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Charlotte Salomon's great and strange work Life? or Theater? A Song-Play incorporates word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937-1938 was an important source for Salomon's innovative mixture of word and image. Where the Degenerate Art Exhibition's text served to label, vilify, condemn and erase, Salomon's use of text emphasizes ambiguity, not fixity. It layers the art rather than effacing it. Most importantly, it rejects the Nazi attack on Jewish German artists and people by reclaiming both art and language. Salomon's creation of a künstlerroman soon after The Nazis' display of repression and purgation defied the Kunst politik of the regime. Her project was all the more perilous because of her family history of mental illness. Salomon's use of expressionist conventions and of image-text became elements of a therapeutic technique, a means of telling the story of her own life.
Charlotte Salomon's great and strange work Life? or Theater? A Song-Play incorporates word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937-1938 was an important source for Salomon's innovative mixture of word and image. Where the Degenerate Art Exhibition's text served to label, vilify, condemn and erase, Salomon's use of text emphasizes ambiguity, not fixity. It layers the art rather than effacing it. Most importantly, it rejects the Nazi attack on Jewish German artists and people by reclaiming both art and language. Salomon's creation of a künstlerroman soon after The Nazis' display of repression and purgation defied the Kunst politik of the regime. Her project was all the more perilous because of her family history of mental illness. Salomon's use of expressionist conventions and of image-text became elements of a therapeutic technique, a means of telling the story of her own life.
Keywords: Charlotte Salomon / degenerate art / modernism / mental illness / word and image
Charlotte Salomon's great and strange work Life? or Theater?A Song-Play- play, picture book, prayer book, roman a clef, act of imagination-is a chimeric artwork incorporating word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. Salomon created the work in isolation while in hiding in the South of France between 1940 and 1942, painting and drawing 1,325 pages of image and text. In the first 220 pages, textual narrative overlays the paintings on thin semi-transparent paper. The later paintings incorporate text directly into the imagery. Salomon included almost 800 paintings in the approved series without discarding the remainder, then entrusted the whole to a local friend, Dr. Georges Moridis, with the words, "Keep this safe. It is my whole life" (Felstiner x).
Salomon was arrested in late September 1943, and put on a transport from Drancy to Auschwitz in early October. She was pregnant, and was sent to the gas chamber upon her arrival. Her work stayed hidden throughout the war. After the war ended, it was returned first to Ottilie Moore, who owned the villa where Salomon had taken refuge, and then to her father and stepmother, who had spent the last years of the war in hiding in Amsterdam. When her parents opened the trunk, they were confounded by the scale and complexity of the artworks they encountered. In a 1963 interview, Albert Salomon said, "We didn't even know they existed" (Troller).
Although Salomon's reputation has steadily grown, her great opus remains understudied. The size and scale of the work has complicated both its reproduction and its exhibition: museums and publishers have had to grapple with the problem of excerpting paintings from a serial narrative, displaying the overlays either beside or above the paintings, and incorporating the music that Salomon left as written cues. The first exhibition of Salomon's work, in 1961 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, was followed in 1963 by the publication of selections from her paintings, in Emil Straus and Paul Tillich's Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. Even as Straus and Tillich publicized Salomon's work, they misrepresented it; the eighty reproductions they printed omitted both the darkness and the fictive quality of the work, staging it as a diary rather than a "song-play." Their version privileged life-affirming images and entirely excluded the suicide motif that is central to the book, even airbrushing out the grandfather's shocking response to Charlotte's despair near the conclusion-"Go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!" (see Felstiner 223-230). The most important exhibition to date, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998, was accompanied by the publication of the complete set of numbered gouaches in Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? (Waanders Publishers, 1998), prefaced by critical essays by Judith C. Belinfante, Christine Fischer-Defoy, Ad Peterson, and Norman Rosenthal. This far more comprehensive publication did not include the additional gouaches Salomon preserved, and represented the overlays as typed text alongside the paintings, losing some of the play and originality of the layered structure of the first 220 paintings.1 Alongside these exhibitions and catalogues, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner's ambitious biography To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (1994) brought Salomon's work to a new generation of both critics and artists, and Griselda Pollock's numerous publications and lectures on Salomon over the last dozen years served to cement her critical reputation.
