When Rosa Luxemburg is murdered by government henchmen in 1919, Charlotte Salomon is barely two years old. Salomon’s war, both public and private, begins more or less at this moment, when the benighted legacy of the First World War is already being written. Because Luxemburg was murdered for her part in the Spartacist revolutionary uprising in Germany in 1918, we do not always remember that it was her opposition to the war that consigned her for the longest time to prison: first for a year in 1915 for inciting public disobedience, and then when that sentence ended in February 1916, under indefinite detention without trial for the rest of the war. If her support for the Spartacist uprising was at the outset cautious – she felt the revolutionaries were not ready, had not seized the right time – it was because she was painfully aware of the vulnerability of a defeated and humiliated Germany, notably its returning, mutilated army, to the blinding rhetoric of patriotism which would be so decisive in the rise of Hitler. ‘It is a foolish delusion,’ she writes in her famous anti-war ‘Junius’ pamphlet that was smuggled out of prison, ‘to believe that we need only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under a bush to await the end of a thunderstorm to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over.’10 Germany, she predicted, would learn nothing from defeat. ‘The Jew,’ Goebbels famously pronounced in 1930, ‘is the real cause of our losing the Great War.’11
Charlotte Salomon can fairly be described as her heir. As if in counterpoint and anticipation, she ushers in the next phase. Her monumental work, Life? or Theatre?, is a unique record of what Germany became in the aftermath of the First World War for the Jews who were to become the victims of the next – she was the daughter of a distinguished German-Jewish artistic and medical family. Charlotte Salomon paints her way through that history, gouache upon gouache, which she created in the last years of her life and which were then bound into a book after she died. She was murdered in Auschwitz, but it is a fatal error to assign her work to the category of Holocaust Art, which has been the partial effect, if not the aim, of including her work in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel, Yad Vashem. Salomon is another woman whose creativity exceeds her final tragedy, both historically and in terms of the energy and exuberance of her work. Life? or Theatre? was painted in a cacophony of colours, often glaring, as if in defiance of the private and public anguish she charts with such deft and vivid precision. It spans the two wars, orchestrates the space between them, running its brightly coloured lines between now and then.
Certainly she creates a new form that ‘ignores all rules and conventions’ (specifically the rules of artistic form stipulated by the Nazi custodians of art). This has certainly been the view of the commentators – followers would not perhaps be an exaggeration – who have given her work almost a cult status over the years.12 Life? or Theatre? is an in-mixing of genres, announced on the first page as a three-coloured Singspiel, a musical drama with a cast list, a series of painted images accompanied by words and songs which are spelled out in transparencies laid across each page. Salomon instructs her audience to look at the images with the accompanying tune running inside their head. She created the work in the years immediately preceding her capture and deportation, while in exile on the French Riviera when it was still under the relatively benign occupation of the Italians. According to one reliable report, she sat humming as she painted by the sea. Seizing her history against the encroaching dark, Salomon ushers us into a picture gallery which is also a poetry recital, history lesson and concert hall. The combination of sight and sound adds to the sense of historic urgency, as if to proclaim: ‘See this!’ ‘Listen here!’ You do not exactly look at, or read, Life? or Theatre? You enter into its world. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the work, has created a site where you can look at the images, read the transparencies, reverse each gouache to see what it carries beneath, and even listen to recordings of the music, taken from the moment, which Salomon intended to accompany her paintings.13
Salomon paints and rhymes her way out of an abyss which is as intensely personal as it is historical. It is the genius of her work to navigate across the two domains, uncovering the perilous foundations they share. Life? or Theatre? begins with the suicide of her mother’s sister in 1913 on the eve of the First World War. She is the offspring of that moment. In response to the death, her mother-to-be becomes a nurse, a sister again (like English ‘sister’, Schwester in German means both nurse and sister), who then travels against her parents’ wishes to the front where she meets her surgeon husband. Charlotte, named after the lost sister, will be their only child, steeped in unspoken tragedy before her life begins: ‘Little Charlotte did not seem at all pleased at being born.’14 ‘There is’, the written commentary announces across the scene of her parents’ wedding, ‘nothing to remind the gathering of the still raging war.’15 Salomon is born into a world of secrets and lies. From the outset, she is instructing her audience to see what others are refusing to see: a nation at war which seizes its moments of elation in a type of grim desperation against a bleak and threatening sky; and her aunt’s suicide, hushed up because German Jews have the highest suicide rate of all population groups in the country, which makes them vulnerable to the charge of degeneracy (a charge which will of course fatally intensify). In fact there are seven suicides in her family, including her own mother when Salomon is eight years old. Salomon is told that her mother died of flu. ‘Nobody’, the text observes, ‘had ever told Charlotte how some of her family lost their lives.’16
