Women in Dark Times (11 page)

The impression that Luxemburg was slow to register the importance of feminism to revolutionary struggle is, however, misleading. In fact, her writings on the women question run through most of her active political life, from 1902 to 1914. Full emancipation for women was a central plank of her breakaway Polish socialist party. She saw the absence of women’s political rights as ‘a remnant of the dead past’, as reactionary ‘as the reign of Divine right on the throne’.
170
She knew that, for its opponents, women’s emancipation was a ‘horror and an abomination’ – she had experienced first hand the visceral revulsion aroused by women who ask too much. But it was for her a ‘
bold and grand political
experiment’, which would blow in ‘a strong fresh wind’ and ‘clear out the suffocating air of the current, philistine family life that rubs itself off too unmistakeably, even on our Party members, workers and leaders alike’ (like Marxism as a ‘gout-ridden uncle afraid of the breeze’).
171
Perhaps because she never settled into the family life she herself also longed for, she could see that the so-called privilege of the bourgeois woman was a trap: ‘For the property-owning bourgeois woman, her house is her world.
For the proletarian woman, the whole world is her house.
’
172
Bourgeois women are ‘parasites of the parasites of the social body.’
173
At the same moment, in
Women and Labour
of 1911, British feminist Olive Schreiner will produce an almost identical indictment of the bourgeois woman as parasite (more unequal than the working-class woman or even the aristocrat).

Luxemburg was scathing about the idea that women’s emancipation should wait ‘
for the time being
’ – a demand that any woman who has ever participated in male-dominated left politics will surely recognise. Women’s oppression was ‘one link in the chain of the reaction that shackles people’s lives’.
174
It was not that women’s demands should come second to class struggle, but that everyone should be free – a lesson today’s ‘post-feminism’ might heed. Everything was connected. This we might say is still the true meaning of socialist feminism – that women cannot possibly emancipate themselves while ignoring the iniquities of a rampantly unequal world.

Above all she believed that what women brought to politics was a moral impulse, a different register and quality of the heart. Only women, she insisted in her ‘Address to the International Socialist Women’s Conference’ of 1907, could restore the moral authority of socialism.
175
To that end, she wanted the International Socialist Bureau to relocate into the editorial office of Zetkin’s feminist paper
Gleichheit
,
which was never going to happen. You cannot, she insisted – her message for all politics – achieve a centre of international socialism ‘through mechanical means alone’.
176

Women’s equality was therefore an issue of burning importance for Luxemburg. It unleashed some of her most impassioned outbursts, just as her letters to her women friends, as we have seen throughout this chapter, provoke some of her most spirited and searching reflections on the meaning and purpose of life: to Mathilde Wurm on what is a human being, to Sophie Liebknecht on buffaloes, to Luise Kautsky on real life beyond the rooftops and on infinity, to Henriette Roland Holst on the endless changeability of the soul. As though it were through her lines of communication with women that she could ask the unanswerable questions – as though this was the place where she really tested herself.

*

When Luxemburg was murdered in 1919, it was the beginning of the end for a Europe which would fall prey to everything she loathed and had struggled to defeat and which would barely survive the next phase of its own history. It is to that history that we now turn. But before we do so, it is worth registering that we have not had a figure quite like her since. We have not had a woman thinker who so clearly understood – who lived in every fibre of her being – the link between the mechanics of freedom and the unknowable recesses of the heart (‘Oh, I don’t know any recipe for how to be a human being, I only know when a person
is
one’). Nor one who quite so brazenly perhaps – as we have seen over and over again – went too far. There is something outrageous in the lives and thoughts of all the women who follow. We could say that each one, directly or indirectly, takes a leaf out of her book. But Luxemburg was the sublime satirist of the world’s iniquities. To take one final example that also reverberates for feminism today: Why, she asked in her 1912 speech ‘Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle’, is the music-hall dancer ‘whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket’ deemed a productive worker but not the proletarian women and mothers taking care of their families and homes? She could be talking about pole dancing. It is all in the language, in the shocking image of a woman’s legs as conduit for dirty lucre, as flesh for the world’s avarice to feed on, in the frisson of thrill and disgust. If this sounds ‘brutal and insane’, she insists, put that down to the ‘brutality and insanity’ of the present arrangements of the world.
177
If you really want to challenge those arrangements, Rosa Luxemburg teaches us, you have to risk being a little insane yourself.