Recent artistic adaptations of Salomon's work have brought her new prominence; these include Marc-Andre Dalbavie's opera Charlotte Salomon, which premiered in Salzburg in August 2014, the ballet Der Tod und Die Malerin, with music by Michelle diBucci and choreography by Bridget Breiner, winner of the 2015 Faust prize, and David Foenkinos's novel Charlotte (2014), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and won the Prix Renaudot and the Goncourt des Lycéens. Following the success of Foenkinos's book, the French publisher Le Tripode published the fullest print transcript of the work to date (October 2015), complete with miniature reproductions of the overlays and the surviving pages of the final, controversial letter.2 Even as Salomon's Life? Or Theater? has become better-known, however, it eludes becoming more knowable; the irreducible strangeness of the work and the vacuum of its production-no precedent, no artist to speak for it, no significant witnesses-means that critics and readers have much left to understand and unravel.
I want to argue for an additional possibility: that Salomon's work is an extended response to the German attack on modernist art and a rejection of the Nazi monopoly on the meaning and heritage of German art and music.3 Charlotte Salomon came of age as an artist at a time when she was told that her art and her race were vectors for mental illness. The notorious "Entartete Kunst" or Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937-1938 crystallized these claims around a display of extraordinary modernist art, paintings and artworks which were identified, labeled, exhibited, and then purged in a pre-figuration of the fate of the Jews of Europe and under the same bio-political auspices of societal health. Salomon's creation of a künstlerroman soon after this display of extreme repression and purgation was an act of defiance against the Kunst-politik of the Nazi regime. Her project was all the more perilous because of her family history of mental illness. In this context, Salomon's use of expressionist conventions and of image-text became elements of a therapeutic technique, a means of naming herself and telling the story of her own life. One way we can see Salomon's mix of image-text is as a response to the obsessive labeling and classification that the Nazis deployed in their conflation ofJudaism, mental illness, and modernist art, most concretely and explicitly illustrated in the text-heavy staging of the Degenerate Art Exhibition, which used language to deface and undermine the art on display.
When the Reich Culture Chamber (Reichskulturkammer) staged the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, following the suggestion of Joseph Goebbels and under the directorship of a committee chaired by Adolf Ziegler, Charlotte Salomon was an art student at Berlin's Fine Arts Academy. The exhibition, conceived as counterpoint to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (the Great German Art Exhibition), was assembled in haste. Over two weeks, the five-man committee seized "approximately 5,000 paintings and 12,000 graphic artworks from 101 museums" (Petropolous 56) and labeled them "degenerate." The final Degenerate Art Exhibition included 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by 160 artists, mostly Expressionists.
The Degenerate Art Exhibition presented modern art as a subversive virus, an attack on art and on the German people. While only six of the artists were Jews, the show was presented as an exemplification of Jewish decadence and as justification, first for the purge ofJewish culture, and then of the Jews themselves. As the guide to the exhibit prescriptively read, the exhibition meant to "reveal the philosophical, political, racial, and moral goals and purposes pursued by those who promoted subversion" and "to show, too, how these symptoms of degeneracy spread from the deliberate troublemakers to infect those more or less unwitting acolytes who . . . were so lacking in scruple, character, or common sense as to join in the general Jewish and Bolshevik furor" (qtd. in Barron 360). The show was a surprising blockbuster. A daily average of 20,000 people attended, and over three million had seen the show by the time it finished its tour of Munich, Berlin, and other German cities (Petropolous 57). The simultaneous Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, which focused on the völkisch, neo-classical and "racially pure" type of art advocated by the Nazi regime, was far less well attended.
