Charlotte has painted a picture of Wolfsohn looking at one of her paintings. Here she writes, In this moment he almost becomes a delicate young girl himself. Later she depicts him in one of his many philosophical moods as he dreams of moving beyond the boundaries of gender. Hoping for a time when men and women will become a single being, he envisions the heroine of a new age as a young girl who will face her own depths.
November
It was an astonishing performance, and I felt myself becoming Inanna, slipping into the underworld, my flesh stripped from my bones, left hanging in a terror of suspension.
But under this idealized vision is a darker image. He does not really accept young girls as they are. Sitting across from Charlotte at a café table, he tells her to try to control her face. He does not like to see what she is feeling all of the time. Does she mirror back to him too much of his own vulnerability, his volatile moods, his sense of insecurity as a Jew in Nazi Germany, an artist with unconventional ideas? Though, according to Charlotte, he becomes her lover, he treats her publicly like a bothersome child. When she brings him the illustrations she has worked so hard to render for his birthday, he leaves hurriedly without even bothering to look at what she has given him. He may wish to incorporate the feminine into himself, but he also rejects this capacity.
November
According to Kramer’s obituary, his work began when he went on an archaeological expedition to the ruins of Ur, Kish, and Uruk, the ancient walled city that was home to Gilgamesh. These sites are all in the country that is now called Iraq.
I am thinking now of my own generation, coming of age in the decade of the sixties. It was fashionable then in the alternative culture for men to wear long hair, feathers and beads and even, at times, caftan-like gowns. In this way a certain androgynous appearance was achieved. But this union was accomplished more in the manner of an empire annexing a colony than that of an equal union. Women did not have respect in this milieu. Rather the evocation of the feminine as a primordial power of nature had been claimed as part of the masculine signature.
November
The history of warfare and poetry have been intertwined for centuries. The Iliad. The Aeneid. Samurai poetry. El Cid. Gilgamesh.
Charlotte’s story begins in a period between the two great wars. A menacing public history has been unfolding at the edge of her private story. Until, finally, members of Himmler’s Gestapo show up at Charlotte’s front door searching for her father, whom they take away to a concentration camp.
November
From a recent translation of Gilgamesh, this beginning: “The one who saw the abyss … who saw things secret, opened the place hidden.” That was when the journey of the warrior was symbolic of a soul journey.
Charlotte is trapped as if by a vise, one arm of which is the torment of her private life and the other the danger of the public world. Wolfsohn has become a permanent resident in her family’s apartment. She pictures herself at the doorway not wishing to enter. Inside, her sometime lover alternately grabs at her and shunts her aside whenever her stepmother and his beloved appears. She longs to go out to a café, but Jews are forbidden these public spaces.
November
Over Thanksgiving the President and his wife travel to the Persian Gulf. They sit with soldiers on top of tanks eating Thanksgiving dinner.
Although Charlotte’s stepmother does succeed in using her influence to win the release of her husband, Berlin has become very dangerous for anyone who is Jewish. The decision is made to send Charlotte to live with her grandparents, who are living in exile in Villefranche, near Nice, in the South of France, as guests of a wealthy American woman.
November
I read that the troops have been carefully instructed about how they must treat Bush. Those allowed to eat with the President and his wife have been carefully selected.
In the beginning it seems to Charlotte that she has finally found a safe haven. High on a cliff the silvery leaves of a pepper tree are blowing in the wind. Beneath her the Mediterranean Sea seems to reflect her dreams on its blue surface. As she paints, looking into the waves, she asks, What makes you shape and reshape yourself so brightly from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right?
November
The President’s wife wears battle fatigues.
It may be that her grandparents are sometimes less than understanding. Are you here in the world only to paint? her grandfather asks, and suggests she ought to work as a housemaid. On the other hand, her grandmother, who wishes to protect her from that fate, wants her to meet a young man. But despite these pressures, she is in a place where she can do her work, and she is coming into her own.
November
I can easily imagine Barbara Bush as a field commander, raising binoculars to her eyes, as she calmly surveys the field.
Yet the troubles of the world have not disappeared. Charlotte and her grandparents listen nightly to the radio. They can hear Hitler’s speeches. They can hear the progress of the violence as it closes in around them. The harrowing sorrow of her grandmother, cast for some time into a fragile abeyance, returns to center stage along with news of the raging war. She sinks further and further into a depression. Fearing she will go mad, she tries to hang herself.
November
No doubt the allure of crossing over the line into masculine territory made uniforms attractive to me as a child. Did my father feel more manly in his blue firefighter’s uniform?
How is it that in the past I did not put together the two histories which I lived through to make one history? Now I can see clearly that my mother’s alcoholism and the small suicides of omission practiced by my father are part of the history of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. That terrible stunning violence and then the silencing pall which proceeded from it did not stop at the doorsteps of our homes. Everyone became less visible, less.
