Charlotte: A Review

...The choice she faced after her grandmother's suicide, Charlotte tells us, was "whether to take her own life or to undertake something wildly unusual...

...All these qualities, together with her expressive technique, make up a unique testament, which is dazzling to study in the original in Amsterdam...

...I wish everyone I love the experience of suffering so that they are forced to find the way to their depths...

...In a series of stark, fiercely drawn images, as if she were reliving these moments, Charlotte again and again bends over the old woman's bed, imploring, beckoning her to flowers, mountains, sunlight, singing her Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and urging her to write poems so as to overcome melancholy...

...What do these images and words have to tell us...

...In two years, Charlotte made 1,325 paintings, obsessed with the need— and gifted with the means—to prove her life...

...Could we bear to know so fully every one of those who perished in their twenties in the Holocaust...

...In her most telling memories we see Charlotte painting and etching to make a gift for Daberlohn...

...Yet she does survive...

...Kann at work, demonstrating to colleagues a lifesaving surgical technique, but she has crossed out the scene—her father is dismissed from the hospital...

...Then, on the very next page, as this public terror inevitably impinges on private existence, Charlotte shows Dr...

...Once home she begins thinking: "You know, Grandpa, I feel as if the whole world has to be put together again...

...For that reason perhaps, people can respond with their whole selves, wanting to know more and more about this or that aspect of her life or work...

...Within two months the Germans invade France, and in June 1940 Charlotte is sent by the Vichy authorities with her grandfather to the brutal camp at Gurs...

...Charlotte says, of her mother's and grandmother's suicides, "I was the only survivor...

...Ultimately she was not...

...She called this work Life or Theater...

...In late summer 1942, Charlotte entrusted these paintings to a French friend in Villefranche, saying that-this-was her whole life: "C'est tout ma vie...

...Unlike the documents of day-to-day survival or the survivors' autobiographies written years after, Life or Theater...

...He tells her: "To love life completely one must always accept and Understand its other side, death and sorrow...

...On her back we read the words Leben oder Theater, as if that ambiguity were finally resolved in the person of the artist...

...She receives the Fine Arts Academy's prize, but as a Jew, has it revoked...

...We ourselves feel that force in every page of this book...

...Inevitably Charlotte Salomon has been likened to Anne Frank, and she deserves to become that much of a spiritual byword...

...A small selection was published in 1963, European exhibitions were held, and the Dutch poet, Judith Herzberg, collaborated with German director Frans Weisz on a film...

...At this point a new figure appears in these painted pages—which is to say in Charlotte's life—who profoundly affects her identity, her art, her very survival...

...Meanwhile she herself feels the encroachment: In one painting, against a background of schoolroom walls speckled with swastikas, Charlotte tells her father she can't bear to stay in school...

...Charlotte also had—astonishing, in so young an artist—a genius for empathy, for portraying her own life through the eyes of those close to her: "I was my mother, my grandmother—yes, I was each person who appears in my play...

...Oh, we have lost her...

...After the war her father and Paulinka, having hidden out in Holland, went to Villefranche and were given Charlotte's work...

...Dear God," Charlotte writes over a fiery red-orange-yellow scene of herself near the open window, "just let me not go mad," and she clutches her sketchpad on her knees...

...And the sketch pad is transparent so that on it we see not a painting of the sea but the blue sea itself shining through...

...Alfred Wolfsohn, grandly renamed Amadeus Daberlohn in Life or Theater?, comes as a voice theorist and coach to Paulinka...

...and called it a singespiel, a play with music, casting it in dramatic form both to distance and to grasp her life...

...Throughout 225 sheets of paintings, we watch Daberlohn bestowing upon Paulinka his Romantic ideas about voice and soul, while Charlotte herself is scarcely seen, hovering in the margins or watching the two adults from a window...

...She begins the play before her birth, with her aunt's suicide and her mothers courtship, and brings it to a close 25 years later, with the artist in a bathing suit kneeling on the shore of the Mediterranean, painting...