Though the propaganda purpose of the Degenerate Art Exhibition was to mock, condemn, and reject, it is clear that the exhibition also served as a means for the dissemination of images and ideas. Silent footage taken by the American filmmaker Julien Bryan records the expressions on the faces of visitors in the crowded rooms of the exhibition. Some laugh and point, while others look soberly at the soldiers guarding the rooms; along with contempt and ridicule, their faces suggest curiosity, admiration, and fear. Peter Chamehtzky notes that the Dada artist Hannah Hoch visited four times (98). Willi Baumeister, whose work was on display, visited at least twice. He bought postcards and a catalogue at the Great German Art Exhibition, only to turn them into examples of decadent art by drawing on their surfaces in a playful, surreal style that subverted their conservative representations of neo-classical heroism. The clown face scribbled over the genitals of Germany's heroic "avenger"-testicles turned to bulbous nose- transformed the image from masculine and menacing to perverse and absurd (see Fig. 1). Chametzky calls Baumeister's response "oppositional," "clearly anti-Nazi," and a "private and subversive message" (100) that was secretly distributed as a barbed joke among friends during a period of tremendous fear and repression. For these artists, the Degenerate Art Exhibition was an opportunity for defiance and inspiration.
We do not know for certain that Salomon attended the Degenerate Art Exhibition, but it is very likely she did. When the show came to Berlin, she was a student at the State Arts Academy, and the travelling exhibition was a crucial opportunity to see work that was both inspiring and implicating. Felstiner interviewed Salomon's friend and fellow student Barbara Frisch Petzel, who attended the exhibition in 1938 during the three months it showed in Berlin. Petzel said, "I certainly assume Lotte saw it too" (Felstiner 65). Griselda Pollock picks up on this possibility, calling the exhibition "the greatest gift a young artist could desire-her century's key artworks and artists assembled for her three-month long appraisal-offered to her by the very political forces that had decreed her political annihilation and social disemancipation" ("Theater" 54). Pollock writes, "What greater irony would there be than the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon being seen as the one great beneficiary of the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition?" (54), and notes Salomon's "mordant tone" and "daring and dangerous play with/against the emerging Nazi aesthetic that left no space for pathos and sentimentality" (54). Building upon Pollock's brief allusion to the Degenerate Art Exhibition's influence on Salomon, I want to explore how her reworking of the show's strategies of vilification can help us contextualize both her unusual mix of word and image and her insistence on self-fashioning in the context of both labeling and erasure.
Critics have struggled to find precedent and context for Salomon's intermedial mixture of word and image, often emphasizing her originality. Felstiner calls the work "a way of telling life history never tried before or since" (x), while Pollock says it is "radical in its modernist hybridities" and "unclassifiable" ("Theater" 54, 63). Steinberg notes "a synaesthesis that resonates with the conjunction as well as competition of seeing and hearing" (2) and Ad Peterson argues that it is "difficult to place in terms of art history, because there is little or no work with which it can be compared" (93). Often, critics have examined Salomon's mixture of word and image through extending the theatrical and filmic analogies with which Salomon frames the text; the singespiel of the title (Freedman, "Melodrama"), the "cinematic strategies of representation" (Pollock, "Theater," 67), the relationship of the work to "Brechtian aesthetics" (Conley 92), or as both "a thoroughly Wagnerian and an anti-Wagnerian work" (Steinberg 6).
These analogies, drawn from music, film, opera and theater, are certainly justified by Salomon's work, but they are insufficient comparisons. Salomon struggled to mimic the multimodal effects of the auditorium, using only the two-dimensional format of paper, pencil and paint. As much as Salomon channels the multi-media art that preceded and surrounded her-Cubist, Futurist, and Dada experiments with text and image, dialogue, music, and spectacle in theater-the extended serial quality of her narrative; the faint, half-erased metascript notations on some of the paintings; and the colorful, thickly lettered final pages explore a broad range of textual incorporations that have little analogy or precedent.
