Life? Or Theatre?

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a German-Jewish artist. As a young girl she lived relatively carefree until the National Socialist takeover of power in 1933. In spite of this radical political change she was almost able to complete a course at the Berlin art academy. In January 1939 Charlotte fled Berlin and travelled to her grandparents in the south of France, who had already left Nazi Germany when the National Socialists took control. In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, her grandmother committed suicide. Only then did Charlotte learn that her mother had also taken her own life in 1926.

The twenty four year-old Charlotte assimilated this turbulent family history and her experiences as a Jew in Berlin in an extraordinary way. In her anguish she resurrected her memories of her former lover, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962). Among other things, he told her that in order to love life fully, one may have to embrace and understand its opposite – death. She decided to save herself with the help of his ideas and to undertake "something totally insanely special" as an alternative to suicide. She withdrew completely and began to paint in an unprecedented explosion of creative activity to ward off mental disintegration. And along the way she recreated her life. She used everything she had in her: her artistry, her visual and musical memory, her insight into the personalities of her relatives, her intellectual faculties, her humor and the inspiration she drew from her love for Wolfsohn.

In a unique interplay of art forms, Charlotte Salomon depicted her life in an artwork of almost eight hundred gouache watercolor paintings with overlaid sheets full of texts and musical references. In it she introduces herself and the people around her with assumed and grandly-resounding stage names as the protagonists in a musical theater play (a ‘Singspiel’). She mercilessly scrutinizes their lives in an ingenious game veering between fact and fiction, leaving her viewers with the question of what they are actually seeing: is this life itself – or merely theatre?

As Nazi aggression escalated, the Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon sensed the end was near. She wrapped over 800 of her paintings in brown paper and handed them to a friend with the words "Take good care of it, it's my whole life". Miraculously, the gouaches survived.

Charlotte Salomon died in October 1943 in Auschwitz at the age of 26.

1939, painting in the garden at the Côte d'Azur, France

After the Second World War her father and his wife discovered Life? Or Theatre? in the South of France. They donated it to the Jewish Historical Museum in 1971.

 "And she saw with awakened eyes all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun and knew: she must disappear from the human surface for a while and make every sacrifice to create her world anew from the depths."

All the works are in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.