...In Charlotte, Paulinka inspires loving adoration: We get various glimpses of them embracing, and a painting with five views of Charlotte sketching her stepmother...

...Here, against a few fierce russet brushstrokes, Charlotte in stark outline stretches almost longingly above her grandmother's body, her arms and her words themselves cradling the old woman's head: "Have you forgotten all I told you about the...

...And unlike the art that survives from ghettos and camps—bread lines, deportees, fellow prisoners, barbed wire and watchtowers, corpses—Charlotte's vision turns inward to find the source and shape of a private life...

...Four years later, in 1930, her father, Albert Kann (the family name Charlotte invents for this autobiography), Mary Lowenthal Felstiner is a history professor at San Francisco State University...

...She may also have had premonitions that in a further sense this was all her life...

...Finally, early in 1939, Charlotte's parents send her from Berlin to Villefranche, near Nice, where despite unsympathetic grandparents, she passes happy months, musing and drawing in a tropical lushness...

...Possibly an impassioned dilettante, possibly a deep philosopher, he becomes enamored of the singer while utterly fascinating the younger woman...

...A ring of gaping folk stand around the placard, while in the background another parade surges by and Jewish clothing stores are boycotted...

...and on one sheet the girl stands at window after window, which means ten times a night, waiting for an angel-message from Heaven...

...The grandmother sinks into depression and tries to hang herself...

...On the next sheet she has drawn a monstrous placard with an anti-Semetic diatribe on it and lines from the Nazi Horst Wessel song: "When Jewish blood spurts off the knife,/ That's when you get more kicks from life...

...The colors of mimosa, pepper and orange trees, and of sunlit water, suffuse these pages now...

...Pictures are courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam...

...Now, after Dutch and German editions, The Viking Press has published Charlotte: Life or Theater...

...What we come to know about Charlotte somehow lets us cherish life—hers and our own as well...

...holds a university chair and marries a well-known contralto, named Paulinka...

...Could she have generated so intense a life story if she had not felt that life at risk...

...tells Charlotte's whole life story from the heart of the danger...

...In both senses this was all her life, being both the story of it all and utterly vital to her...

...But her earliest memories, seen in intricately, lovingly-drawn vignettes, abound with warm primary colors as they retrace the close human touch she felt...

...Charlotte possessed an astonishing visual recall, evoked under the duress of events and the need to summon her existence before her eyes...

...She titled this work Life or Theater...

...She must show him—and us—that she is an artist, so in these pages she displays herself at work and depicts her works themselves—a meadow of yellow buttercups, or Death and the Maiden—with Daberlohn scrutinizing them...

...These paintings create a choice against suicide and, in their astonishing experimental force, a form of resistance to Nazi dehumanization...

...with 769 paintings beautifully reproduced...

...John Felstiner, professor of English, teaches at Stanford University...

...Then war breaks out...

...This eloquent collection is edited by Gary Schwartz, a Brooklyn emigre to Holland translated by Leila Vennewitz and search-ingly, sensitively introduced by Judith Herzberg...

...In Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum, at an exhibit of Charlotte Salomon's work last year, the visitors' book filled up with impassioned comments in Dutch, German, French, English, Hebrew and other languages, many from women reaching out to her as to something insistent in the human spirit...

...Yet Charlotte lived longer than Anne Frank, and was a maturing artist at the time of her death...

...An early sheet has 12 successive scenes painted in detail: from Albert kissing Paulinka good night while Charlotte stands apart, through moments alone that night when she wonders whether she may go to her stepmother, to a closing sequence at Paulinka's bed, close up now in warm, bright colors, where slowly the woman and the girl embrace...

...GOTT MEIN GOTT ? IST DAS SCHON—Charlotte's words splay out across the sunshot landscape she is gazing at: "God my God ? is that beautiful...

...Or late in the story, Charlotte brings another intensity to scenes with her despairing grandmother...

...Luckily her family has the means to give her private art lessons, and soon she gets admitted to the Berlin Fine Arts Academy...

