Thus Milner provides a psychoanalytic subtext, a manifesto of the ethics of otherness in a time of war that can serve as a type of theoretical handmaiden, as I see it, to Charlotte Salomon’s craft. Like Salomon, she suggests, the artist has no choice but to let go of herself, so as to achieve ‘a relation to the inevitable otherness of what is outside one, to the reality of the ground beneath’.40 We could call this an ethics of treading carefully. What is outside and beneath you must be accorded the most fervent respect. This applies as much to people as to objects, as much to those in front of us as it does to the un-negotiable weight of the earth (we will see this concern becoming urgent once more in the paintings of Thérèse Oulton). ‘In order to “realise” other people,’ writes Milner, ‘one has in a sense to put oneself into the other.’41 One has to risk becoming the person one is not. Only by losing yourself in the other can you give the other place and voice.
This is not, however, straightforward or simple. You could say that psychoanalysis devotes itself more or less exclusively to the complexity or anguish of this task. There is a kind of internal blowback to the generosity of Salomon’s cry ‘I will live for them all’, since to give yourself over to the other means, psychically, not only that you risk losing yourself but, even more uncomfortably, that you have to let the other in. Boundaries become porous. Either way, there is the risk that, as a separate being, you will be lost. Milner’s call for the ‘free reciprocal interplay of differences confronting each other with an equal right to be different’ has something oddly formulaic about it (how could any one object?). In fact we know – and not just in relation to Nazi Germany – that it is the hardest of all political and psychic realities to respect. Differences are threatening. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in the same year as On Not Being Able to Paint, Hannah Arendt writes of the ‘dark background’ of ‘mere’ difference as something intolerable to human thought: ‘It is because equality demands that I recognise each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups . . . take on such terribly cruel forms.’42 The innocence of the demand is misleading. It carries an undercurrent of dread. Milner describes the emotional forces opposing such recognition as ‘titanic’.43
Both Milner and Salomon allow us to contemplate – bring us face to face with – this intolerable demand. To paint, they both suggest in their different ways, is to do nothing less. Together they are laying out the painful psychic drag or undertow of painting, its affiliation to anxiety and death (they could also be seen as offering a type of disturbing psychoanalytic gloss to French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the central ethical and political task is to contemplate the other’s face). How do bodies, how does the mind, take shape out of the radical shapelessness of the primordial psychic world? ‘It became clear’, writes Milner, ‘that if painting is concerned with feelings conveyed by space then it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of bodies that occupy different bits of space.’44 ‘In fact,’ she continues, ‘it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing.’45 For Milner, entering the realm of painting means plunging – a word she repeatedly uses – into one’s psychic roots, but not, she insists, nostalgically. We are not talking about restoring one’s first, immortal loves. Painting goes deeper, ‘right back to the stage before one had a love to lose’. 46 In her foreword, Anna Freud cites Milner’s allusion to the ‘all-out body giving of infancy’.47 But that is only one side – the lyrical side – of what Milner is trying to describe. To enter this realm is dangerous and frightening. It is paralysing – hence her title, On Not Being Able to Paint. Likewise, Salomon describes being struck with a ‘deathlike lethargy’, a ‘paralysing stupor’ in one of the first of the unnumbered gouaches (above all when her grandfather was too close).48 What is at risk is the whole sensory foundation of the world we take for granted, which mostly we do not see, as well as the boundary between inside and outside the mind. For Milner, this type of creativity, probably all creativity, is a form of ‘madness’ – again her word – or ‘uncommon sense’.49 Sanity, she writes citing Santayana, is a ‘madness put to good uses’ (one of her most famous book titles is The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men).50 Seen in this light, the problem of equality and difference which she places at the heart of painting is, I read Milner as saying, an unconscious problem. It is the problem of losing yourself in the night.