The Degenerate Art Exhibition provides an important source for Salomon's unusual and innovative mixture of word and image, the most striking and original element of Salomon's art. That exhibition employed word and image in a manner more reminiscent of a Dada happening than of the art establishment. Neil Levi calls the notorious Dada wall "a propaganda exercise that takes the form of a Dadaist installation" (82) an "appropriation of Dada techniques" that turns "Dada against itself" (83). The mixture of text and commentary in the show drew upon some of the works on display. In an expressionist self-portrait as the man of sorrows, by the Austrian painter and writer Oscar Kokoschka, that appeared on the cover of the avant-garde journal Der Sturm in 1910, for example, Kokoschka's shaven head, distorted features, exaggerated grimace, and stigmata-like wound, point to the artist as outsider and martyr; the words "Neue Nummer" (new issue) and the initials of his signature mark his body as if to merge the artist and journal (see Fig. 2). Salomon would later inscribe her own figure with a similar boldness.
As opposed to the classical hallways and clean walls of the Great German Art Exhibition, the Degenerate Art Exhibition had text everywhere, graffittied on the walls, over reproductions of art criticism (art criticism itself was outlawed in 1936), and in long screeds meant to vilify the art, and to undermine the critics and institutions that elevated it. Visitors to the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich were confronted with a cacophonous mix of word and image as they entered into the claustrophobic, transformed rooms of the Archeological Institute in the Hofgarten. Text was used in multiple ways: to deface, to emphasize, to ironize, and to interpret. The crude acts of labeling, and the dogmatic, effacing, reductive graffiti on the wall of the exhibition and over some of the texts included on display, were meant to press the art into the exhibition's propagandistic aim. The high prices the artworks had once sold for were noted in large numbers on the wall in order to further provoke disgust and derision, and on the lower floor many works were accompanied by "a piece of red paper pasted with a printed note: "Purchased with the taxes of the working German people" (Lüttichau 38). Large letters on the wall labeled general themes, far more closely connected to the obsessions of the organizers than to the content of the art: Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau quotes a representative selection: "Mockery of the German woman-ideal: cretin and whore," "conscious sabotage of the military," "German farmers seen from a Yiddish perspective," "Jewish yearning for the desert is vented," "Take Dada seriously! It pays," "Crazy at any price," "This is how sick minds viewed nature" (38). As von Lüttichau points out, the crowded, hectically hung paintings and the ubiquitous text served to create "an impression of disorder and chaos" and to present "a supposedly didactic order, to introduce and justify the themes of degeneration" (38). Quotations by Hitler and Goebbels written on the wall served as manifestoes by the new arbiters of art and culture. The exhibition was accompanied by even more text in the form of the Degenerate Art brochure, which "outdid the explanatory texts not only in its directness but also in the numbers in which it was disseminated" (Lüttichau 48).
From its entry point, the exhibition modeled for audiences a derisive and mocking response to the art on display (see Fig. 3). This new art pedagogy was meant to mock and displace not only modern art but also the sponsors, critics, and institutions that once supported it. The first installation, Ludwig Gies's distorted crucifix, was hung beside a reproduction of a critical essay that praised it. The article was covered by a thick question mark by the curators of the Degenerate Art Exhibition (see Fig. 4). This question mark was meant to be a definitive rejection: not an exploration, but an attack-a deliberately clumsy act of defamation. If the audience managed to read the text beneath it, they were intended to only mock it further. The Degenerate Art Exhibition was to serve as both catharsis and exorcism of the entire cultural apparatus that had supported and surrounded modern German art from the turn of the century until the thirties.
However, nothing ensured that this textual framing of Degenerate Art would be read as the Nazis intended. Instead, the scrawl of the question mark unwittingly interpellated the viewer as potential writer, perhaps even inspired engagement. The thick scrawl of the question mark undermined the Nazi ability to control the reception and significance of this powerful art.