2

Painting Against Terror

Charlotte Salomon

My dreams on a blue surface. What makes you shape and reshape yourselves so brightly from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right?

Charlotte Salomon,
Life? or Theatre?

To know the worst about oneself [is] like the breaking down of a prison wall.

Marion Milner,
On Not Being Able to Paint

The death of Rosa Luxemburg can be seen today as presaging a hideous future which we might be partly glad that she did not live to see. At first glance, that future appears to give the lie to her fierce optimism and hopes for a better world. In fact, if you read her closely, she was always acutely in touch with the way that history could, at any moment and even as part of a seemingly inexorable logic, fulfil the worst version of itself. She had after all witnessed the German Democratic Party vote for the 1914 munitions bill, which would allow for the carnage of the First World War. She had watched, powerless, as her former socialist colleagues yielded to a blind patriotism that would set the workers of the world at each other’s throats. And she knew, even during her life, that anti-Semitism – ‘the common banner of political backwardness and cultural barbarism’, as she put it – was one of the most powerful forces pulling hard against progress.
1
We do not yet know, she wrote with chilling foresight in 1918, whether the Jews had played their role of scapegoat ‘to the end’.
2
None of this, however, led her to relinquish her fervent attachment to life. ‘Doesn’t this busy creaking of the [baker’s] door seem to say, “I am life, and life is beautiful” . . . Perhaps I look like something peculiar with my face aglow with happiness and my hands in my pockets. But so what? What does that matter to me!’ It was 1917 in the middle of the war and she was incarcerated in Wronke prison at the time.
3

In the same year, the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon was born. She too, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, was unequivocally on the side of life, even while her story could be seen as the embodiment and fulfilment of Luxemburg’s worst fears, and more. In the middle of the Second World War, she discovered that seven members of her family, including her mother, had committed suicide. Later, her abusive grandfather, who has told her the story, will urge her to get on with the job of killing herself. Having discovered the truth, she declares, ‘I will live for them all.’
4
With this statement she sets out her manifesto for survival. Although she will die in Auschwitz, Salomon is for me above all a survivor, crafting a passage through horrors, both personal and political, by means of her art. In this too she can be seen as the heir to Luxemburg. ‘I fight against devils in my insides like Luther,’ Luxemburg wrote from prison to her epistolary lover Hans Diefenbach in March 1917, ‘by means of the inkwell.’
5
This chapter will track another woman whose creativity stands as her fierce riposte against the bleak landscape of her time, while also taking us deep within that landscape.

She produced one work,
Leben? oder Theater?
(
Life? or Theatre?
),
composed between 1941 and 1943, a series of over 700 colour gouaches (over 1,300 if you count the unnumbered pages not included in the final version), with musical and verbal accompaniment mostly inscribed on transparencies laid over the painted page. In the form of its composition, the work is therefore as multi-faceted as the characters to whom she so unerringly gives voice. ‘The author has tried’, she writes in the first pages, ‘to go completely out of herself and to allow the characters to sing or speak in their own voices.’
6
‘I became my mother, my grandmother,’ she writes much later, ‘in fact I was all the characters who take part in my play. I learned to travel all their paths and became all of them.’
7
This strange outgoing from herself is inscribed into the way the story is written. It is her story, but she foregoes the use of ‘I’ and at more than one point she assigns the tale to ‘another viewpoint’, insisting that it is not being told, is not to be seen, ‘through her eyes’.
8
Once again we can hear the echo of Freud’s ‘another scene or stage’, which he used to describe the unconscious. Remember Luxemburg describing her life as if it was taking place ‘not here where I am’, somewhere ‘far away, off beyond the rooftops’. Like Luxemburg, Salomon could tolerate – indeed she makes the core of her aesthetic – becoming something or someone other. She is another woman whose unyielding sense of who she is relies on an ability to disperse, or even lose, herself.