...What we have, what Charlotte Salomon gives to us, is many things in one: the life of a woman, of a young woman, in Nazi-ridden Europe, the detail of an inner and outer life in vivid images, salvaged when so countlessly many other lives were lost with all the vivid, intimate detail that filled them too...

...Charlotte was taken off violently and transported to Auschwitz to be murdered...

...He replies: "Go kill youself and put an end to this babbling...

...Born in 1917 (her mother was the daughter of well-to-do Berliners, her father, after fighting in the war, an aspiring surgeon), Charlotte Salomon experienced traumatic upset even before undergoing the European education destined for Jews of her generation...

...What's more, in the writing all over her drawings, we see her gift of words, of dramatic speech...

...What is unusual is that we have the story at all, vividly, vibrantly told in hundreds upon hundreds of gouaches, nearly all of them bearing her own words, within or above her images, as comment and dialogue...

...Her eyes, in that lucid self-portrait of 1940, stay with us wherever we go...

...The story of Charlotte's childhood, adolescence and young womanhood as a Jew in Germany and then a refugee in southern France may not be so unusual...

...But Charlotte realizes that instead, "she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths...

...She dwells on Paulinka's loveliness yet returns again and again to Daberlohn, always darkening and deepening her colors to penetrate his expression, his gesture—on some sheets she draws his head or body 50 times over, each time changing it subtly while winding Daberlohn's words around these images, these gripping memories of him...

...For the first time, Charlotte is told that her mother did not die from influenza but threw herself from her bedroom window, and that her aunt, for .whom Charlotte was named, drowned herself and that her great-grandmother as well as several other family members took their own lives...

...Three weeks later, thanks to his age, they are released and return to Villefranche...

...Eventually the Salomons donated the paintings to Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum...

...We see her father Albert and her mother's parents distraught—"Oh, I have lost her...

...Another scene shows him and Charlotte sitting close on a park bench, rapt in one another...

...And that is what she did, withdrawing from life in order to draw her whole life, day and night for fully two years and in more than 1,300 paintings...

...But suddenly a new image and a new pictorial technique take over these memories, scarcely a fifth of the way through Life or Theater...

...Charlotte is given that experience of suffering by German anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution...

...Shortly before Charlotte turned nine, however, her mother died from influenza, as the child was told...

...What Paulinka looked back on as an insignificant episode in her own life and an innocent infatuation in her stepdaughter's, Charlotte paints with a lyric intensity that recalls Marc Chagall, or Edvard Munch...

...We can try to imagine the moment when Paulinka, first turning over these pages, discovered how much Charlotte loved and understood her...

...Grounded in the German Expressionism of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Pechstein and others, her style grew into something quite her own...

...At slide presentations of Charlotte's paintings, students and other audiences invariably find themselves drawn, by way of Charlotte's own sensibility, into a single life that was taking its shape—and not into ghastly flames and ashpits...

...I was the only survivor," Charlotte Salomon writes, and she gazes out at us gravely, fixedly, through this self-portrait painted in 1940...

...A mass of brown shirts parades full across the page, with heads daubed in black staccato strokes and the date "30-1-1933" superimposed under a red flag unfurling its agitated swastika—"a bright symbol of hope," Charlotte's caption says, while noting that Jews are dismissed without warning from public offices...

...She had recently married an Austrian refugee and may have been six months pregnant in September 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies and Germany occupied southeast France...

...Right after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo take her father off to Sachsenhausen—she pictures the professor being whipped at heavy labor—but eventually Paulinka gets him released, broken in health...

...Remote from home, alienated from her grandfather, perhaps by extending her imagery with words, she was staying in touch with the mother tongue...

...Would they reach out so forcefully if Charlotte had not perished...

...But soon her grandmother slips away and jumps from a window...

...As much to save herself, she turns to succor her grandmother...

...Her grandparents emigrate to southern France...

...Her mother "fed her herself," Charlotte writes above a nursery scene, "and was very down-Cast each time the all-powerful nurse took the baby away...

...Why, after all, do we need this record of a life...

...She developed, for example, a way of repeating images that deeply draws the beholder in and through her mind...