Patricia Highsmash
Life, Death, Story, Charlotte Salomon
by Travis Hedge Coke
“[S]he had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917, a few months before American comics genius, Jack Kirby, in Berlin, Germany.
Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? (translated into English, Life? or Theatre?) is over two-hundred and fifty pages of autobiography, memoir, family history, and dramatization framed as a musical, committed as a sequence of polyptych paintings with text overlays or embedded text, creating a massive achievement in comics which is only still being reckoned with for its depth, advancement of the art, significance as a historic document, beauty and intensity as an aesthetic creation, and power as a narrative artifact.
Life? or Theatre? is beautiful. The English-language edition, published by Taschen, has a careful, loving translation, full-color reproduction, but does not overlay the transparencies or provide transparencies to overlay onto the paintings of figures and scenes. The translation is committed to blank space beside or opposite images, instead of over them, and the transparencies are frequently reproduced on their own, in their own space.
Without scanning in this six hundred page edition, then carefully combining images, it is impossible, from the printed edition, to read the comic, then, as it was seemingly meant to be taken in. Still, the potency of the images, the vibrancy and thoughtfulness of the text, and the vigilance of the translation make the edition worth reading, rewarding and life-changing despite its reproduction choices.
Life? is amazing. The Taschen edition is long, but much briefer than Salomon’s planned edition, which was just under 800 pages, and those pages were culled from over two thousand paintings she executed before 1943.
Life is difficult to capture.
Salomon most likely murdered her elderly, abusive grandfather, after generations had suffered his cruelty and rape, and she may have sketched him as he died.
Something I think bothers some, who would call her great work, not real comics, is that the text is, itself, unashamedly a visual component. It moves and sings itself across the tableau. Rather than panels sharply distinguished across a page, her figures and temporal shifts glide between and over one another.
“I am convinced you will not doubt for a moment that I have known and learned to love life in the meantime.”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
Salomon’s combination of outline art and color fills do not often resemble the coloring inside the lines precision of traditional comics. Her figure work ranges from rough forms to abstraction. Her narrative moves from vignette to memory, moves along emotional lines or aesthetic connections, a network of ideation and yearning.
Melody: “Weary am I of my days – wherefore all this pain, this pleasure… Sweet pea, come, oh
come into my great… At last there approaches – where I shall wait for you, O my beloved.”
Nazis in the Audience: “Out – get out”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
In Life?, Salomon catalogues her family before her, her birth and youth, the world beyond her, the worlds inside her.
Salomon, illustrating herself as her she learns of her mother’s death and both understands and misinterprets it – as we all do with deaths – gives her younger self to the pages in a way which reminds me of Joe Kubert illustrating his alternate history self, Yossel, in the comic of that name, though Kubert was an old man by the time he created Yossel to talk of Ukraine and his parents and what it was to be Jewish in early 20th Century Europe. The merest shift of lips or pupil from face to face allows Salomon to fill her younger self with questions and feelings the text does not elaborate upon. Or, it permits us to imbue the art with those feelings.
Charlotte Salomon will never have the opportunity to reflect on her life in old age. She will never have the range that those who have long lives might have to reflect or contextualize.
Salomon is only twenty-five when she gives up her life – what she calls “my entire life, the comic, Life? or Theatre? and she is twenty-six when she is taken to Auschwitz and killed.
I have successfully avoided writing at length about Charlotte Salomon, the maker of comics who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. I don’t want to write about Auschwitz. I don’t want to invite myself to future arguments about what is not comics. I have no tolerance for the dismissal or erasure of women. I am so arrested by the murder, itself, my body physically seizes.
It is one thing to know you are cowardly and cannot fix things. It is another to choose to remind yourself, and to do so in front of a potentially limitless audience. And, I do not want to make this about me.
Any work which truly strikes a chord within you, you make it about you. Life?, that soundless operetta, plays the entire orchestra of my soul, so that when Salomon presents us her birth, in 1917, as a radiating cosmos of her mother playing piano, writing, creating, my breaths deepen and I feel electric and I feel freed and stressed. I feel something very close, as if someone stands over my shoulder so intimately they stand where I am sitting.
I am – egotistically, maybe, vainly – transposed by Life?. I am afraid and filled with love and pain.
I want to say that this is all without taking into account her murder in a camp meant only for death. I want to give her artistry and experimentation and brilliance their due. I want to honor her life, as I read her comic or as I talk of it, write or it, hide myself away from having to talk or write about it. But, if the murder does not fill you with anger and despair, if the existence of death camps, of genocidal concentration camps, of brutality and death does not affect you enough that it affects everything, I don’t know what.
Charlotte Salomon left a great emptiness in the world, as do all victims so deprived. The lack of availability of her work, the second-guessing and tricked out relativizing of her murder and her poisoning of her abuser, these are social emptinesses, abscesses of a spiritual and historiographic nature.
“Now, I don’t have to be anybody anymore. Fate, fate, how harsh you are. And…”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
“And now our play begins!”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
“Give me these two!”
“No, I’ll give you only this one.”
– Life? or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon
