Charlotte Salomon (16 April 1917 – 10 October 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust, consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 Salomon, 5 months pregnant at that time, was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis soon a
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Charlotte Salomon (16 April 1917 – 10 October 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust, consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 Salomon, 5 months pregnant at that time, was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis soon after her arrival. In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.
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Charlotte Salomon came from a prosperous Berlin family. Her father, Albert Salomon was a surgeon; her mother, Franziska (Grünwald), sensitive and troubled, committed suicide when Charlotte was eight or nine, though she was led to believe her mother died from influenza. Charlotte was sixteen when the Nazis came to power in 1933. She simply refused to go to school, and stayed at home. At a time when German universities were restricting their Jewish student quota to 1.5% of the student body (providing their fathers had served on the front line in the First World War), Salomon succeeded in gaining admission to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Pure and Applied Arts) in 1936. She studied painting there for two years, but by summer 1938 the antisemitic policy of Hitler's Third Reich meant that it was too dangerous for her to continue attending the college and she did not return, despite winning a prize. Salomon's father was briefly interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in November 1938, after Kristallnacht, and the Salomon family decided to leave Germany. Charlotte was sent to the South of France to live with her grandparents, already settled in Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice.…
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The work includes some two hundred transparencies carrying text intended to overlay their associated gouaches. The examples illustrated are typical. It is the closing gouache of Scene 1 of the Prelude and depicts the fictional Charlotte Kann (representing Salomon herself) in bed with her mother Franziska, who is telling Charlotte how wonderful it is in Heaven and how one day she (Franziska) will go there and turn into an angel and leave a letter for Charlotte on her windowsill describing life in Heaven.
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There have been several other exhibitions of parts of Life? or Theater?, and a number of films and plays made about Charlotte Salomon's life, notably Company of Angels (2002) by the UK theatre company Horse and Bamboo Theatre which toured the UK, Netherlands and U.S. and in 1981, Dutch director Frans Weisz released a feature film based on her life, entitled Charlotte, with the Austrian actress Birgit Doll playing the artist and Daberlohn played by Derek Jacobi. In 2011 he made a documentary revealing the contents of her last letter to Wolfsohn. Saving Charlotte, a play by Judi Herman, was performed at the Bridewell Theatre in London in October/November 1998. Lotte's Journey, a play by Candida Cave, was performed at New End Theatre, Hampstead, in October/November 2007. In remembrance of the artist, French composer Marc-André Dalbavie dedicated an opera to her: Charlotte Salomon, commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. The libretto by Barbara Honigmann is based on the gouaches Leben? oder Theater? and integrates them into the performance in form of projections. The main role of Charlotte is performed by two artists, an actress and a singer. Most of the singing is done in French while the spoken parts are in…
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Sources Charlotte Salomon: Life or Theater. The Viking Press, New York, 1981. ISBN 0-670-21283-0. Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life. Harper Collins, 1994. ISBN 0-06-017105-7. Michael P. Steinberg (Editor), Monica Bohm-Duchen (Editor), Reading Charlotte Salomon, Cornell University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8014-3971-X Ernst van Alphen, "Charlotte Salomon: Autobiography as a Resistance to History" in: Inside the Visible, edited by C. de Zegher, MIT Press, 1996. Griselda Pollock, "Theater of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon's Modernist Fairytale" in Steinberg and Bohm-Duchen (2005) ibid. Griselda Pollock, "Jewish space/Women's Time" in: Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-415-41374-9. Griselda Pollock, Life-Mapping in (ed.) Griselda Pollock, Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84511-522-7 (pp. 63–88) Griselda Pollock, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. Yale University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0300100723. Darcy C. Buerkle, Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide. University of Michigan Press, 2013. An eight minute film created by Studio Louter, using Salomon's original goauches, for the Jewish Historical Museum. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/salomon-charlotte (ed.) Judith C. E. Belinfante et al, Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1998, ISBN 0-900946-66-0 (pp.…
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"Event – Charlotte Salomon, Life? or Theatre? and the Victory over Fear" Archived 7 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Jewish Cultural Quarter, Amsterdam Vanderbilt University: The 29th Annual Holocaust Lecture Series "Against Cultural Genocide" (contains a link, by permission of the Charlotte Salomon Foundation, to a high resolution image of the gouache illustrated above depicting Charlotte Salomon working in the garden at L'Ermitage pic, archive) The Chronicle of Deportations (about Ottilie Moore – pdf), archive. Wayback Machine Jewish Renaissance Magazine, UK The German-Jewish Artist Charlotte Salomon, Yad Vashem website UC San Diego, Holocaust Living History Collection: Charlotte Salomon's Interventions - with Darcy Buerkle
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R.I.P Charlotte
A large part of Life? or Theater? is about her obsession with Amadeus Daberlohn, a voice teacher she met through her stepmother Paulinka Bimbam (Salomon gives all her characters humorous, often punning, pseudonyms). These sections are honest and compelling accounts of her passionate relationship with Alfred Wolfsohn – the one person who took her artistic work seriously. It is not possible to know if Salomon's version of her relationship with Wolfsohn corresponds with reality, but he was undoubtedly her first love. In 1943, when she was 26, Charlotte Salomon gave her collection of paintings to Dr. Moridis, a trusted friend who had counseled her through her depression. Life? or Theater? is intended as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a Wagnerian 'total work of art' within the tradition of the ambitious nineteenth-century German idea to fuse poetry, music and the visual arts. Yet Salomon's work is a reversal of that tradition which was intended to be the ultimate manifestation of Germanic culture – instead it is a work created by a "young woman who belonged to a supposedly alien race and who was therefore held not to even have a right to exist, let alone a place in society."
