The music Charlotte (or CS as she signs her work) incorporates into the work is hardly esoteric. It’s the music of the period, the music the people of her world had in their shopping baskets, from Mahler to Bach and back again, from the music halls to Schubert’s Miller song cycle. She wanted to remind people of the familiar (and to parody it), but eighty years later there is practically no one left who could instantly recognize these tunes. The sound element no longer resonates, it is merely suggested and is, in its own way, like memory itself, with its inevitable dark spots and corrections. To quote Salomon:
Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.
The high register, quickly supplanted by mocking tongue twisters and the many-voiced dialogues interrupting the authorial voice all make perfect sense if we think of it as theater, with the opening sheet as the cover of program notes or a play text, with curly scripts and theatrical flourishes and a cast list. Just like traditional theater, the Prologue and Epilogue come out center stage to deliver their explanations and warnings. Yet Life? Or Theater? doesn’t unfold neatly like a play. Nor is it a guide to be slipped in a pocket — it is so big you can barely pick it up. To read it from beginning to end would be a real undertaking, requiring both time and willpower.
It is also extraordinarily hard to exhibit the work properly, and not only because of the vast space you would need to do it thoughtfully, in narrative order. The images themselves seem to demand more — they want to be a book, the pages interleaved with transparent overlay so the text interacts with the image showing through, and we can lift the curtain and look at the naked image beneath, without its veil of text. There is a complex balance between the out-of-frame voice of the handwritten text (which changes color for certain key words and phrases, sometimes several times on a page) and the live transmission of the reportage-style images: this balance doesn’t just suggest a rhythm for reading/looking, it insists on one. What we see needs to be treated like “temporary art,” in the same category as cinema or opera. To do this through museum exhibition seems impossible — the full work is never on display and so the very first graphic novel never looks anything more than a series of talented sketches.
In the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter, where the Salomon archive is kept, there is a single case where (of 1300 gouaches) a mere eight pages are displayed. The work is damaged by exposure to light, so the display is limited and continuously changed. Displaying them in book form would be even more damaging, as it is said every single touch would cause irreparable damage. Life? Or Theater? has become something like holy writ — never seen, known only by reproduction and hearsay. It can be quoted or interpreted or called upon, but never just read in the order intended.
About her work, Salomon wrote:
The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows: a person is sitting beside the sea. He is painting. A tune suddenly enters his mind. As he starts to hum it, he notices that the tune exactly matches what he is trying to commit to paper. A text forms in his head, and he starts to sing the tune, with his own words, over and over again in a loud voice until the painting seems complete. Frequently, several texts take shape, and the result is a duet, or it even happens that each character has to sing a different text, resulting in a chorus. [ . . . ] The author has tried — as is apparent perhaps most clearly in the Main Section — to go completely out of herself and to allow the characters to sing or speak in their own voices. In order to achieve this, many artistic values had to be renounced, but I hope that, in view of the soul-penetrating nature of the work, this will be forgiven.
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“Soul-penetrating” is a sly self-ironizing, but when we consider Life? Or Theater? it isn’t really an overexaggeration, more of a diagnosis. The narrative has all the qualities of sensationalist fiction: it can’t be put down, it breathes fire and frost. The narrator, named simply “the author,” lays before the reader a story that spans generations, includes eight suicides, two wars, several love stories, and the victorious onslaught of Nazism. Anyone who knows that it closely follows the real history of Charlotte’s family (and there’s a long tradition of understanding the “three-colored singspiel” as a purely autobiographical work), also knows how the story ends. In September 1943 the Nazis conducted what they called the “cleansing of Jews” in the Côte d’Azur — the efforts of Vichy France seemed to them, and probably were, lacking in assiduousness, and tens of thousands of refugees were quietly minding their own business down by the Mediterranean. By then the rhetoric of Jews as insects, bedbugs, cockroaches, as constant as the sound of running water, had hardened to become perceived reality, and it was time to “take back control.” A man called Alois Brunner was put in charge of the operation and it was effective: a villa owned by an American woman in Villefranche-sur-Mer was one of many “decontaminated.” The villa was called L’Ermitage and a Jewish couple lived there pretty openly: Charlotte and her husband of only a few months. They were taken at night, their neighbors heard screams. On October 10, a freight transport (with x number of freight “units,” as they wrote in the consignment notes) arrived at Auschwitz. On the same day, just arrived, twenty-six-year-old Charlotte Salomon was put into a group destined for immediate destruction. This was unusual: a young woman, full of energy and able to draw as well, had an increased chance of surviving longer. But Charlotte was visibly pregnant. Clearly that decided her fate.
The horror reflex, the onrush of pity when we face such information is overwhelming, it shapes our understanding: a long history of critical inertia mean that we see in Salomon’s work the spontaneous (and artless, in the face of her silence) expression of a pure heart. Any story of a victim is doomed to be emblematic — an arrow pointing toward a collective fate, a collective death. Charlotte Salomon’s life story tends to be thought of as typical: the result of layers, one forming on top of another, of political and cultural conditions, of terrible and immutable patterns. But it was against all of this that she rebelled, and I think she felt herself to be victorious. Life? Or Theater? isn’t the witnessing of a victory, but the victory itself, the battlefield, the captured castle, and a declaration of intent on 769 sheets of paper. All the same, it is often treated not as an object, but as material (as raw material from which fragments can be taken, and the excess discarded), and not as an artistic achievement but as an act of witnessing (which can be used in different generalizing contexts), not as a result but as an unfulfilled promise — a human document, in short. This interpretation could not be further from the truth.