I suggest that this use of text and image is an important source for Salomon's own use of word and image. The thick question mark on the text in the entry room of the Degenerate Art Exhibition is recalled in Salomon's ubiquitous question marks. Her work enters under the sign of the question mark, and her project consistently explores uncertainty. The sinuous s-shape curve of the question mark, which repeats on the page of epigraphs, is the mirror image of the curvy initial she incorporates into her emblem (see Fig. 5). S is ?-Salomon is called into question. The entire work is framed in the interrogative, and one of the things the S-shaped question mark interrogates is the relation between text and image, since the thick question mark and the mirror-image signature become thickened into a sign, both text and image.
If the Degenerate Art Exhibition's walls served to label, vilify, condemn and erase, Salomon's use of text is quite different. It pushes back against the labeling and erasure of modern art, emphasizing ambiguity, not fixity. It layers rather than effaces. Most importantly, it rejects the Nazi attack on Jewish German artists and people by reclaiming both art and language.
While Salomon's unstable mixture of text and image returns to the ambiguity, irony, and complexity the Nazis rejected, her style of drawing embraces the expressionism the Nazis purged. Jonathan Petropoulos has argued that anti-modernism was a late development in the Kunst politik, of the Nazi party. Goebbels began as a supporter of modernism, but by 1935, "experienced a stunning reversal in his views about modern art" (Petropolous 48). Petropolous writes, "Anti-Semitism and anti-modernism increased in Germany in the mid-1930s, and as a result of the Nazis' sophistry, the two ideas reinforced each other" (54). Jews were accused of controlling the media and the art market, of promoting modern art as a means of profiteering, of duping and cheating non-Jewish Germans, and of using art as a means to contaminate German society. Modern art was labeled "degenerate," "Jewish," and "Bolshevist," even when produced by pro-Nazis like Emil Nolde, who had 1,052 of his works seized.
Goebbels, who once proclaimed, "we guarantee the freedom of art" (Petropolous 24), now applauded its purgation. Expressionism-with its emphasis on the internal world over exterior appearances-threatened the dominance and homogeneity of the Nazi position, if only in the world of the imagination. Hitler's speech at the inauguration of the Great German Art Exhibition made the implications of this cultural conflict clear: "sooner or later the hour of liquidation will strike for those phenomena which have participated in this corruption. . . . From now on we will wage an unrelenting war of purification against the elements of putrefaction in our culture" (Kolocotroni 562).
Salomon came of age as an artist during this moment of purgation, and yet she was defiantly clear about both her cultural identity and her aesthetic practice.4 As Pollock has argued, it is a mistake to read the work as simple autobiography and to conflate the character with her creator. Instead, Salomon's work is what Pollock calls a "theatre of memory" (Conceptual Odysseys 67). Rather than simple autobiography, Life? or Theater? is an act of self-fashioning, centrally and consciously preoccupied with the creation of identity. Salomon inserts her artistic signature onto every page, through the linked C and S that is her constant insignia. This self-chosen insignia contrasts with the inscription of Jews in German society through the yellow star. When Salomon draws Charlotte's father, Dr. Kann, being expelled from the university, his figure is crossed out as crudely as the effaced documents in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. By contrast, Salomon refuses the erasure of her identity. When she is depicted interviewing at the Berlin Academy, she asks the director if they admit Jews in response to the "Heil Hitler" he offers as greeting. When he responds, "Surely you aren't Jewish" she boldly returns, "Of course I am" (JHM 4336). As Felstiner writes, in the overlay that accompanies the painting, "this confession fastens on her painting arm, for good" (37).
