The young German-Jewish artist, Charlotte Salomon did not survive to see reactions to the thrilling series of almost 800 gouaches, collectively titled Life? Or Theatre?, she created between 1940 and 1942. The 26-year-old was recently married and five months pregnant when she was murdered on her arrival at Auschwitz in September 1943.
For months she had poured herself into creating the complex, death-defying exploration of her family history, and what it means to be human — possibly possessed by a need to tell her story before, she feared, falling prey to the mental illness that had driven women from previous generations of her family, including her mother, to suicide.
Charlotte painting in her studio in a scene from the animated film
For a while, she had seemed relatively safe, ensconced in the South of France with her husband, another German-speaking refugee, Alexander Nagler. However, as Nazi aggression against Jews in France worsened, she wrapped the paintings in brown paper and entrusted them to her doctor and friend, George Maridis.
“Keep these safe,” she told him. “They are my whole life.”
The combination of her work and the tragedy of a life, and all that might still have flowed from it, cut short at 26, have made Salomon the inspiration for theatre productions, operas, films and novels. Even so, she remains unknown to many.
Film producer Julia Rosenberg and author David Bezmozgis say they hope to help change this with Charlotte, released this week: a respectful animated biopic co-directed by Tahir Rana and Eric Warin, featuring a talented voice cast led by Keira Knightley.
Rosenberg began working on the project in 2011, but her relationship with Salomon goes back much further, to when she received a copy of Life? Or Theatre?, which some regard as the first graphic novel, as a batmitzvah present.
“I was given it at the moment that I theoretically became a woman,” she says. “At first, I really connected to the coming-of-age part of Charlotte’s story, being alienated, and no one seeing her for how she wanted to be seen. Then, as I got older, and learned a little bit more about art, narrative and form, I became more and more astounded at the work’s complexity.”
A rare picture of the artist herself
On another level, she says, “Part of my family survived the war, and it felt like a window into what possibly could have been their lives. So, I had a deep personal interest.”
Bezmozgis knew little about Salomon when he got involved. Diving deep, he “was impressed and moved by her”, he says. Not least because she was a young Jewish woman who was trying to “forge an identity for herself as an artist” in an existentially and creatively hostile environment.
“Anybody who has wanted to make art knows how difficult it is to go against the forces that would have you be staid and conventional.
“And even to announce to yourself and to other people that you want to be an artist, takes a tremendous amount of courage and confidence.”
Salomon, whose intuitive expressionism (a number of her paintings are beautifully re-created in Charlotte) is at odds with the precision demanded by her teacher at Berlin’s Academy of Arts in the film, did this in conditions where “the type of art that she wanted to make was anathema under the Nazi regime”, says Bezmozgis admiringly.
He was grabbed by her story as a creative person himself, as a father of three daughters, and as someone who “thinks a lot about the Holocaust and about what it means to have been a Jew during that time”.
The filmmakers say they both learned about the Holocaust around the age of five, although the circumstances were very different.
Bezmozgis was living in a new apartment complex in Riga, in Soviet-era Latvia, and would go cross-country skiing with his parents in the nearby Bikernieki forest. He recalls that “even though there was no memorial there, my parents told me that during the war, Jews were killed in this forest. So I had an awareness of that from a very young age.
“And the reverberations of the Great Patriotic War were everywhere. My maternal grandfather was a wounded veteran, so everybody was like, ‘Jews fought in the army as Jews while other Jews were being killed.’ Germans, Nazis, Jews, Red Army — it was just everywhere.”
Rosenberg remembers being confused when a family photograph caused her grandmother to burst into tears and her grandfather to become suddenly “agitated”. “It was explained to me that this was my grandmother’s favourite brother, who died in the Holocaust. Which led me to ask, ‘What was the Holocaust?’”
A section of Charlotte set in the sunshine of the Cote d’Azur (with mise-en-scene that looks like Art Deco travel posters) makes the film a different kind of Holocaust story, claims Bezmozgis.
“But, of course, it ends up like pretty much every Holocaust story does, with murder. The Holocaust is not the story of heroic overcoming and triumph. The Holocaust is the story of the wholesale slaughter of Jews, just because they’re Jews, anywhere in Europe.”
Today, we are living in an “era where there’s Holocaust denialism”, he says. This, combined with the fact that they were making a film about an actual historical person, meant that they tried to be “faithful to what actually happened”, and included only what they could support with information from primary and secondary sources.
Rosenberg admits that a scene about a visit to the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937 was “purely invented”. But they felt that, as an art student in Berlin, Salomon would probably have gone to what is “on record as still being the most frequented exhibition ever”.
Writing in the Journal of Modern Literature, the academic Ariela Freedman suggested that Salomon’s use of transparent textual overlays in her series could have been a reaction to the Nazis’ deployment of text at the exhibition.
Whereas they had used it to erase, efface and distort Jewish artists and their art, Salomon was “reclaiming art and language” by using text to add layers of meaning and ambiguity. Whether this is correct or not, we may never know.
“How can you isolate exactly what the influences are on any given artist?” asks Bezmozgis.
“You hope that they’ll tell you, if they live long enough. But she wasn’t well-known enough to have been interviewed. So we just have to infer, to some extent.”
What is clear is that not everything about Salomon’s work should be taken at face value. Rosenberg views Life? Or Theatre?, with its made-up character names and third-person point of view, as auto-fiction, rather than as autobiography.
Thus, while there are hints in it that Salomon may have been sexually abused by her grandfather, for example — a theory advanced by the scholar Griselda Pollock — this was not part of the artist’s official story when the filmmakers consulted with the Charlotte Salomon Foundation, to whom Rosenberg “gladly” provided script approval.
When I ask if a moment in the film where the grandfather seemingly becomes jealous as Charlotte dances with Nagler alludes to sexual jealousy, Bezmozgis insists that was not their intent.
Rosenberg agrees, but adds: “I’ve asked myself since, thinking about the grandfather and thinking about Professor Pollock’s very compelling research, whether or not it made it into my subconscious. Like, maybe, looking at that shot, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s good that that’s happening.’”
More impactful on the direction of the film than the possibility of abuse was the publication in 2015 of a letter in which Salomon confessed to murdering her grandfather with an omelette laced with the barbiturate Veronal.
Because she wrote the letter with a paintbrush, and in the same style as Life? Or Theatre?, Rosenberg says: “Charlotte invites us to ask questions about veracity and representation, and there are scholars who questioned whether or not she did that.”
Nevertheless, the foundation accepted it as part of her biography. “I think, then, our first thoughts were practical,” says Rosenberg. “Like, ‘This is a big story moment that we hadn’t contemplated.
"How does it affect the grandfather as an antagonist? How does it affect Charlotte in terms of her choices?’”
“No matter how sympathetically you show that,” says Bezmozgis, “it is a really hard sell to have a protagonist kill her, basically, ailing, pretty much helpless grandfather, and for the audience to not hate her.”
His answer was to focus our attention, in silence, on Charlotte’s “decision- making process, which is complex and fraught.
“There’s no dialogue, you’re just with her,” he says. “And I think that, to me, is what cinema is, in the best way. Using image and sound, you create an experience for the viewer, and you can’t quite do that in a book. I mean, you’re really with someone.”
Charlotte brings us closer to Salomon but cannot ultimately explain why she created the monumental Life? Or Theatre?.
“I’ve always imagined that she wanted desperately to be part of the conversation and she was doing this imagining that she was part of the conversation of people making art at the same time,” says Rosenberg.
“I also think it was a way to stave off what she feared would be the arrival of suicidal depression.”
“She had no idea that a world would even exist where it was possible for her work to be shown,” offers Bezmozgis. “She dies in 1943 and there’s no indication at that point that the Germans are going to lose the war. The world is about as bad as it can be. I think it’s her way of finding freedom of expression in the only way that is possible at the time.”
