Something unspeakable enters, but also fails to enter, the mind. Today trauma is often described as an event which consigns itself to silence, but how often do we ask which dimension of the voice precisely has been lost? In Life? or Theatre?, the destroyed voice, the one to be repaired, is a singing voice. As with painting, such a voice has to plunge into the lowest depths in order to find itself. Salomon is inviting us to trace the path from war into something barely articulable as coherent sound. She is inviting us to see how the very form of her work – billed as ‘Singspiel’ or ‘song play’ – bears testimony to her, but not only her, struggle to survive. So for example, as she gets ready to escape from Germany to France, the caption of the first picture of this series instructs us that the tunes from scenes 1 and 2 of the prelude are to be repeated. When her grandmother threatens suicide, she recites to her the ‘Ode to Joy’, with people dancing and singing everywhere. Although she will fail with her grandmother, we could say that in her invocation to song, Charlotte has made Daberlohn’s cause, and Daberlohn’s war, her own. In fact the whole work becomes his cure as much as it is hers. Visually this identification between them – easily obscured by the more obviously compelling tale of their love affair – takes her right into the heart of his war. In a run of hallucinatory gouaches discarded from the final version, Charlotte is portrayed sitting up night after night reading his manuscript, as the ghosts of soldiers crowd her space, one of whom seems to have thrust his hand through the dark and to be hanging on for dear life to the back of her chair, a transgression of natural space which shatters the barrier between now and then.74 It is as if, writes Felstiner, ‘she’d been stationed at the front three years before her birth’, or as if the only way for her to endure the pain of the Second World War was to enter the pain of the First.75 Salomon is not just sending us into the depths of her time. She is also making a plea for historical understanding. The germs of Nazism – on this Luxemburg would surely have agreed – were planted in the first war of the century. We do not yet know, to repeat her words of 1918, whether the Jews have played their role of scapegoat ‘to the end’.76
It is my belief that it is the burden of the suicides in Salomon’s family – silenced and yet, or for that reason, all the more deeply lived by her – that allows her, at least partly, to venture so fearlessly (although that is of course not the right word) into such realms. ‘From the deeply moving expression of the girl,’ to recall Wolfsohn’s words about Salomon’s painting Death and the Maiden, ‘I feel that the death’s head holds none of the usual horror for her . . . Maybe this is the reason why the expression of Death shows so much softness, tenderness, almost defeat.’77
‘The author has tried to go completely out of herself.’ By now we are close to some sense of what such a proposition, such an effort, might – both ethically and aesthetically – entail, what it might require you to embrace. At every level, Salomon lays waste to the borders, fractures the lines of distinction – as if there were no boundaries, not between herself and others, not between public and private dying, not between the two world wars. Historical analysis will of course bear her out on this, seeing the Second World War as consequence, or as the intensified repetition, of the first, rather than – as Nazi logic would have it – its redemption. Is this what it means, what it takes, to identify? A body that spills, pouring across its own edge. When Charlotte’s mother, her grandmother’s second daughter, commits suicide, ‘the grief spreads throughout her [grandmother’s] body. It transcends her own suffering. It is the suffering of the whole world.’ In fact the painting itself contracts her body into a dark smudge, while it is the body of her mother’s sister, Franziska – the first of the two sisters to commit suicide – in the preceding image, lying with her limbs splayed on the ground, that seems to spread across the face of the earth.78 No doctor can cure Wolfsohn unless he can cure the whole world. With no less reach, Milner describes resistance to colour as resistance to infinite pain. ‘Later it was to become clear,’ she writes, ‘that the foreboded dangers of this plunge into colour experience were to do with fears of embracing, becoming one with, something infinitely suffering, fears of plunging into a sea of pain.’79 The fear is of course justified. After all, the world’s embrace is an ambiguous gift and to long for it unequivocally would indeed be mad.