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The "signature image" (cf. Michael Steinberg 2005, p. 1) of Life? or Theater? occurs as the final image of the concluding Epilogue section. Steinberg is reminded of Franz Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony, in which sentence of execution is inscribed on the victim's back, and describes the image as combining the innocence of the mermaid of Copenhagen with violent narrative. Because of the nature of the work, it requires three images adequately to convey it. The image on the left is of the last page (verso) of four pages of densely packed text, carried on both sides, that conclude the epilogue. The center image is the final example of the transparent overlays that occur throughout the work, while the rightmost image is the gouache most closely associated with the work, depicting Charlotte Salomon kneeling before the sea with brush and paper in her hand and the words Life or Theater inscribed on her back. The concluding words of the epilogue, quoting ideas of Alfred Wolfsohn, are as follows:
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Salomon entitled her work, Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singespiel. Singspiel is a German music form resembling "operetta" in some respects, although actors' parts are often spoken over, rather than sung with the music. The form is influenced by the English ballad opera and the French opéra-comique. Music provides the backdrop for the play-form which is most often comical in nature, tragedy being a less-frequent motif. Romantic interest nearly always plays a prominent part. Singspiel was considered less elevated than opera proper, often being written in the vernacular. While celebrated composers such as Mozart and Schubert are known to have worked in the form, Singspiel often introduced folksongs, marches and narrative songs into its repertoire. By the early twentieth century, at the time of Salomon's appropriation of the form into her work, the Singspiel had ceased to be a contemporary form (although Ralph Benatzky's popular 1930 work Im weißen Rößl is a singspiel and Kurt Weill introduced the term 'songspiel' to describe some of his collaborations with Berthold Brecht). Note that Salomon's spelling, "Singespiel", adds an "e", but whether this was intentional or not is unclear. Thus, Life? or Theater? is not only a series of paintings. It includes a script…
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In exhibitions and art history The paintings that make up Life? or Theater? were first exhibited in the 1960s. The first book of reproductions was published in 1963 and drew comparisons with the story of Anne Frank. Marc Chagall was shown the paintings and was impressed. In 1971, the collection was placed in the care of the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam. In 1981, the Museum presented 250 scenes in narrative sequence, and critics began to comment on the work. An exhibition at the London Royal Academy in 1998 was an unexpected sensation, helped by the publication of a complete catalogue. The work is still relatively little known, in part because Salomon's work does not appear on the international art market, as the whole archive belongs to the protective Charlotte Salomon Foundation based at the Joods Historisch Museum. The art historian Griselda Pollock dedicated to Charlotte Salomon a chapter in her Virtual Feminist Museum, analysing her work in terms of contemporary art, Jewish history and cultural theory. In 2018 Griselda Pollock then published a major analysis of Life? or Theatre? titled 'Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory' (Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0300100723) challenging the autobiographical interpretations with an examination of…
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Since 1992 a primary school in Berlin bears the name of the artist, in 2006 a street in Berlin-Rummelsburg was named after her. On 21 April 2012 a Stolperstein in front of her former residential house in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Wielandstraße 15, was dedicated to Charlotte Salomon. In addition a Memorial Plaque on the facade of the building commemorates the artist.