During the entrance exam, Charlotte both masters and mocks the neo-classicism that the Nazis elevated. The students are assigned a life drawing of a male model whose body and pose closely resemble a statue by Hitler favorite, Arno Breker, titled Preparedness, which was displayed at the "Great German Art" exhibition (see Fig. 6). Salomon depicts herself defiantly taking the measure of the model. Her confidence contrasts with the bemusement of the young man in Nazi uniform at the back right of the painting, while the style of her drawing-the loose use of color, the internal dissonance-is a playful expressionist contrast to the dutiful exercise being depicted (see Fig. 7). If it is not specifically Breker that she is parodying, it is certainly the virile image exemplified in the model's pose and Breker's art that she is powerful enough to confront.
Later, Salomon pokes fun at the nativist conformity of both the professors and students at the art school-the teacher who proclaims German fairy tales a "priceless treasure"; the student who cries, "this-Heil Hitler!-is the place for me" (JHM 4358). In the meantime, as she depicts "the progress she makes" (JHM 4363), her art seems more inspired by European cosmopolitans like Matisse than by the völkisch sentiment and aesthetic that had come to grip the school and the nation.
Though Charlotte's progress remains defiantly resistant to the Nazi takeover of school, the changes around her are threatening. After the National Socialists win the election of 1933, Salomon gives us a bird's eye view and, in one of her few historical scenes, shows the sudden dominance of the swastika (see Fig. 8). As Felstiner points out, the backwards swastika is distorted in her rendition, "all in reverse," an "inversion meant to defy that manly symmetry" (30).
At this point in Life? Or Theater? backwards swastikas are suddenly everywhere in her images: on signs, on the paintings themselves, on the cross-hatching on the wall. Even Salomon's signature, the linked insignia of the C and S, is infected by the swastika, linked and marked by that terrible sign.
When Dr. Singsang visits the Minister for Propaganda (JHM 4314), Salomon's signature is bookended by the swastika. The two insignias are painted in the same dark blue, and the C and S have been linked in such a way as to resemble the Nazi emblem (see Fig. 9). In this central section of the work, as Jewish artists continue to scramble to make work and to earn a living, the Nazi monopoly on culture threatens to subsume their identity even before it makes claims on their lives. The Nazi emblem is overwriting Salomon's signature.
In Life? or Theater? the threat to the young artist is doubled; on one hand, there is her family legacy of suicide and mental illness, and on the other hand, the external pressures of war, National Socialism, internment, and exile.5 But these threats are not distinct, since Nazi propaganda racialized categories of mental illness and linked them to the very activity she saw as her salvation: making art. The Degenerate Art Exhibition conflated mental illness and modernist art.
Max Nordau's 1892 book Degeneration, a central text in Nazi propaganda, argued that avant-garde fashions in art and literature "have their source in the degeneracy of their authors," express "more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia," and "exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation" (viiii). The Nazi architect and ideologue Paul Schultze Naumburg's 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race) printed photographs of disabled people alongside expressionist self-portraits. At the Degenerate Art Exhibition, the room labeled "Madness becomes Method" quoted Nordau on the walls and borrowed Naumburg's comparison, although instead of placing expressionist portraits alongside photographs the exhibition catalogue placed modernist paintings beside art produced by institutionalized mental patients, reproduced from Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn's book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922; see Fig. 10). Hitler's exhibition speech also linked modern art to physiognomic weakness, speculating that the experimentation of modern art may be produced by "eyesight deformation" and warning that "further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes" must "be checked" (562). The accusations of the exhibition were crude and circular-modernist art makes you ill, and ill people produce modernist art.
Salomon was thus inscribed as multiply susceptible to madness, doomed through her race, her family history, and her art. Throughout Life? or Theater? she rejects this claim through her own exploration of her family legacy of mental illness and suicide in the circular trauma that encompasses the narrative. The story begins with the suicide of her aunt and namesake, and ends with the suicide of her grandmother. In the interim, six other friends and family members take their own lives, including her own mother, whom she is told died of the flu. Mrs. Knarre, the character based on Salomon's grandmother, calls this cascading trauma a curse, and in a grotesque, memorable image, turns the family legacy into a nursery rhyme. "One, two, three, four, five, six, do you play witch's tricks? Now we are only three" (JHM 4294; see Fig. 11).