Once again it is the resonances that are telling, suggesting that the ethical, aesthetic and political tasks are one and the same. The greatest danger is indifference, which draws up the ramparts of the soul. For the narrator of Doctor Faustus, the ironically named Dr Serenus Zeitblom (serene flower of the times), such disregard is key. Leverkühn’s tutor spoke of musical notes showing ‘regard’ for each other. The extent of the war’s utter destruction of human values can be measured by how it has trampled over each individual, crushing their self-worth, and by ‘a general indifference to each man’s suffering and perishing that had found itself into people’s hearts’, which is why in hell, as the Devil points out with relish in his one appearance in the novel, derision and infinite suffering are bedfellows.80 Recognising that much is also, for Zeitblom, a type of moral advantage which gives the defeated nations ‘something like an intellectual head start over the others’.81 Put simply, they are now meant to be familiars of the destruction they wrought and to understand how and why. Not all of them, of course. On the same page, he describes those Germans for whom the prospect of democracy imposed after the war was a ‘bad joke’ (freedom as a self-contradictory notion which is forced to negate itself).82
Indifference to the other is therefore the underside of fascism, its pre-condition and its drive: experientially (you cannot kill someone with whom you identify), but also politically. After all, it is true that the other’s freedom is always potentially threatening to your own. On this matter, Salomon is ruthless. The worst, she insists in the running commentary to her paintings, are those who cannot see anything beyond themselves. Nor does she dispense her own people from the charge. At her mother’s wedding banquet, ‘there is nothing to remind the gathering of the still-raging war’ (again it is the First World War where the tragedy begins).83 Then, just before her exile for France, she sits at a dinner of ‘German Jews’ (the title of the chapter), ‘of whom’, she writes, ‘each one is so preoccupied with himself that at a dinner party a silent observer feels as if he were in a goose pen.’84 Social life – the drawing or dining room – carrying on blithely as usual becomes the supreme barometer of moral health. Later, she will describe her grandfather’s insensitivity to her as merely typical, ‘applied to everyone at that time, so that no one was able to listen to anyone else’.85 As if the only alternatives were a fatal blindness or plunging, paintbrush in hand, into the dark core of the world.
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We are nearing the end of this chapter but I realise that it might, at least partly, be giving a wrong impression, which would in fact undermine everything we have to learn from Charlotte Salomon. I have been in danger of making her sound way too good. Perfection is to my mind deadly for women, twice over: as a projected male fantasy but even more as what women might be tempted to ask of themselves. To present Salomon as morally unimpeachable would therefore be doing her a grave injustice, as well as being a mistake. In fact this has become all the more pressing an issue in relation to Salomon, since the publication of a missing letter, apparently withdrawn from the work by Paula Lindberg, that describes her grandfather dying of veronal-laced barbiturates while Charlotte watches by his side, and which has led many of those most deeply involved in her work to conclude that – in real life – Salomon must have killed him.86 Most recently, Griselda Pollock has argued, partly in response to this first discovery, that what lies barely concealed behind this moment – real or fantasised by Salomon – is the sexual abuse of her mother and mother’s sister by the grandfather (the precipitating cause of the two women’s suicides).87 My interest in this moment is different. For me it shows that, whatever the reality, whether murder or abuse or indeed both (and this we cannot know), Sa
lomon had no interest in presenting herself as innocent, and that for this to be recognised by those around her was a struggle which, if her family had had its way, she would posthumously have lost (the victim is never a murderer, the one who suffers is – must be – good). This is to rob Salomon of the complexity of her inner life.