Salomon’s allusions to madness are important. After the suicide of her grandmother, whom she has done everything in her power to save, her grandfather urges Charlotte to use the dead woman’s quilt: ‘I’m in favour of what is natural.’51 Later, when they have been rounded up and are travelling in railcars across France he will repeat these exact words when he asks her to share his bed. Two images later, Salomon stands contemplating whether to throw the quilt out of the window: ‘I am afraid it is starting with me too’ (both her mother and grandmother threw themselves from a window).52 We then see her sitting on her bed, an over-large paint-book balanced precariously on her lap, one leg outstretched, hands clutching her forehead, her body rigid with fear, in a wash of red. The combination of the paralysed body and what feels like the slow spread and thickening of fire and flame make this for me one of the most disturbing images in the book (see illustration section, page 4). Written directly on to the image are the words: ‘Dear God, only please don’t let me go mad’ (‘Lieber Gott, lass mich bloss nicht wahnsinnig werden’).53 As Griselda Pollock points out, the ‘nicht’ is in a different colour and out of alignment with the other words.54 Pollock deduces from this the possibility that there was an earlier version, without ‘nicht’, expressing Salomon’s wish to follow the path of her mother and grandmother to suicide. In fact, if you remove the ‘nicht’, the desire she is expressing is to go mad: ‘Lieber Gott, lass mich bloss wahnsinnig werden’ – ‘Dear God, only let me go mad’.
On the recto of the image of her standing with the quilt at the window is a painting of her watching an anti-Semitic meeting in front of a synagogue (both sides of the image which show Salomon looking, observing, can be taken as an allegory of painting as a form of frighteningly suspended attention). This is not the only time that Salomon binds her personal agony so closely to the political tragedy of the Jews. Her grandmother’s breakdown which follows their flight from Germany is, the text explicitly states, a consequence of the war, a ‘greater force’ under which the self-control, the sharp intellect which had allowed her to live, breaks apart: ‘The awful pain that has pursued her throughout her life seems to have resurfaced into full consciousness as a result of the raging war.’55 In fact, the German – ‘Erinnerung’ – is not so much consciousness as memory. The war is forcing the grandmother to remember the deaths that litter her past, including the suicides of her two daughters. One of the most powerful things about Life? or Theatre? is the way that it forces both of these tragedies on to the same page (literally recto and verso in this case). Neither takes precedence. We are talking about something inextricably bonded – so inextricably that I was told by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam that to turn over the images by hand risks irreparable damage to the page. Between these two tragedies, you do not have, indeed it would be obscene, to choose. ‘I can’t take this life any more. I can’t take these times any more,’ Charlotte exclaims (Life? or Theatre? is truly a ‘life and times’).56 The insanity she pleads to be saved from belongs as much to the most intimate resources of memory as it does to the ugliness of her political world.
She will surface by creating her work. And yet, as that suspended ‘nicht’ already suggests, madness is by no means something she wholly turns herself against. It remains, I would argue, a question. Indeed only by holding it open as a question will she be able to paint. On one of the very last pages, she writes: ‘She found herself facing the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric.’57 The translation ‘wildly eccentric’ is, however, again misleading, as if we were talking
of something a bit wild but almost endearingly dotty. The German is ‘verrückt’, which, like ‘wahnsinnig’, means mad. Madness must be answered with madness (Milner’s sanity as madness put to good use). Salomon has perfectly captured the paradox of painting. In order to stop herself from going crazy, she must create something mad.