The faces of the dead dominate the image, taking the top two thirds of the picture space. Their eyes are closed and their faces are marked by one of Salomon's aesthetic innovations, rippling red lines that signal their passing. Small red x's further signify that they are gone, in a cartoonish semaphore beside their heads. Blood-red arrows show their family relationships, and Grandma Knarre's head breaches the line that separates the living from the dead, as if to hint that she will be next. The linked S of Salomon's signature resembles the broken link of a jewelry chain, an image of the fissure of these familial connections.
The narrative does not offer a definitive reason for these deaths. Critics have argued for hidden causes6 or have put the epidemic of suicide in the context of German Jewish life in the first two decades of the twentieth century (Buerkle 2013). Fate, curse, fault of the grandmother, and fault of convention-all these possibilities are mentioned but none is sufficient. Here we must note the explanation Salomon never suggests, even though she was surrounded by a racial discourse that cast her family as tainted and doomed. Salomon never intimates any link between the epidemic of suicides in her family and their Jewishness. In the context of the bio-political obsession with tainted bodies, Salomon's omission of this narrative should be understood as a definitive rejection.
Salomon also rejects the idea of a curse or fate that she cannot break. Her way out is through the aesthetic vision that the text both narrates and creates. Here, modern art is not a vector of madness; it is salvation. In contrast to the Nazi pathologization of the avant-garde, the expressionist vision of the artist becomes her most powerful tool for sanity. The last third of Life? or Theater? is increasingly experimental in its strategies. Her figures become more abstract, her use of color turns to loose, rough washes rather than the careful miniaturizations of the earliest sections. Her pictures are more chaotic-the distinction between background and foreground largely vanishes, and the words become larger, echoing across the page like a shout. In one explosive image, her character cries out, Lear-like, "Dear God, please don't let me go mad" (JHM 4907). The surroundings are reduced to the merest outline-her grandmother's quilt in the foreground like the outline of a body, the window that her mother and grandmother both chose as the means of their suicide facing her directly, the entire image suffused in the orange-red that Salomon uses to indicate insanity and intensity (see Fig. 12). The expressive cry on the page is not surrender, or even a prayer; it is an exorcism.
In her epilogue, Salomon writes that "she found herself facing the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric" (JHM 4922). In Salomon's version, artistic experiment is an antidote for her inheritance, and a path to sanity. If the art of the Third Reich emphasized racial purity, gender norms, and obedience, then Salomon's was an art of miscegenation, subversion, and rebellion. If the Nazis forbade Jews from participating in the German cultural tradition, then Salomon insisted not just on experiment but also on her ownership of the language and tradition that was her birthright. If the Germans attacked cosmopolitanism, abstraction, distortion, and dissonance, then all of these were strategies that Salomon embraced. Finally, if the German attack on Degenerate Art was predicated on the insistence that Dada and Expressionist art was inherited and viral, expressive of madness and spreading madness, then Salomon tells a story of mental illness that insists on modernist art as a route to health. We can read Salomon's work as counter-myth to the myth of "degeneracy," as a response to pathologization of modernism, and as a heretical reclamation of German culture through a constitutively miscegenous, dissonant, and experimental art.
The last, triumphant image returns to the seaside colors of Charlotte's childhood memories and of her first arrival on the Mediterranean. Michael Steinberg reads the final image in relation to the machine of execution in Kafka's "Penal Colony," arguing that it carried a "double marking of self-representation and selfabuse" as "the subject is folded into a texture of subjection" (2). Pollock echoes the thanatographic reading, claiming that the final seaside image includes a drowning woman in order to "use art to stage an unwitnessed event and give it an image" ("Crimes," 215). She bases her interpretation on seeing an image that is not at all clear: the haunting "suggestion of a face" (217) rising out of the sea.