Almost everyone writing about Charlotte in the last few years has cautioned against the obvious danger of seeing the work as an account of death told by a victim. This singspiel in pictures, written on the Côte d’Azur just before the world ended, is not a tale of the Holocaust (although unlike its author it has, against the odds, become a survivor). But it takes special effort from the viewer to stand in front of these works and simultaneously remember and forget, to know and not to know about Auschwitz at the end of the tunnel. The pages of Life? Or Theater? are overlaid with tracing paper and through it we see the image, but at any moment we can remove this filter to find ourselves alone with pure color.
In the summer of 1941 Charlotte Salomon had a stroke of luck that overwhelmed her and made her life feel charmed: rounded up and imprisoned, she was one of very few who were released and managed to escape disaster and death. In her text, alongside the initial “The action takes place in 1913–1940 in Germany and later in Nice, France,” she writes “Or between heaven and earth beyond our era in the year I of the new salvation.” So Noah might have described himself with his sons, or Lot’s daughters, and that is how Charlotte saw herself and her situation: the known world had ended, together with everyone she had loved or hated. They had died, disa
ppeared, or been dispersed to other places. She was much like the first person in a new world, the recipient of unexpected and indescribable largesse — she had been given a renewed and redeemed world: “Foam, dreams — my dreams on a blue surface. What makes you shape and reshape yourselves so brightly from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right? Dream, speak to me — whose lackey are you? Why are you rescuing me?”
Straight after the war, when Charlotte’s father and stepmother were finally able to come to Villefranche-sur-Mer to search for her — for anything, traces, tokens, tales — they were handed a file that Charlotte had left with an acquaintance with the words: “This is all my life.” The logic of the “typical” that I spoke of earlier pushes us to search out analogies, and in this case an analogy was waiting in the wings: in exactly the same way Miep Gies gave Otto Frank a bundle of papers, including Anne Frank’s diary, when he returned from concentration camp. There is, astonishingly, a very real connection between these stories in that Albert Salomon and his wife hid in Amsterdam, not far from the Franks, and Otto Frank chose to show them Anne’s diary before anyone else. A little later they decided together with Otto what to do with Charlotte’s drawings. I have an idea of them in the fifties and sixties, parents who had lost their children, sitting together and arranging their children’s posthumous fate. The first publication of Salomon’s work appeared in 1963 and the quality of its reproductions remains thrilling. Eighty of the thousand-plus gouaches are included and the book is called Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. “In pictures” — as if we are talking about a little girl, Anne Frank’s age or even younger. The diary is a traditionally female genre, a sort of mirror-mirror-on-the-wall: the spontaneous and unadorned voice of the feelings. The joy of the genre is in its very immediacy and simplicity. Anne Frank’s diary was carefully edited to make it a text of consolation rather than horror, and was already making headlines all around the world, it had become the most influential text about the Holocaust, a way of thinking about it without thinking about railway lines, pits, and corpses, pushing all these horrors back to the epilogue: and then they all died. Whether consciously or not, Anne Frank’s diary became a model for the first publishers of Salomon’s work, who insisted on the convergence of Charlotte the author and Charlotte Kann, the fictional heroine of the work, young victim, so very promising, so little fulfilled.
The tradition set by the family both elides author and heroine, and yet suggests at the same time that actually “things happened quite differently.” Whatever the reality was, we only know how Charlotte had wanted to tell the story at any cost. It’s hard to distort the carefully constructed Life? Or Theater?, the editing principle already lay at the heart of its structure and the 500 rejected drawings testify to this — but the first publishers’ impulse to “tidy the story up” meant they didn’t stop at cutting the images, presenting fragments from the carefully composed whole image without indicating they were fragments, and crossing out or rewriting phrases. They had a harder job than the editors of the Anne Frank diary, where only very particular elements of the text were censored: anti-German outbursts, hurtful things about Anne’s mother, chat about contraceptives, shocking for the time — and, more interestingly, any reference to the everyday Jewish experience, like Yom Kippur, which would be inaccessible to a wider readership.
The editorial changes to Salomon’s singspiel ran counter to everything, foremost actual authorial intent: Salomon had shaped the work like the film of a family’s history, run from beginning to end as if everyone was dead and gone, including her, and nothing could touch her anymore. Everything that happened from the 1880s onward was subject to revision, to satire and distancing: deaths, marriages, meetings and new marriages, career hopes, the love of art. That sort of chronicle, describing lives over several generations as the movement toward an inevitable endpoint, won Thomas Mann the Nobel Prize. But then his work was far more conservative.