In defiance of a future she could not have known in advance, Salomon makes her extraordinary bid for freedom. As a young woman, she had dreamt of herself as a larva bound by a thousand shackles, ‘a larva with the one burning desire to be freed one day from these shackles’.17 Only when she finally learns the truth, at the age of twenty-three, does she start painting her work. ‘Keep this safe,’ she said when she handed the completed work to her friend, Dr Moridis. ‘C’est toute ma vie.’ (‘It is my whole life.’)18 Dipping her brush into the worst, painting the unspoken and barely speakable, she makes herself the chronicler of her world. It is how, internally, she survives. In this, she can also serve as a model. Like Luxemburg and, as we will see, Monroe, Salomon draws her strength from the most disturbing parts of her history and her own mind. It is a central part of my argument that they can, therefore, only be understood if we are willing, unlike most of the people around them, to countenance – live with, one might say – what is most horrendous about their public and private worlds. You cannot close the blinds, or turn up the volume to drown out the sounds of war. Unsolicited, for the most part, by the official rhetoric, or more simply excluded, women have the privilege, or at least the option, of being less in its thrall. In search of her own talent, Salomon combs the depths (we might say that it is her talent that drives her there). According to Alfred Wolfsohn, her mentor and lover, she made death her familiar – as opposed to an ugly family secret or the buried dead of a nation marching defiantly to its next war (Wolfsohn was himself a survivor of the First World War). Writing of one of her early paintings, Death and the Maiden, he comments: ‘From the deeply moving expression of the girl I feel that the death’s head holds none of the usual horror for her . . . Maybe this is the reason why the expression of Death shows so much softness, tenderness, almost defeat.’19
What, for women, are the wages of fear? This is a question that has returned to recent feminism. If fear is something women experience, it is also something they are instructed to feel. ‘I don’t like the fact,’ Emily Birkenshaw stated at the UK Feminista summer school held in Birmingham in 2011, ‘that as a woman I have to feel scared.’20 Fear is not only a signal. It can also be a demand. Women have to feel scared. Birkenshaw is talking about the danger to women on the streets – women whose visible sexuality is seen as the real threat, thereby making women responsible for crimes committed against them. But her statement also beautifully captures the ambiguity of fear – the appropriate response to the threat of violence, b
ut also an image of what women should be (weak, powerless, would be the accompanying cliché). If women are always or always potentially frightened then the illusion can be nurtured that no one else ever has to be. Let women be fearful so men can feel brave and safe. As with most projections, this neatly parcels off a fundamental problem of the heart. As if the world were not a frightening place. As if fear were not somewhere everyone has to go. If instead we think of fear as place or portion, then it can be seen as a component of mental life that everyone, by dint of being human, inextricably shares. For Luxemburg, Salomon and Monroe, fear is an intimate, a companion. It is part of their world or psychic repertoire, and a type of knowledge, something they are able to tolerate. Why do we talk of conquering fear, as if there would be no price to pay for such brutal inner defacement? We might take as a model of such defacement a defeated army – Germany after the First World War, for example – that will go to war once more and destroy the whole world rather than admit its own failures as a nation or face its own worst fears. The fact that it has to live these fears so totally at the end of the Second World War shows such denial to be as ineffective as it is absolute. Nothing, we might say, is more dangerous than the repudiation of fear – at which men (often) and nations (regularly) excel themselves.
When Salomon arrives in Auschwitz, she is five months pregnant. Her biographer, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, carefully unearths the figures which show that women were first in line for extermination (when Auschwitz was liberated, 17 per cent of the Jewish survivors were women to 83 per cent men). Witnesses have described how pregnant women were picked out, ostensibly for improved rations, and then immediately sent to their deaths. ‘Genocide’, writes Felstiner, ‘is the act of putting women and children first.’21 Her shocking claim simply underlines that it is the capacity of women to engender life that sparks the greatest fear. Not just the act of gestation and birth. This is not the idea of womb-envy used by some feminists to counter Freud’s infamous theory of penis-envy, which is seen as his greatest slur against women (overlooking the fact that for psychoanalysis there is no greater dupe than the man who holds on to his anatomy as his own ideal). Nor is this the argument that men always potentially hate the bodies to which they owe life, although that may also be true. Nor, more obviously perhaps, should this be taken to imply that all women are or must be mothers, or even – although this is more contested – that being a woman is something with which all women primordially self-identify, seeing themselves as a woman before and to the exclusion of anything else (as if that reality exhausts all the psychic options on offer). Rather, it is the question of what the possibility of birth represents, in Arendt’s terms, as unpredictable beginning. A new birth confronts us with the collapse of our omnipotence, creaturely life whose future – other than by magic – cannot be foretold.Totalitarian terror is needed, to cite Arendt again, ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’. ‘Totalitarianisms’, Margaret Atwood wrote on Obama’s 2012 re-election, ‘always try to control women’s bodies, one way or another.’22 (She was referring to laws against reproductive rights which remained in the pipeline, after his re-election, in individual states.)
