a laboratory for trying out new works. Perhaps most importantly, private music-making offered women, including Fanny Hensel, an opportunity to shine in multiple overlapping organisational and musical roles at once.

This chapter draws on a year of fieldwork with housing activists in Berlin to examine law as a cultural archive of putatively long-defunct utopian visions, and at once as the key for resurrecting these visions in the present. In the German elections of September 2021 a referendum for expropriating hundreds of thousands of apartments owned by real-estate multinationals in the federal state of Berlin won by a resounding majority, to the surprise of both supporters and detractors. The inclusion of the referendum on the Berlin ballot represented the successful culmination of several years of intensive organizing and campaigning by a grassroots movement facing a largely uncooperative and antagonistic government led by the Social Democrats. The movement based its campaign on an article in the German constitution that grants federal as well as state governments the power to “socialize” private property on a massive scale. Included in the 1949 constitution with the support not only of the Social Democrats who now oppose it but also of many conservatives, the article reflects a bygone time when competing visions of how best to structure Germany’s economy had not yet reached a political resolution, when ideas about the supremacy of public over private interests held sway over broad constituencies, and when aspirations for the collective ownership of the means of production were central to working-class discourses. Notably for how these struggles panned out, this article has never been used in the history of the Federal Republic. The chapter examines how contemporary housing activists seek to reanimate such past futurities through their legal afterlives, locating in the law the potential for a radical change that in contrast with the largely ineffective impact of existing rent regulations and city ordinances would fundamentally transform the nature of the real-estate market from the ground up. The chapter argues that far from naively staking their hopes on law, these activists elaborate creative strategies for reckoning with the limits that an antagonistic political conjuncture as well as enduring hegemonic ideologies about the market place upon it.

This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

Schoenberg’s years in Berlin (1901–3, 1911–15, 1926–33) 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. These three periods were marked by profound changes in his life and works, mirroring the cataclysmic transformations of Berlin and Germany as a whole. This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the changing locales of his life in the city as well as the dramatically expanding artistic and cultural spheres in which he operated. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with the people and places around him.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

Examining rescue during 1940–1945, this chapter asks what possibilities of self-help were available and what strategies were developed to take action? Could Jewish organizations continue to operate under the Nazi regime? What forms of cooperation were forged with non-Jewish organizations and individuals, such as members of the Christian churches, and did these raise chances of survival?

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.