November
One day public opinion polls announce that the only reason Americans would support a war would be to prevent Iraq from having nuclear weapons. And the next day Bush announces this as the principal reason for going to war.
It is now that Charlotte finally learns the truth about her family history. Struck by the pain and panic of his wife’s attempt at suicide, her grandfather blurts out the real story. Your mother, he tells her, and your aunt Charlotte, and your grandmother’s brother, and your great-grandmother and your cousins all committed suicide.
December
Very little rain still. The days are very short now. Red sunsets made more brilliant by pollution, yet still so beautiful.
Charlotte’s mother was just one in a chain reaction of deaths within her family. In her work in progress about Charlotte’s life and work, Mary Felstiner points out that the suicide rate in Germany was high. And rising among upper-middle-class women, and among Jews. The first one to die in this manner was Charlotte’s grandmother’s brother. Why? He had shown signs of madness. Unmotivated laughter. Depression. So the family kept him isolated until he recovered. Then his mother pushed him into an unhappy marriage with a wealthy woman.
December
Long conversation with my sister. She is exploring the possibility that our father abused her. This would explain so much in her life.
Were there other hidden causes behind this death? What if his marriage was unhappy for another reason? Not only because he did not like his wife, but that he did not want to be married to a woman at all. I am thinking of the film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) produced in Germany in 1919. The movie begins as the hero reads about the suicides of three men, each for no apparent reason. But the hero of this film feels he knows the cause. They are victims of society’s repression of homosexuals. By the end of the film, the hero himself commits suicide, stricken by the same prejudice.
December
The thought of this creates such disturbing emotions in me. I have no memory nor even a vague sense of having been molested by my father. And yet I felt he was in
love with me in some way that embarrassed him.
Neither is it apparent if perhaps Charlotte’s aunt, the first Charlotte, felt the sting of anti-Semitism more than Franziska, Charlotte’s mother, who was fair in coloring and perhaps less subject to bigotry. Or was it possible that the family internalized some of this attitude, and showed a subtle form of favor to one daughter? I know I received a certain special attention as a child because I was blond.
If my sister was abused, was I a witness to this? How I wish I knew the truth now. Terrible conflict. My father’s love sustained me as a child.
How deeply prejudice of any kind etches its way into being until the presence need hardly be named. What is left is an amorphous feeling of inferiority whose origin can no longer be traced. The distinction between privately and publicly inflicted wounds can hardly be made. They are blended in one life, one psyche, one body into the same pattern of pain, which can even seem, after a time, to be self-inflicted.
December
A conference about the Hanford Experiment. In 1949, the government released large amounts of radiation into the air. A secret experiment, meant to determine the size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. In an airport hotel I sit at a round table with survivors and listen as they tell stories of exposure and illness.
Charlotte pictures herself as a girl in a moment of despair standing by the window of her home in Berlin as she contemplates jumping. Wolfsohn has failed to acknowledge her birthday gift, and he has rejected her. First she throws her money out of the window. Then she thinks of throwing herself out too. But she tells herself that the fellow is not worth it. And besides, someday he will tell her that he likes her paintings. This is reason enough to go on living.
December
Across the table from me sits a woman who clearly had not connected her own illness with the experiment before this moment. She grows more pale with each story, and finally hides her face in her hands and weeps.
Now, once again it is her work that will save her. First she uses Wolfsohn’s teachings in an attempt to give her grandmother hope. For a moment, her grandmother springs to a new vitality. But it does not last. The moment she is left alone she jumps to her death. Now, alone with her grandfather, who is bitter, and selfish, mourning her grandmother’s death, exiled and in danger from an advancing hostile army, confronted with a terrible family secret, she must act to save herself.
December
The symptoms the survivors describe are all so familiar to me. The coldness. Legs suddenly weak, almost as if paralyzed. The nervous system off balance. Numbness. Loss of memory.
Her life is in danger from two directions. From her own hand as directed by her family history, and from the hands of others, as directed by our shared history.
December
As disturbing as they are, there is a strange comfort for me in hearing the stories of these survivors. To hear the inner life, the suffering of the body, spoken.
Since just before the war the South of France had become a refuge for those fleeing the Gestapo. The control of France near the Italian border passed from the Vichy to the Italian government. For many reasons, including their resistance to German domination, the Italians refused to carry out the German order to deport Jews. Because of this Villefranche was safe. But this was just a temporary safety. Near the end of the war, the Italians signed a separate armistice with the Allies, and because of this their armies were soon in retreat from the Germans. Now the area where Charlotte was exiled fell under German occupation. The Gestapo began a ruthless search of the area. Driven by revenge, they searched every hotel and boarding room, arresting all and beating anyone who even looked Jewish.
December
I think of the years of atmosphere testing, and my own illness. Radiation damages the immunity of the cell.