*
As Felstiner points out, the form of Life? or Theatre? offers its own gracious – or precisely ungracious – riposte to the Nazi vision of ideal art: scenes which inflate some figures and unbalance others, liberties taken with colour and cropping, ‘a thirstiness’, as she puts it, for caricature and non-volkisch folk art.58 The work, she concludes, parades its ‘affinity with every style the Nazis were working to suppress’, as the recent exhibition of art classified by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ makes even more clear.59 Systematically Salomon defies all the Academy lessons in proportion, even though in one early image she announces, after a shaky, humiliating start, that she has now completely ‘got it’ (to the tune of ‘Allons enfants de la patrie’).60 There is something wilfully gauche in Salomon’s style of painting, much of which stems, I think, from her use of retained outline – each painted image somehow still seems to be the preliminary sketch or trace of itself – as well as from her use of colours which, while appearing at first glance to distinguish her characters, nearly always bleed or cut across into other figures and their surrounding world (which is why the predominant feel of each section is that its main subject, as much as the narrative, is whichever one of the three primary colours dominates). We are light years from Nazi monumentality as described by Edward Said, in the course of a discussion on music with Daniel Barenboim – ‘bombastic, loud, uncouth . . . in the colours and in the balance’ – far from a form of art where every section of a painting or building becomes the unequivocal boast of itself.61
It is as if, in Salomon’s hands, line becomes a tentative process of taking shape whose uncertainty she does not want to suppress. We might call this, after Milner, letting the line ‘call forth an answer from the thought’ (once again a form of freedom).62 It is central to Milner’s account that one of the first things you have to reckon with as you start painting is that objects in the world, quite apart from the unsettling matter of your place in relation to them, are not really distinct or separate but are ‘continuously merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves’.63 If you let yourself go, things in the world merge – with you, but also with each other. But you have to let yourself go first. What fascinates Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus, when he is not making his deranged, overwhelming music, is ‘the unity of animate and so-called inanimate matter’. We sin against the latter ‘if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous’.64 There is, we could therefore say, line, but also not line (a bit like madness and no madness). Like Salomon, Milner also sits by the sea: ‘I wanted to draw’, she writes, ‘the tensions and sweep of “earth” by the shore, not outline or edge so much as stretch and spread and heave of the sea-wall and low shore cliffs – yet seen in terms of line.’65 Neither outline nor edge, yet something seen in terms of line. The most cherished and ruthless distinctions must be allowed to crumble. Looked at through the eyes of painting, the objects of the world around us are always on the verge of melting into each other and themselves. If you look at the first painting of the Epilogue (see illustration section, page 3), Charlotte painting by the shore, the lines seem to sweep – stretching and heaving – in one over-riding arch which passes through her body, as she paints, from the earth to the sky.
Salomon does not blur her lines, but there is something about them which makes them seem to follow their own path across the painting, past the bodies they fitfully contain and out of the page on to the words of the transparencies (line upon line, we might say). As with the colours, something is not being held to its right place. For Milner, colour is the greatest challenge of all (‘The Plunge into Colour’ is the title of one of her chapters). Goethe famously described colours as ‘the deeds and suffering of light’.66 Milner makes no bones about how much colour terrifies her. If colour always threatens to exceed its proper limits, it is also something that has to be let loose (like the larva of Salomon’s dream bursting its shackles). To demand that colour remain wedded to its natural forms is precisely an ‘omnipotent fiat from above’. It inflicts a type of bondage: ‘The colour flooded up from the earth,’ writes Milner, ‘once it was let loose from bondage to natural appearance.’67 In Salomon’s painting of herself painting, quite what the orange curve is doing in the sky, how it got there, is unclear and doesn’t seem to matter. Milner is inviting us to watch the struggle for freedom – ‘part of a contemporary struggle in the whole social world’ – insinuating itself not just into the experience of painting (the struggle and dread), but also into the fine print, colour and line, of artistic form.
Something is being released from bondage at the same time as it is being orchestrated: ‘The only exciting bits,’ Milner writes, ‘are when the colours are split, making a sort of chord so that they seem to move and live against each other.’68 Move and live against each other – similarly Leverkühn’s teacher had described the ‘interweaving of independent voices that . . . show regard for each other.’ Like Salomon, Milner is writing about the ethics and aesthetics of freedom. Like Salomon, as part of that process, she crosses the border, marks the affinity, between paint and sound. You have to listen to colour.
