Women in Dark Times (12 page)

A person is sitting beside the sea. She is painting. A tune suddenly enters her mind. As she starts to hum it, she notices that the tune exactly matches what she is trying to commit to paper. A text forms in her head, and she starts to sing the tune with her own words over and over again in a loud voice until the painting seems complete.
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Together with her grandparents, Salomon escaped Nazi Germany to the South of France in 1940, where they lived in the villa of Ottilie Moore, a wealthy American of German descent who offered her home to fleeing refugees. According to Marthe Pécher, the landlady of the hotel ‘La Belle Aurore’ where Salomon retreated to get away from her grandfather to paint, Salomon hummed as she sat painting.
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As the many scholars and critics who have written on
Life? or Theatre?
point out, there is nothing quite like this work, not before or since, which also makes it uniquely compelling. Once you look at it – read is not quite right, even though it is also written – it is hard to get it out of your head. The expansiveness and experimentation, the sheer strangeness, is remarkable by any standards.
Life? or Theatre?
is a type of grand visual poetic symphony, although whether it should be thought of in terms of harmony or dissonance is unclear. This uncertainty is also at the core of the work’s theme. It is unclear whether anything or anyone is really in tune with anything or anyone else. You can never be sure whether any of the characters are really listening to each other, whether indeed any of them can truly subsist in the same space. Salomon’s gift is to give visual form to that question in her paintings: characters listening behind closed doors, characters repeated multiplying across the page clearly talking only to themselves, characters in desolate isolation. Likewise the musical references are oddly singular, as if hoarded by the characters, each one having his or her own signature tune. All the characters, painted – and transformed – from life, are given their refrain, which means they each strut across the page accompanied by sound. As if Salomon were giving musical shape to what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas describes as each person’s idiom – the enduring, if only partially visible or conscious, repertoire by which each one of us distinguishes ourselves.

From the moment each character makes her or his first appearance, their music is meant to start running inside our heads: Bach’s plaintive aria ‘Bist du bei mir’ (Abide with me) for Paulinka, who is modelled on Salomon’s stepmother, the famous alto Paula Lindberg; the toreador’s song from
Carmen
for Amadeus Daberlohn, Paulinka’s coach and suitor and then Salomon’s lover, based on the distinguished voice teacher and writer Alfred Wolfsohn. In fact Paulinka has more than one song – her other key tune is ‘I have lost my Eurydice’, Orpheus’s lament for Eurydice from Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
, which is one of the central musical roles that Paula Lindberg played. Salomon’s grandfather is also given this refrain when his first daughter commits suicide (tragedy carried musically across the generations)
.
Charlotte’s mother’s tune is ‘We twine for thee the bridal wreath’ from Weber’s
Die Freischütz
, with its deep undertow of foreboding
.
Alongside these canonical works, other songs alluded to include popular German ditties and Nazi marching tunes, as well as ‘Deutschland über alles’, oddly but historically accurately depicted as sung by Charlotte and her grandparents in the late 1920s. Like many German Jews in the first part of the twentieth century, Salomon came from a family who entertained no doubts about where they belonged. They were Germans and had nothing to fear from a patriotic affiliation which they freely and joyously celebrated alongside the co-patriots who would eventually kill them.

Among so much else, Salomon is therefore offering us a musical history of Germany in the run-up to the Second World War. Even though the tunes appear only as visual traces, as we look at the paintings and read the words, we are meant – like the narrator – to hear them playing inside our head (a German Jewish audience would have recognised every one). Taken together they provide a type of musical cacophony, as sacred plaints such as ‘Abide with me’ or ‘Strike then thou, O blessed hour’
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struggle against fascist affirmation. In this Salomon is providing a painstaking record of the musical history of her time, which, like all art forms, found itself at the heart of the historical crisis. Music in general, and Salomon’s family in particular, can be traced in the midst of this struggle. In his new book,
On the Eve
, a study of European Jewry on the threshold of the War, Bernard Wasserstein describes a concert broadcast from St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig in 1933, the night before the ban on public performances by Jews. Paula Lindberg, Salomon’s stepmother, sang the alto part of Bach’s Cantata 159,
Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem (See! We are going up to Jerusalem
) – while boy choristers wore swastika armbands.
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According to Wasserstein, Lindberg later recalled that the bass aria, ‘Good night world’, was experienced by many, especially Jewish listeners, as a
Menetekel
, the famous Biblical forewarning to Balthazar of his imminent doom. Salomon is tapping into the spirit, especially the German Jewish spirit, of the times. ‘For German Jews in particular,’ writes Wasserstein, ‘classical music came to occupy a place in their spiritual life that amounted to an ersatz religion’ (he calls this section of his chapter on culture ‘The Presence of the Lord’).
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In
Life? or Theatre?
however, the redemptive power of music fails. That somewhat surreal Leipzig Bach concert of 1933 – Lindberg singing to God, choristers bearing the swastika on their armbands – could be seen as the first moment of that dawning recognition. If Salomon’s work possesses a haunting unity – as if a single wash had been spread over the whole surface – it nonetheless eschews totality. It is precisely many-voiced. The transparencies laid across the page, the words often scrawled all over them, the relationship between the recto and verso of the pages – to which I will return – make the work feel less like a finished product than a palimpsest. If the work is an autobiography, it is also the case that Salomon tells her story in the form of traces, fragments of a life that cannot be cohered into a single shape. In this, the title in itself – Life?
or
Theatre? – is telling. The two question marks undermine the idea, which at first glance seems to be invited, that you are being offered a choice (as in ‘life or theatre?’), with the implication that the first, life, is somehow the more authentic of the two. Between life and art, instead the title suggests, you should not decide, above all at a historical moment when both are under threat, and the capacity to create might be the only way of affirming your life against those who wish you dead and/or who would kill you.

