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. 

INVOCATION: Hildegard von Bingen ~ Anonymous 4

In June of 2013 I posted my Invocation, which I wrote both as a prayer and a blessing for all women who are oppressed, in whatever form that oppression might take. Since then the Invocation also has been accepted for and now appears on the World Prayers website. Now my husband David has realised the Invocation as a video, featuring his painting of our dear daughter-in-law Anneke. The video is set to the haunting music of the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, as sung in plainchant by the quartet of women’s voices Anonymous 4. In creating his video, David’s wish and intention has been the same as my own: to allow the Invocation to be released further into the world so that its words may do the work for which I intended them.  

Invocation on Sophia’s Mirror: Invocation

Invocation on the World Prayers website: World Prayers

The Children of the Light

Music fills the infinite between two souls. 
~ Rabindranath Tagore

There is a universal language which expresses itself in music, symbols and images. This cosmic muse does not in the first instance address herself to the mind, but mainly to the awakening human soul. She is like a messenger who brings beauty into the world - an urge that in someone awakens the urge to create something which touches the heart of the other. With this language the Light expresses itself in the material, and then the person creates something that was not there before - not yet present in the material world.

The French author and philosopher Victor Hugo stated: "Music expresses what cannot be said in words - and about which can hardly be kept silent." In the same spirit Rudolph Steiner describes this universal language of the soul when he says: "What the soul sets foot on her initiation path one cannot ‘experience’ - but one can sing it or compose it.”

This language of the soul may be used by those who wish to reconnect us with the Great Light from which we originate, from which we ourselves well forth. The creative ones amongst us articulate this language already as poetry, as music. A primary function of music is that of intermediary: time and again this cosmic muse activates longing - and the existence of longing.

It has been said that the children of the Light, in the end of days, will play a perfect piece of music before their Creator. When this time is upon us they will perform all themes in perfect harmony, for they will have understood the meaning of the Light, and each will know the function of the other wholeheartedly, as they themselves will be known by others. But even before that time music can be a portal for the happiness and peace within us to shine through.

Painting Angel by Edward Burne-Jones