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You could, I suppose, tell it like this: an old, honorable, and assimilated Jewish family, oil paintings on the wall, a summer house in Italy, candles on the Christmas tree, breaking into “Deutschland über Alles” at moments of national fervor. And far too many suicides. We’ll skip the brothers and other relatives and begin with one of the daughters, the more melancholy daughter, who leaves the house one November evening and drowns herself in a lake. A few years later the second daughter, the happier one, gets married. Eight years later, after promising her own daughter she will send her a letter from heaven, she jumps to her death from a window. The daughter is never told how her mother died: she thinks she died of flu.
New governesses, trips to Italy, the little girl grows up. She is called Charlotte after her dead aunt and her living grandmother — as if the line of Charlottes can’t be broken. One day her workaholic father (“And I will be Professor. Don’t disturb, please don’t disturb me.”) meets that peak of refinement, a blonde woman who sings Bach. In Life? Or Theater? she has the clown-like name Paulinka Bimbam. I should add here that for one reason or another all the characters with some connection with the stage have operetta-style names with jester’s bells attached: Bimbam, Klingklang, Singsang. These masked players have double names to match their own comic duality. Bimbam’s real name was Paula Lindberg, but even that was not her real name: she was the daughter of a rabbi, and her real name was Levi. She was Jewish like everyone else in Charlotte’s life. Ten years later Charlotte wrote about her family that one should remember they lived in a society consisting entirely of Jews.
The marriage of science and art (medicine and music, of Albert Salomon and Paula Lindberg) pleased fourteen-year-old Charlotte more than anyone. Her relationship with her stepmother can only be described as passionate, and as time passed this passion became weighted with its attendant sentiments: jealousy, misery, exigency. Lindberg wanted to be a mother to the orphan, but instead she became embroiled in a white-hot crush friendship, a pleasure and a torment to them both. Our only clear source for this is Life? Or Theater? where much of the information may be deliberately or involuntarily distorted — but what can’t be mistaken is the level of attention directed at the heroine of the novel (or the operetta?), Paula. There are hundreds of portraits of Paula and they reproduce with terrifying precision the expressions and movements of Paula’s face (in a video interview with Paula, made decades later, it’s these expressions you recognize first — the face is old, but the mannerisms are unchanged). There’s a page filled entirely with the bodies and the faces of Paulinka: sullen, passionate, animated, downcast, detached. In the center, her official portrait on a playbill with a list of the towns where she had sung to great acclaim. Only the character of the singspiel, Amadeus Daberlohn (Alfred Wolfson) takes up more space in the narrative.
The many pages of “drawn” writing stand outside the main body of the text. This writing was intended as an epilogue, but constantly strives to become a letter to an addressee, Wolfson, whose fate Charlotte did not know. Parts of this “letter” are online at the Jewish Cultural Quarter Museum in Amsterdam. It has been excerpted and quoted, but never published in its entirety. At one stage in the composition of Life? Or Theater? the artist thought of the whole work as a speech in a dialogue with Wolfson, a way of proving to him her own ability to regenerate. The work has an addressee who is the person Charlotte Salomon considered or wanted to consider her beloved, and in dozens of scenes she rehearses the notion of inseparability, from embrace to complete union.
This can perhaps be explained by the fact that the gouaches depicting Paulinka are lit with erotic energy, but they never cross the line into the territory of love: the narrator deliberately holds the narrative on the brink, hinting and never clarifying (“our lovers have made it up again”). This page is a rapid burst of images of the two women moving toward each other, the little girl in her blue bedroom, stepmother by her bed, their embrace caught in nine frames, Paulinka bending down, her stepdaughter moving toward her, suddenly tiny, a babe in her mo
ther’s arms. The embrace is full, Paulinka’s face is pressed against Charlotte’s breast, the white sheets blossom pinkly. In the last image at the bottom of the page the childish blue pajamas are gone, and instead we see the naked shoulders and arms of both women. Charlotte’s eyes are screwed up and the sheet is now a crimson wave. The explicit nature of the drawings has no textual equivalent — if a thing is left unnamed, does it exist?
The relationship between Daberlohn and Paulinka is never elucidated, either. It remains a matter of projection and guesswork. It’s vitally important for the text and the narrator that the relationship be presented as a triangle with Charlotte forming the third side: the grown-up and equal rival. The singing teacher who has promised Paulinka Bimbam that he can perfect her singing cannot avoid falling in love with the singer because in the world of the singspiel she is irresistible, as any indifferent divinity should be, and because his passion is the fuel for her flight. He still finds time to pay attention to the little girl and her drawings, and even to have a separate love affair with her, taking walks and talking with her, and this doesn’t seem to surprise her in the least. She rather feels a deep sense of gratitude. He is writing a book and she illustrates it: their relationship is shaped so it can be grown into, and it gives a purpose to her existence. She remembers his theories, she inhabits them; his theory that one cannot begin a life without the experience of going through death (and the need to “go out of oneself,” the cinema as a machine invented in order to leave one’s “I” behind) becomes the hull of the enormous ship Life? Or Theater? Their meetings in the station café (Jews are prohibited from going to other cafés) and on park benches (also prohibited, but they risk it) are placed right at the center of the text, along with hundreds of pictures of Daberlohn’s face, framed in his own rather simpleminded sermons.
In Memory of Memory Page 22