As the complex staging of the work makes clear, it is not therefore in the name of a falsely totalising perfection that the world – that Salomon herself – is to be reborn. In the context of Nazi Germany, perfectibility is lethal. It is the death of freedom. Music itself was deeply implicated in such concerns. In his essay on Thomas Mann’s eightieth birthday, philosopher Theodor Adorno spells out the political implications as he insists that nothing could be worse than music which, in the face of social dissonance, produces a falsely harmonious world:

Works of art which create a totality of meaning do not allow the listener to escape for a single second, any more than they would give licence to a single note. While such a totality conjures up a vision of redemption, the work exerts an unrelenting compulsion which belies the redemptive message and for that reason necessarily unites redemption and death in an ambiguous and murky synthesis.
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It is because
Carmen
possesses no ‘sacral aura’ that we can breathe freely. Wagner’s world, on the other hand, is closed in on itself, unremittingly narcissistic, allowing no escape, because the composer and his characters are stifled by forms of passion that are merely the self-gratifying reflection of themselves: ‘Love loves only what is like itself, in fact only loves itself and hence does not really love at all’ (for this incest, a theme of Wagner’s, is simply the motif).
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False harmony – in music, in life, only has room for itself. The contrast with Salomon could not be more striking as she instead makes room, musically and visually, for everyone else. Unfailingly, she gives herself over to the others that people her world. Thus
Life? or Theatre?
can be seen as embodying a counter-fascist ethic. Only a world that recognises the other as other can set you free since the other’s freedom is inseparable from your own (if the other
does not
live, you die).

Salomon is struggling for an artistic form which will allow the different voices of the world, however dissonant, to subsist in the same space. In Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
,
the inspired but doomed musician Adrian Leverkühn has a piano teacher who defends musical dissonance in exactly these terms. Music, he reminds his pupil, was polyphony and counterpoint long before anything else, ‘first one voice and then another’: ‘the chord is the result of polyphonic singing; and that means counterpoint, means an interweaving of independent voices that . . . show regard for each other.’
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Dissonance, we might say, is the true respecter of difference. Voices must show regard for each other. None of this can be taken for granted, not even when the battle for freedom appears to be won. Writing across the war and after, Mann is able to give us a glimpse of what Salomon will not live to see. He is also telling us that the defeat of fascism does not mean that the problem has gone away. At the end of the war, Leverkühn’s friends sit around idly dismissing the prospect of German democracy since freedom, they insist, is a self-contradictory notion. Freedom always has to limit the freedom of its opponents, that is, ‘to negate itself’.
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Repeating the ethos of a war that came close to destroying the future of the world, they casually repeat that war’s most deadly proposition: Freedom is impossible since you can only be free at the other’s expense. If the other lives, you die.

*

Charlotte Salomon’s work is her hymn to freedom. In his unpublished manuscript ‘The Bridge’, Alfred Wolfsohn, who was her mentor and lover in life, describes this dream which she narrated to him: ‘I floated in the air bound by a thousand shackles, a larva with the one burning desire to be freed one day from these ­shackles.’
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This is worth pausing at. In the normal run of things, the larva of a caterpillar evolves naturally into a butterfly (grows into its own freedom as one might say). Leverkühn asks, ‘How does one reach free and open air? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly?’(He insists this is the only question.)
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But larva also has other connotations, which will be so hideously exploited by the Nazis, of the Jew as vermin or bug, a means of robbing the Jews of their humanity as a prelude to genocide. Act Two of
Life? or Theatre?
opens with the Nazi takeover of power – an image of a mass rally. Salomon paints all the swastikas on the flags in reverse: ‘Here you see how this affected a number of souls that were Jewish-human!’ (see illustration section, page 2). As her riposte to the dehumanisation of the Jews, Salomon has condensed the Jews and humanity into a single word (the German is ‘
Menschlich-jüdischen
’, whose force is lost in the translation: ‘Jewish
and
human’).
29
One of the most resonant moments in the work occurs when Salomon, identifying herself as a Jew, is shown being accepted into the State Art Academy of Berlin in 1936 at the age of nineteen: ‘Do you also accept Jews?’ ‘Surely you aren’t Jewish?’ ‘Of course I am.’ ‘Oh well, we’re not that particular’ (the German, ‘
Na, so sind wir ja hier nicht
’, is wonderfully imprecise in tone, something more like ‘Whatever’).
30

She was the one Jewish student accepted into the Academy, which was technically allowed a quota of 1.5 per cent. It had just fired over a hundred professors and students who, by Nazi definition, technically were Jews (the number also included those married to Jews). The minutes of the Admissions Committee of 7 February 1936 state that, because of her ‘reserved nature’, the danger posed by non-Aryan female students to the Aryan male students did not apply in Salomon’s case.
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Already we get a glimpse of the hatred and fear of Jewish womanhood which, as Felstiner was one of the first to describe, would be so central to the final genocide – genocide as ‘the act of putting women and children first.’ Crucially Salomon announces herself, enters her life of painting, as a Jew: ‘Of course I am.’ On this she will be constant. When challenged by Marthe Pécher as to why, in 1942, as the Côte d’Azur became more overtly Nazi, she presented herself to the authorities as a Jew, Salomon replied: ‘Because there is a law, and since I am Jewish, I thought it correct to present myself.’
32
Looking back on this moment, Hannah Arendt will later observe: ‘For many years I considered the only adequate reply to the question, who are you? to be: a Jew. That answer alone took account of the reality of persecution.’
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