Salomon gives us a Charlotte who is a very good hater. She has to be to survive. Very near the end, she thanks Ottilie Moore for giving her the opportunity ‘to become fully acquainted with human beings of that era and to learn to hate/love or despise them’. Like ‘Jewish-human’, ‘hate/love’ is one word in the German – ‘hassen/lieben’ – with a painted red line barely separating the two words in blue.88 Love and hate are not alternatives, they are combined, and despising people is the opposite of them both. This, it seems to me, is psychologically astute. Contempt – the derision of hell – is the real antagonist to feeling which, in order to be feeling, has to encompass hatred as much as love. As we will see, Marilyn Monroe, a woman who knew all about the curse of perfection, will say almost exactly the same thing. Likewise Luxemburg’s ideal was a world where one could love with a clear conscience: ‘Striving after it, defending it, I might perhaps even learn to hate.’89 For Salomon, the only way to paint her way both into and out of her story is by knowing the inner rage that she is capable of. ‘How I hate them all!’ Charlotte exclaims after her grandfather’s friends have been congratulating him on how well she seems to be coping with the death of her grandmother – ‘really marvellous . . . she still looks the picture of health’. ‘I would like to kick them all down the stairs.’90
Alongside everything else Life? or Theatre? can teach us, it also displays the violence inherent in creative art. It is, however, only when you look at the manuscript in close-up that you truly get the fullest measure of this. As already mentioned, Salomon used both sides of her paper – recto and verso – more or less consistently as she painted. Felstiner must be right that Salomon did this partly in response to a paper shortage during the Nazi Occupation, especially towards the end, when the words run from back to front of the page as if it was not just paper that she was lacking, but also time. But I think this misses the point. These reverse images speak volumes of what Salomon has had to discard as she works. Some of these, most simply and poignantly perhaps, are scenes of Nazi demonstrations and humiliations – one image of anti-Semitic pamphlets in front of a synagogue, another of Salomon and a group of women pleading with the Gestapo for disappeared husbands and fathers: ‘Charlotte does not have much success at police headquarters which is full of sad women’91 – as if there were only so many images of Nazism that she, or that she felt her work, could finally take.
Mostly, however, the scenes on the recto of the pages are ones that have already been staged, sometimes revisited with cruel hindsight. Thus her grandmother kneels by the radio listening to reports of ‘terrible excesses against Jews in Germany’, while the reverse image shows a poster of Paulinka in her heyday carried aloft in the streets (the voice of the world reduced from song to ugly radio reports).92 Or Daberlohn is seen urging Paulinka to freedom – he is citing Nietzsche on song – with Charlotte on the reverse applying for a visa at the French embassy while an endless row of people are condensed into what looks like a puddle on the floor (freedom no more). A much later image shows Charlotte at the foot of her grandfather’s bed, with the grandmother asleep, fainted or dead beside him, as he explains to Charlotte that she has attempted to kill herself five times before. This ghastly image has that earlier scene of Daberlohn exhorting Paulinka to freedom on the other side.93 These connections are brutal – from inspiration to fascism to suicide, although the idea of sequence is wrong since you can track in either direction. You can always, Salomon seems to be telling us, lift life out of death, and the reverse.
Charlotte Salomon, Life? or Theatre?
Above all, something is being tracked here as the underside of what you are being allowed to see. Nothing, however, can convey the shock of seeing for the first time what Salomon actually does to these rectos of her page. Strips of tape are stuck all over the image, above all over mouth and eyes, figure upon figure mutilated almost – although never quite – beyond recognition. Why, Felstiner asks, did she use tape instead of just crossing the images through?94 These are bodies that can no longer – are no longer being allowed to – speak or see. What, we might ask, could be more devastating in a work dedicated to the singing voice and the painting eye? Beneath the surface of the page, as its inseparable counterpoint, Salomon is lashing out, assaulting the very same figures to whom she has given herself so generously.