*
It is perhaps almost too obvious to say that, when Milner describes the plunge into painting, the dread of annihilation it provokes, she is talking about the fear of death. Too obvious perhaps also to say that, although her experience of the war is not Salomon’s, any more than it is Thomas Mann’s, it is the war – the drum looming in her picture as the storm breaks across Europe – that Milner is somewhere writing about. In Life? or Theatre? the harbinger of death is Amadeus Daberlohn, modelled as already mentioned on Alfred Wolfsohn, voice coach and tutor, who enters the lives of Charlotte and her stepmother Paula trailing the detritus of the First World War (there are 135 faces of Daberlohn in the first nine pages of the Main Section, and no less than 467 scenes including him overall).69 He is at once maestro and buffoon, arch-seducer and deceiver. As well as taking him as her lover, she buries and crucifies him in her paintings more than once. But he also provides her with the verbal refrain that releases her into painting. Their orchestrated dance – the closest the work gets to pure theatre – begins when she hands him her painting Death and the Maiden, from which he immediately seizes for himself, or rather recognises in himself, the role of death. ‘Suddenly she knew’ – she writes in the verbal cascade of the final pages – that ‘if he was Death, then everything was all right, then she did not have to kill herself like her ancestors, for according to his method . . . in order to love life still more, one should once have died’ (she has just torn his portrait into a thousand pieces and thrown them to the wind).70
It is tempting, I think, but too easy to read these words – ‘one should once have died’ – as a premonition of her own death, although that must also remain an open question. Life? or Theatre? is not, as other commentators have stressed, a work of Auschwitz, but before Auschwitz.71 This is important, not least because of the way Salomon has been appropriated into the Auschwitz narrative at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem (no foreign dignitary visits Israel without being taken there). Salomon is offering a death, not as anticipation, even if there might be that too, but as something much closer to what Milner is describing as the unconscious slipstream of creative life. This is death, not as suicide – ‘she did not have to kill herself’ – nor as imminent genocide. It is dying as a form of lived experience and as the pre-condition of art. Thus Salomon hauls to the surface and gives body and shape to the ugly historical reality behind Milner’s intensely felt but also more contemplative, restrained account (to call it ‘safer’ feels right, but also not quite right).
If Salomon
is a painter of death, it is therefore in a very precise sense. This is death as something that is inseparable from creativity – neither death as calculus, nor death as suicide, nor death as forced choice. If Daberlohn can help her on this journey, it is because he himself first appears in the story as survivor and as living dead. Life? or Theatre?, so firmly anchored in the Second World War, also forces us to ask the question – existential and historical – of which war we are talking about. It thus ushers us back to the last years of Rosa Luxemburg, tightly binding the histories of these two women into one (this is just one moment in this book where I find myself wanting to introduce two of its women to each other). Born in 1917, Salomon is a child of the First World War. Spanning the two wars, Life? or Theatre? undoes that seeming space between them. If that first war is Daberlohn’s tale, Salomon also makes it her own (both Luxemburg and Salomon claim their place in a war which technically allots no role to women). Barely seventeen when he went to the front, Daberlohn was buried in the trenches among corpses, and woke up hearing the cries of a comrade he did not go to help (he knew that to do so would cost him his own life). ‘I was,’ he writes with no overstatement, ‘a corpse.’ Thereafter afflicted with seizures, he started to recover when he realised, in his own words, that what matters is ‘not whether life loves us, but that we love life’ (words that Charlotte will claim for herself).72 In his unpublished 1937–8 memoir of the war, ‘Orpheus or the Way to a Mask’, Wolfsohn, Daberlohn’s original, describes how no doctor could help him: ‘The doctor [ . . . ] who wants to cure me must first cure the whole world.’73 According to Felstiner, he lost his power to sing until he reached the point where he could bear to hear his comrades screaming again, and then dedicated himself to treating people with damaged vocal cords. Singing, for Wolfsohn, coaching others to sing, is therefore, quite literally, giving voice to the (war) dead.
Women in Dark Times Page 10