Seen in this light, the fact of birth is a type of endless reminder of what escapes us, a living caution to our totalitarian dreams. In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Charlotte Salomon was accepted as the one Jewish student by the Berlin State Academy of Art. According to the minutes of the admissions committee, her reserved nature meant that she was not seen to pose the normal threat of ‘non-Aryan’ females to the Aryan male students. It was because her sexuality coiled back into itself that the state granted Salomon permission to paint (she was still a larva in shackles). The Nazi dread is of course that miscegenation will produce the wrong kind of racial life. Salomon, they surmised, was no danger. Were the context not so lethal, such reasoning would be laughable – as if to be reserved robs a woman of all sexual being (the idea of appearances as deceiving acquires an additional gendered gloss). But behind the inanity, we can discern the drive to control the bodies of women – to master the unmasterable – which is at the core of totalitarian logic. Or to put it more simply: a woman is terrifying because you never know what she is going to come up with.
*
The demand for perfection directed at women in modern times (everything in place, no flaw, no lines, no shadow) can therefore be seen as one of the places where terror of the unknown takes refuge. As the centre of gravity shifts across the Atlantic after the Second World War, no woman carries the weight of that demand more heavily than Marilyn Monroe. As if, like America itself, Monroe were being handed the keys of redemption to the dreadful story – for which Luxemburg’s and Salomon’s deaths can be taken as emblems – that came before.
America had been Europe’s saviour, first militarily through its 1941 intervention and then economically through the Marshall Plan. As the continent struggled to emerge from the catastrophe of the war, America took up its position as bastion of freedom and new dawn. In that role, Hollywood will be one of its strongest suits (American cinema was wildly popular in post-war Europe at least partly because most American films had been banned under the Nazis, under Mussolini and by the Pétain regime in France).23 This was America, in the words of film critic Laura Mulvey, as ‘the world’s image of a new democracy of glamour’ which ‘proclaimed the desirability of capitalism to the outside world’.24 Monroe is the face and emissary of that desire. In 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of her most successful films, the two dazzling showgirls sail across the Atlantic ferrying American beauty to a still war-scarred Europe.25 Europe’s catastrophe was America’s opportunity, allowing it to resume fully a cultural and economic colonisation of Europe which dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, and which had merely been interrupted by the war: between 1947 and 1949, Coca-Cola plants opened in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy. News of a target of 240 million bottles for France in 1951 provoked an outcry in the country.26 Monroe, we could say, was America’s answer to the war, its greatest boast, and a covert – or not so covert – weapon in the Cold War that follows. One of her most famous moments is her singing to US troops in Korea in 1954 (she herself said later that nothing had ever made her so happy). When Khrushchev asks to meet Monroe on a visit to the US in 1959, his aides explain that, for the USSR, America is Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself put it rather differently. ‘I don’t look at myself as a commodity,’ she said in her last interview, ‘but I’m sure a lot of people have.’27
Monroe was a child of the post-war Depression – she was born in 1926, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. According to the latest count, she moved during her childhood between eleven different foster homes, apart from the short periods of time she lived with her mother’s closest friend and also briefly with her mother before watching her being carried off to a mental home. She will be the most photographed woman in the world, as well as one of its most gifted cinematic performers, as is now, sometimes grudgingly, being recognised. But there is always something wrong. Not just because the back story of her life is so grim, nor because of her early death (whether accidental or suicide or indeed something far more sinister is to this day unclear); but also because both of these realities are the bleak undertow, the always hovering B movie to the triumphant tale which a newly dominant America, spreading its goods and money across the globe after the war, will try to tell the world and itself. She is far more aware, more critical, more resistant to everything that moment stands for – to all that she herself is meant to stand for – than we have been allowed to see.
Monroe’s life shadows the transition of America from Roosevelt’s New Deal, which saved the nation from Depression, through the Second World War, and from there into the 1950s Cold War, Korea and McCarthy’s witch-hunt of suspected communists which was one of its ugliest legacies. To such moral decay, Monroe’s beauty was the perfect foil. Her flawlessness was a type of magical thinking, Amer
ica’s dream of itself come true (no limp, no stutter; in fact Monroe stuttered all her life). As we will see, despite her Korean moment, she surrounded herself with people who provided some of the most searing commentary on any such delusion and on the decline of America’s liberal ideals which accompanied it. Monroe may have embodied the perfection of America, its most dazzling image of itself, but she did not believe in it. She was suspicious of the official line. In May 1960, at the height of the Cold War, a CIA U2 plane was shot down by the Soviets. A few weeks later, when a second plane was spotted trespassing in the same airspace, Monroe phoned an aide to ask why. He told her it was not spying but merely carrying out an oceanic survey. ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t trust us,’ she replied. The fact that the sentence grammatically defies all logic makes the political point all the more strongly (how can ‘I’ distrust ‘us’ in which ‘I’ is syntactically included?).28
Monroe was a rebel spirit. Her close friend Norman Rosten tells the somewhat unlikely story of how in 1960 she tried to persuade Arthur Miller to offer their home as a safe haven to Indonesian President Sukarno, who had led his country’s struggle for independence, when he faced an imminent coup. He was eventually overthrown by Suharto with the backing of the CIA.29 ‘My nightmare is the H Bomb,’ Monroe wrote in her notes for an interview in 1962, ‘What’s yours?’30 None of this of course is well known. Monroe’s politics are like a hidden life behind the screen. There is a lesson here too that feminism can make use of. No woman is ever as bad as her own worst cliché.
Women in Dark Times Page 2