There is, I think unarguably, a form of sexual rivalry or straight Oedipal dimension involved. Many of these taped images are of Daberlohn and Paulinka, whose intimacy Charlotte could not bear – any more than Paula Lindberg could bear the idea of Charlotte’s affair with Wolfsohn, which, in an interview with Felstiner near the end of her life, she dismissed as a dream. To read the shock of these images simply in such terms is, however, reductive. For me it is rather as if Salomon has found, alongside her bid for freedom and as an inherent part of the process, the perfect method for portraying destruction – a type of killing energy – which is its own pre-condition of art. In another striking affinity, Milner, to her own surprise and dismay, also found herself producing an image of a bare head with tape over its mouth (there are also a number of moments where Salomon strips her heads bare). ‘That head,’ writes Milner, ‘with its ears stopped, eyes shut, lips sealed, blind and deaf and dumb, it’s surely a picture of defending oneself against something too awful to know.’95
Our own lack of innocence is the knowledge we struggle most fiercely to defend ourselves against. In her early drawings, Milner notices that there was usually a harmless, innocent creature and a nasty one, ‘and that I myself was identified with the innocent one’.96 Salomon is no innocent. She may be scathing about her grandparents’ self-regard – ‘They could not get outside themselves in order to understand other people’ – but she also insists she is no better: ‘I belong to the category of people who seek and find their own profit.’ She would finish her work, she declaims, ‘whatever it may cost’.97
Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint
How much can we bear to know about ourselves? For Milner, such knowledge of one’s own demons, the hardest knowledge of all, is also part of the wager of freedom, ‘like the breaking down of a prison wall’.98 Remember Luxemburg struggling with her demons by means of the inkwell. Remember, too, her reach: ‘The fire of her heart melted the locks and bolts and her iron will tore down the walls of the dungeon,’ wrote Clara Zetkin, ‘[gathering] the amplitude of the coursing world outside into the narrowness of her gloomy cell.’ This is why, for me, Life? or Theatre? is a work not about memory, as it is often read, but about knowledge, about what you need to know, however painfully, in order to be alive. ‘I knew nothing of all that,’ Charlotte says plainly to her grandfather after he has told her the story.99 What saves Salomon is the knowledge that no one around her ever thought she could bear.
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Charlotte Salomon does not therefore claim any moral privilege from the world she so devastatingly portrays. Indeed if she had, she would not have been able to paint it. In the epilogue of Doctor Faustus, the narrator questions whether he has truly held himself apart from his country’s guilt, whose defeat he has alternately dreaded and fervently desired: ‘No I would not have wished it – and have had to wish it nonetheless’ (this very thought sends the letters he is writing on the page ‘skittering out of control’).100 Was he right? Worse, did he really manage to keep himself apart from his nation’s sins?101 ‘The two main protagonists [Leverkühn and Zeitblom],’ Mann later writes of the genesis of his novel, ‘had too much to conceal, namely, the secret of their being identical with each other.’102 Mann of course was an exile. He escaped. But, his novel tells us, you escape from nothing. Later he describes the book as ‘a radical confession’: ‘From the beginning
that has been the shattering thing about the book.’103
At the end of the war, Mann, who had been resident in the United States since the Anschluss of 1938, was invited to address the Library of Congress. He called his speech ‘Germany and the Germans’. It is generally acknowledged as one of the most extraordinary statements made by a German about the war:
To play the part of judge, to curse and damn his own people in compliant agreement with the incalculable hatred that they have kindled, to commend himself smugly as ‘the good German’ in contrast to the wicked, guilty Germany over there with which he has nothing in common – that too would hardly befit one of German origin. For anyone who was born German does have something in common with German destiny and German guilt . . .
There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt and ruin. For that reason, it is quite impossible for one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany and to declare: ‘I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe; I leave it to you to exterminate the wicked one.’ Not a word of all that I have just told you about Germany or tried to indicate to you came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge, it is all within me, I have been through it all.104
After seeing the German typescript ten days before his brother delivered the address, Heinrich Mann wrote to him that these words ‘would justify any author’s life’.105
Throughout this chapter, the issue has been freedom as an ideal with the highest internal as well as external price. ‘Why’, asks Mann in his speech, ‘must the German urge for liberty always be tantamount to inner enslavement?’ Liberty is only liberty when a people is ‘internally free and responsible to itself’ (there is no freedom without inner freedom).106 What then should be the outcome of the war? Mann’s reply is startling. It turns out that Goethe once expressed the wish for a German diaspora: ‘ “Like the Jews,” he said, “the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world!” ’107 Only in this way would ‘the good that lies inside them’ develop ‘fully and to the benefit of all nations’.108 Thus Jewishness – belonging nowhere and everywhere – becomes the clarion call for a new world. (How much further, we might ask, can the German go out of himself than an identification with the Jew?) After the catastrophe of this war, Mann concludes, surely we might take the first tentative steps towards a world in which the ‘national individualism of the nineteenth century will dissolve and finally vanish’.109
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