Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

The relationship between Daberlohn and Paulinka is never elucidated, either. It remains a matter of projection and guesswork. It’s vitally important for the text and the narrator that the relationship be presented as a triangle with Charlotte forming the third side: the grown-up and equal rival. The singing teacher who has promised Paulinka Bimbam that he can perfect her singing cannot avoid falling in love with the singer because in the world of the singspiel she is irresistible, as any indifferent divinity should be, and because his passion is the fuel for her flight. He still finds time to pay attention to the little girl and her drawings, and even to have a separate love affair with her, taking walks and talking with her, and this doesn’t seem to surprise her in the least. She rather feels a deep sense of gratitude. He is writing a book and she illustrates it: their relationship is shaped so it can be grown into, and it gives a purpose to her existence. She remembers his theories, she inhabits them; his theory that one cannot begin a life without the experience of going through death (and the need to “go out of oneself,” the cinema as a machine invented in order to leave one’s “I” behind) becomes the hull of the enormous ship Life? Or Theater? Their meetings in the station café (Jews are prohibited from going to other cafés) and on park benches (also prohibited, but they risk it) are placed right at the center of the text, along with hundreds of pictures of Daberlohn’s face, framed in his own rather simpleminded sermons.

Everything takes place against a backdrop of passing crowds, mouths stretched into cries, children boasting about their ballpoint pens requisitioned from Jewish shops. On one of the sheets, depicting Berlin at the time of Kristallnacht, Salomon distinctly appears among the names of looted shops (Selig and Cohn). To describe what is happening at that point among her circle of acquaintances she invents the word combination menschlich-jüdisch : she speaks of these human-Jewish souls as if she were speaking of some strange wild hybrid that needed to be observed and studied. And that is more or less how it was.

In 1936 the Jew Charlotte Salomon won a place at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, an impossibility, according to the laws of the time, and perhaps only because the Academy was overwhelmed by Charlotte’s uncommon bravery and doggedness. The Academy was later forced to explain their behavior, and it’s worth noting how they did this: Charlotte was allowed to study because of her asexuality, as someone who was clearly not capable of exciting male Aryan students. In Life? Or Theater? Charlotte writes up a dialogue from the entrance interview: “But do you accept Jews?” — “You probably aren’t Jewish.” — “I am a Jew, of course I am.” — “Well, never mind.” A fellow student, featured in a few of Charlotte’s gouache drawings, remembers her as an outsider, dressed in gray, like a somber November sky.

Three years later Charlotte was dispatched against her will to France to live with her grandparents. They were by then impoverished, but somehow contrived to live much as they always had. In a publication of Life? Or Theater? published in 1969, the picture of her saying farewell to Daberlohn (one of many silent embraces owing something to Klimt) is titled “a fantasy.” Paula Lindberg insisted till her dying day that the love triangle embodied in the singspiel was teenage invention and that it had never happened. In the images on the following pages we see a general farewell at the station: Charlotte’s stooped father, who has just been released from Sachsenhausen concentration camp; her stepmother in a mink coat; Daberlohn’s round glasses.

As for the “soul-penetrating nature of the work,” Salomon encouraged the reader to see a lyrical shape in the work, something along the lines of a love story. A “romance,” to employ that useful term, which holds within itself both the kernel of narrative and a system of nuance underpinning everything in the book, and most importantly the love interest. It’s a word Freud uses in his important 1909 article “Familienroman der Neurotiker,” which is traditionally translated as “Family Romances.” In the article, Freud describes a particular stage of development when the child begins to consider how he, such a “special” child, could be born to such ordinary parents, and so he invents new parents: spies, aristocrats, divine presences invented in his likeness. He thinks of himself as a victim of circumstance, kidnappings, fraudulence: a Romantic hero imprisoned in the fortress of dramatic realism. Pasternak writes of this with understanding in an early poem, the inevitable experience of “dreaming that your mother is not your mother, that you are not you, that your home is a foreign land.”

The subject of Life? Or Theater? , with its suicidal angels, fairy-godmother stepmother, and magical teachers is apparently such a “romance” and I occasionally catch myself on the word, as if I were considering it a “he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not” tale. It is of course nothing of the sort — nothing could be further from the virtuous stepdaughter trope, like Cinderella or Snow White . The work has both the structure and the sweep of an epic. It’s a wake for the disappearing world. Charlotte Salomon is writing — with precision and complete self-awareness — the decline and destruction of her class, the only one she ever happened to know. The days were numbered for the enlightened, lofty Jewish bourgeoisie with its refined taste, expensive habits, and little sermons on positivism. (Life must go on, says Charlotte’s rather sinister grandfather after the suicide of his daughter. You can’t get around what you are, he pronounces in 1939 as the shadows are gathering. Everything natural is holy, he repeats.) The family had become a relic, a people of the past, living by inertia and dying by their own will. Charlotte Salomon became the dining-table chronicler of this age of decline, bewilderment, and pitiful efforts to keep one’s dignity intact.

Without meaning to, Charlotte’s hateful grandfather gave his granddaughter an unbelievable, albeit rather depressing, gift by offering her the possibility of a new life. At an opportune moment he told her the whole family history, and he gave it to her pretty straight: the eight suicides lined up in a row looked like an invitation: you’re next. But the knowledge of what had happened, once laid bare, had the opposite effect. In one of the gouaches Charlotte, bent over the pans on a stove, says approximately this: “What a wonderful thing is life! I believe in it! I’ll live for each and every one of them!”

So the colossal system of Life? Or Theater? begins to unfold from the tiny speck of an unexpected revelation. The story of a tribe, seen from the outside, by a person who has lost their connection with the old world.

My life began when my grandmother wanted to commit suicide… when I learned that my mother had also taken her own life… It was as if the whole world, in its depth and terror opened up like an abyss in front of me. […] Then when it was over with my grandmother and I stood alone in front of her bleeding corpse, when I saw her little foot that still moved in the air and twitched in automatic reflex… when I then threw a white sheet over her and I heard my grandfather say “She did do it after all,” [at that moment] I knew that I had a task, and that no power in the world may stop me from carrying it out.

The director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter Museum in Amsterdam once commented that the problem with Life? Or Theater? was that there was nothing to compare it with — in the whole of world art there was nothing that stood alongside it. Its loneliness coincides rather strangely with the massive wave of interest in the history captured in the work. The artist has become yet another icon of collective suffering, an important figure , the synopsis for a Hollywood film, not because of what she did, but because of what they did to her.