Salomon started her work after being told her family’s history – the alternative, she writes in a letter of 1940, was to ‘lose her mind’
9
– and completed it within two years, which means that at some point she must have been producing three to four gouaches in a single day. To say that there is something desperate about it is therefore an understatement. Nothing can detract from the violence and pain, and at times downright ugliness, of her task.
Life? or Theatre?
should not, therefore, be read as a falsely redemptive work against the horrors that it paints (she excludes from the final version a painting of a woman saved from drowning).
10
Nonetheless, in the strokes of her painting, in the music with which she scores her images, in the story she writes, Charlotte Salomon offers a unique way of thinking about how to be human in a time of war. ‘The war raged on,’ she writes on starting to paint, ‘and I sat there by the sea and looked deep into the heart of humanity.’
11

Life? or Theatre?
offers its reply to the deadly wager of fascism. ‘Does one live if others live?’ a character asks in the middle of Thomas Mann’s 1947
Doctor Faustus –
his monumental novel on music under Hitler, composed during the last years of the Second World War. It is, surely, no coincidence that this shocking question should land in the middle of a literary and musical exploration of Nazism whose ideology defined the right to life and freedom, in Mann’s own words, as ‘the right to be German, only German, and nothing else’.
12
Without the ‘psychological experience of Gestapo cellars’, he writes, he could not have composed the passages on hell in
Doctor Faustus
which were written with the ‘hysterical declamations of the German radio announcer about the “holy struggle for freedom against the soulless hordes” ringing in my ears’.
13
If the world has to be subdued to your own purpose, it can only be because it threatens your existence at the core. You live if the other dies.

The alternatives, on which Salomon so uniquely helps us to focus, could not be starker. Either you kill in order to live, or instead – in her courageous, anguished riposte – you carry the dead with you, however painfully, in order to sustain life. Or to put it another way, you take in everything, meaning both to register and to embrace, in order to stay alive. Even when your legacy is deadly – and I think we can fairly say none more so than hers – you gather up, paint, draw, narrate, and sing the others who people your past. Salomon crowds her mind and her page. However sparse and pared back the content of some of her images, the overall effect is nearly always of clutter, as colours, sounds, words overlay and vie with each other. She makes room. This in itself places her on the other side of Nazism, whose doctrine of
Lebensraum
– literally ‘room to live’, or rather killing to make that space – we sometimes forget. Salomon is the first of two women painters in this book – the other is modern-day painter Thérèse Oulton – who will allow us to look closely at how the art of painting in the most intimate detail of colour, space, bodies and lines can do its work against the worst of history.

*

Like a stage impresario, Salomon announces with an opening flourish her ‘three-coloured song play’, a term which, even without her addition ‘with music’ and her cast list of characters, compresses into three words paint, stage and sound
14
(see illustration section, page 1). There are, it turns out, indeed only three primary colours in the work.
15
According to Mary Felstiner, Salomon’s biographer, a restoration study conducted by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, where the work is now housed, revealed that nearly all Salomon’s pigments are a mix of red, yellow and blue, with each part of the work – Prelude, Main Section and Epilogue – dominated by one of the three.
16
There is, as Felstiner also points out, barely any white and ‘astonishingly’ no black – ‘not in figures, texts or outlines’.
17
If you look closely at lines or dense patches that might first appear black, you see that mostly they are an intense wash of dark brown or blue. Thus Salomon paints the darkness – and some of her images are dark to the point of near inscrutability – out of, rather than in contrast to, her primary colours. The most sombre moments are in visual continuum with the rest of her life. The fact that the written words, etched in the same primary colours as the accompanying images, visually mime, lift the colours of the pictures is also important – although it might of course be the other way around (the images taking their visual cue from the painted words). Either way, the writing is awash with colour, just as the images could be said to have been painted with sounds. ‘The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows’ (note again the tone of the conductor of an orchestra or the director of a play):