Sometime in the midst of this terrible history Charlotte and her grandfather were arrested. They were taken to Gurs, a labor camp in France. But the miraculous took place. Because he was ill Charlotte’s grandfather was judged unfit for work. He was sent home, and Charlotte too was released so that she could care for him.
December
That dream I had. A child threatened by a murderer on the loose. Finally a man in a uniform arrives. He is a fireman like my father. I am relieved because he is here to rescue the child. But then I see he is the murderer.
The chronology of her narration is unclear. The original order of the paintings has been lost. I do not know if it was before or after their arrest that Charlotte said to her grandfather, You know … I have the feeling the whole world has to be put together again. To which her grandfather bitterly responds, Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble. In another frame they are on a crowded train. Is this the train they rode to the camp? Here, Charlotte confesses that she would rather be crowded uncomfortably among strangers than shut up in a room alone with her grandfather.
December
I had this dream years ago and I have never forgotten it.
After some time, her grandfather will die. She will meet another refugee from Germany. Become pregnant with his child. Marry him. And then she will be arrested again, and this time deported to Auschwitz, where she too will die. Most of her great work, Life or Theatre? will be completed between these two arrests.
December
A card from Israel, from Shirley, arrives. Camel saddled in gold moving among palm trees. She has reservations to fly here at the end of January but is not certain she wants to leave Israel during the crisis. “Wish we weren’t so anxious here,” she writes, “it casts a pall over everything.”
In the epilogue to her story Charlotte writes, She found herself facing the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric. She chooses the second course. It is a decision I understand, yet perhaps the courage is not so obvious. She is moving against the direction of history. It is like taking a train off the tracks on which it has traveled for so many years that the sound of its whistle, the color of the engine, the steam curling in the air over it, have literally shaped your days ever since you can remember. You have timed your waking with this train. You have learned at what hour you must return home. You have sat down to meals with its music in your ears. You have ridden it so often your feet can move by themselves through the station without a conscious thought. Once the train has changed its path the landscape, which you can hardly separate from your own body, will seem fractured, torn, wrong.
December
She sends a poem with her note. In it are these words: “The dead are so light.”
To make such a change requires more than blunt bravery. Something, some new knowledge, must replace what is lost. She recalls her teacher and his admonition to her that, in order to go out of oneself, one must go deep into oneself. Now when Wolfsohn returns to her in her dream, he reminds her of the painting she did as a girl called Death and the Maiden. And from this she realizes she need not commit suicide. For she can make another kind of descent, into the depths, and return, resurrected.
December
Is it true that there may actually be a war? I can’t help feeling it is all shadow boxing. Powerful men making threats they will not carry out. Is this wishful thinking?
Before she begins her work she draws a picture of Wolfsohn and then tears it to pieces. Only after this can she hear his teachings in her dream. She offers no explanation of this destruction. But I am imagining that she has destroyed her seducer, and her compliant love for him. This destruction makes it possible for her to use what he has taught her now about art and salvation.
December
The polls still show a majority against the war. And then there is the hope Congress will slow the machinery down, and give the economic sanctions time to work.
Now with dream-awakened eyes she sees all the beauty around her. The blue sea and the warm sun. And she knows what her work is. She will remove herself from ordinary life, so that she can create her world as new out of the depths. She will paint and
write the story of her life.
December
Most of the hostages have been released. But Iraq has not withdrawn from Kuwait. Debate in Congress over whether or not the international boycott is working.
It was from the publisher of Charlotte’s book Life or Theatre? that Marita learned Charlotte sang as she painted. The concierge of a hotel in Villefranche wrote this to him. Charlotte had rented a room at this hotel where she might work in peace, free from her grandfather’s demands. The concierge hardly even saw Charlotte, who was adamant that she did not want to be disturbed. But every day she would leave a bowl of soup outside Charlotte’s door. And that was when she could hear her singing.
December
The beginnings of a peace movement. It is déjà vu. It’s been twenty years since the war in Vietnam. I can measure my life this way. World War II. Korea. Vietnam. And throughout, the Cold War.
Charlotte was working at a furious pace. The work accelerates as it nears the end, the drawings becoming more simple, brush strokes hurried. She must have known she did not have much time.
December
Long discussions about the deeper reasons for the war. Oil. The banking interests of wealthy Kuwaitis in the United States. The armaments industry.
Looking back, I want to call to her, to alarm her about the ensuing danger. But of course she knew. Why else would she so carefully pack up her paintings in a suitcase and take them to her friend, the doctor in Villefranche, to be hidden.
December
And it is perhaps also a fear of what the Buddhists call emptiness. The void left by the end of the Cold War. We have no crisis to define us any more.
The doctor in Villefranche urged her not to try to marry her lover, that it was too dangerous. He advised her to flee with the other refugees into the mountains behind Nice, to hide with the others in one of the small villages near the Italian border. Some of the refugees who hid there did survive.
A Chorus of Stones Page 30