In contrast to Steinberg and Pollock, I see this self-marking as far more hopeful. Her back is inscribed with the words of her text; she has merged with her art, and her art has in turn saved her. Salomon has rejected the ways her culture has inscribed her; her mark is not the yellow star but the flickering constellation of her own work, and she insists on her voice despite the many forces that conspire in its suppression. Her self-created artist-androgynous, defiant, and articulate-is the resistant embodiment of everything the National Socialists attempted to purge. By the end of her work, Salomon rejects the inevitability of suicide, and in doing so, rejects the Nazi alignment of madness, Judaism, and modernism. Salomon's work-and its deep investment in modernist art, and German literature and culture-is a counter-vision to the Kunstler politik, and bio-politics of the Third Reich, a rejection of the Nazi appropriation of German culture, an insistence on her own place in that culture and history, and finally, an act of ecstatic sanity and resistance.
Notes
1. The full archive of Leben? Oder Theater? Ein Singespiel is available online at http://www.jhm.nl /collection/specials/charlotte-salomon. The digital archive is the most complete reproduction of the work published to date, including the textual overlays that accompany the paintings. I have used their numeration throughout.
2. Frans Weisz's 2012 documentary Life? or Theatre? was built around a shocking claim. Weisz said that when he was working on his 1980 feature, Charlotte, Charlotte's stepmother Paula Salomon Lindberg sent him a letter that purported to include a transcription of missing pages from Salomon's "Postscript" to Leben? oder Theater? and told him not to include the content of the letter in his film. In this missing conclusion, Charlotte confesses to the murder of her grandfather. Since then, Lindberg's letter has been lost; the director relies on a typed transcript, a copy of a copy. As Griselda Pollock wrote in 2013, scholars have been "stunned and challenged" (266) by this new material, and the nature of the "imagined, willed, attempted, or potentially real" (266) crime. Pollock has directed this scandal towards a reading of "probable ground" for murder in signs of systemic "sexual abuse of his daughters and granddaughter" (266), while insisting that the confession is likely not factual but done in persona as part of the "theatre" of the drama. Her forthcoming book on Salomon will further outline this argument. The claim the documentary makes to have "finally uncovered" the "true Charlotte" is extremely problematic: the missing original pages, the delayed revelation, and the tension between persona and autobiography, all mean that there is no definitive way either to verify the letter or to measure its story. For my part, I am concerned that this scandal, built upon speculation and in absence of an original text, will draw attention away from the legacy of Salomon's work.
3. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
4. All of the characters in this roman a clef have pseudonyms, but many share their given name with their namesake. In this paper, I refer to the artist and narrator as Salomon, and to the depicted character as Charlotte.
5. Salomon did not seem aware of the death camps or the program of genocide, so these threats are implicit but not explored in her narrative. Griselda Pollock once called Gurs, the internment camp where Salomon and her grandfather were held, the "degree zero" (Pollock, "Life Mapping" 84) of the story, "the ground on which this theatre of memory could be enacted" (85), but Salomon never chose to depict it. The only images of concentration camps show Salomon's father, who was temporarily interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, after Kristallnacht. Five gouaches depict his abuse and release (JHM 4798-4801), and there are two alternate images of the concentration camp among the excluded gouaches (4842V and 4885 V). In over 1,300 images, this is a very small part of the work as a whole.
6. Pollock has recently argued that Life? or Theater? "is an oblique, disguised, deflected, but plainly presented indictment of domestic incest, of familial sexual abuse" ("Crimes" 29). I agree that one of the final images (JHM 4915) shows the grandfather attempting to assault Charlotte Kann. However, Charlotte's response seems clear and defiant, not cowed and traumatized, and the claims that Pollock makes for evidence of incest in the rest of the text are not at all self-evident. Incest is too broad a key for the roman a clef of the work; it loses the overdetermined multiplicity of reasons for suicide, which may include a family legacy of sexual assault but is not explained or encompassed by that single reason.
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Copyright Indiana University Press Fall 2017