A Schoenberg Perspective on the Doctor Faustus Controversy

E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of renowned Austrian
composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl, graduated from
Princeton University and received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Southern California. He waged an eight-year battle on behalf of Maria Altmann in her quest to regain six paintings by Gustav Klimt that had once belonged to her family but were taken by the Nazis. In a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court, Schoenberg won the right for his client to sue the government of Austria for the return of the paintings. Subsequently, as a result of a unanimous decision by an Austrian arbitration court, the six paintings, valued at over $325 million, were returned to Altmann and other family members. The portrait of Altmann’s a unt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, now occupies a place of honor in the Neue Galerie Museum in New York City. Mr. Schoenberg is the recipient of numerous awards and honors from many organizations, including the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League. His quest for justice on behalf of Maria Altmann was portrayed in the film Woman in Gold.

Competing Modernisms: The California Exile of Mann, Adorno, and Schoenberg

Marjorie Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a cultured and assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. Her maternal grandfather,
Richard Schüller, held various ministerial posts in the Austrian
government and was the Austrian delegate to the League of Nations after World War I. In the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Gabriele, her parents, and older brother escaped to Switzerland and later emigrated to the United States. She describes her transition from the German-speaking Gabriele to the English-speaking Margie, in her memoir, The Vienna Paradox.

A prolific and groundbreaking scholar, Dr. Perloff has written more than a dozen books on 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics, European and Latin American as well as our own. She is Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California, and Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. An elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Dr. Perloff received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Chapman University in May 2015.