Women in Dark Times (13 page)

Salomon is first and foremost a painter. It is by means of painting that she makes her major bid for freedom. It is probably because to paint under these conditions is such an achievement that
Life? or Theatre?
so dramatically throws up the question of the genesis of art. Like Proust’s
A la recherche
or Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist
, Salomon’s work is a self-generating text, one that loops back on itself, enacting its own self-fulfilment (only by reaching its end is it able to begin). How did she do it? Or to put it another way, where did she have to go inside her mind and body in order to produce this work? ‘Dream, speak to me,’ she writes over the first gouache of the Epilogue (see illustration section, page 3), whose colours have burst into the brightest blue, one of the rare paintings in the collection that represents drawing as a form of ecstasy, with image after image of her painting repeating boundlessly along the sea shore: ‘Why are you rescuing me? . . . Foams, dreams.’ We really need the poetic alliteration of the German here (‘
Schäume, Träume
’). ‘My dreams on a blue surface. What makes you shape and reshape yourselves so brightly from so much pain and suffering? Who gave you the right?’
34
In advance of its time, in advance of her death, Salomon rejects what will become the post-Auschwitz orthodoxy, as art-historian T. J. Clark describes it, of ‘grey on grey’.
35
Salomon has been surprised by herself. She is not in control of her art. By what right do you produce beautiful images – or even colour – in a time of such infinite pain? Only, it would seem, by going – to recall her own opening words – ‘completely out of herself’, by being summoned by the world of the dream. On the penultimate page, when the text has become a stream of writing with no images, and words are pouring across the page, she sees the world around her with ‘dream-awakened eyes’.
36

Thus painting brings Salomon to the brink of conscious and unconscious life. We have been here before, Luxemburg plunging into the lower depths of her heart, or torn away from herself. Salomon, we could say, takes this plunge on to another plane (the plane of painting). As a woman, she is not alone in turning paint into a means of survival in the midst of war. In her famous study
On Not Being Able to Paint
, British psychoanalyst Marion Milner covers remarkably similar ground, also linking her struggle to paint with the battle for freedom – although the book was published in 1950, she composed it during the Second World War. For Milner, as for Salomon, this struggle was not only personal but ‘essentially part of a contemporary struggle in the whole social world’ – looking back at one of her freely drawn images, which threw up a war gun looming in the sky, she is reminded by the date on the picture that it had been only a matter of days between ‘the making of the drawing and the bursting of the storm of war all over Europe’.
37

‘It is fascinating,’ writes Anna Freud in her foreword to Milner, ‘to follow the author’s attempts to compare this fight for freedom of artistic expression with the battle for free association and the uncovering of the unconscious mind that makes up the core of an analyst’s therapeutic work.’
38
Thus the psychoanalytic concept of free association – ideas pouring uncensored out of the mind – takes on a political gloss. As if strangely, the fascist injunction against independent critical thought leads thought, in defiance, to its deepest and most complex reckoning with itself (thinking as ‘another mode of moving in the world in freedom’ in Hannah Arendt’s phrase). For Milner, as for Salomon, the question of artistic freedom is inseparable from that of totalitarianism. In fact it is the same question. ‘Surely,’ writes Milner, ‘the idea is revolutionary that creativeness is not the result of an omnipotent fiat from above, but is something which comes from the free reciprocal interplay of differences that are confronting each other with equal rights to be different, with equal rights to their own identity?’
39
In the middle of the war – when the right to life and freedom was to ‘be German, only German and nothing else’, when Nazi omnipotence had usurped the place of the sacred – this is indeed a revolutionary thought.

Thus Milner provides a psychoanalytic subtext, a manifesto of the ethics of otherness in a time of war that can serve as a type of theoretical handmaiden, as I see it, to Charlotte Salomon’s craft. Like Salomon, she suggests, the artist has no choice but to let go of herself, so as to achieve ‘a relation to the inevitable otherness of what is outside one, to the reality of the ground beneath’.
40
We could call this an ethics of treading carefully. What is outside and beneath you must be accorded the most fervent respect. This applies as much to people as to objects, as much to those in front of us as it does to the un-negotiable weight of the earth (we will see this concern becoming urgent once more in the paintings of Thérèse Oulton). ‘In order to “realise” other people,’ writes Milner, ‘one has in a sense to put oneself into the other.’
41
One has to risk becoming the person one is not. Only by losing yourself in the other can you give the other place and voice.

This is not, however, straightforward or simple. You could say that psychoanalysis devotes itself more or less exclusively to the complexity or anguish of this task. There is a kind of internal blowback to the generosity of Salomon’s cry ‘I will live for them all’, since to give yourself over to the other means, psychically, not only that you risk losing yourself but, even more uncomfortably, that you have to let the other in. Boundaries become porous. Either way, there is the risk that, as a separate being, you will be lost. Milner’s call for the ‘free reciprocal interplay of differences confronting each other with an equal right to be different’ has something oddly formulaic about it (how could any one object?). In fact we know – and not just in relation to Nazi Germany – that it is the hardest of all political and psychic realities to respect. Differences are threatening. In
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, published in the same year as
On Not Being Able to Paint
, Hannah Arendt writes of the ‘dark background’ of ‘mere’ difference as something intolerable to human thought: ‘It is because equality demands that I recognise each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups . . . take on such terribly cruel forms.’
42
The innocence of the demand is misleading. It carries an undercurrent of dread. Milner describes the emotional forces opposing such recognition as ‘titanic’.
43

Both Milner and Salomon allow us to contemplate – bring us face to face with – this intolerable demand. To paint, they both suggest in their different ways, is to do nothing less. Together they are laying out the painful psychic drag or undertow of painting, its affiliation to anxiety and death (they could also be seen as offering a type of disturbing psychoanalytic gloss to French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the central ethical and political task is to contemplate the other’s face). How do bodies, how does the mind, take shape out of the radical shapelessness of the primordial psychic world? ‘It became clear’, writes Milner, ‘that if painting is concerned with feelings conveyed by space then it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of bodies that occupy different bits of space.’
44
‘In fact,’ she continues, ‘it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing.’
45
For Milner, entering the realm of painting means plunging – a word she repeatedly uses – into one’s psychic roots, but not, she insists, nostalgically. We are not talking about restoring one’s first, immortal loves. Painting goes deeper, ‘right back to the stage before one had a love to lose’.
46
In her foreword, Anna Freud cites Milner’s allusion to the ‘all-out body giving of infancy’.
47
But that is only one side – the lyrical side – of what Milner is trying to describe. To enter this realm is dangerous and frightening. It is paralysing – hence her title,
On Not Being Able to Paint
. Likewise, Salomon describes being struck with a ‘deathlike lethargy’, a ‘paralysing stupor’ in one of the first of the unnumbered gouaches (above all when her grandfather was too close).
48
What is at risk is the whole sensory foundation of the world we take for granted, which mostly we do not see, as well as the boundary between inside and outside the mind. For Milner, this type of creativity, probably all creativity, is a form of ‘madness’ – again her word – or ‘uncommon sense’.
49
Sanity, she writes citing Santayana, is a ‘madness put to good uses’ (one of her most famous book titles is
The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men
).
50
Seen in this light, the problem of equality and difference which she places at the heart of painting is, I read Milner as saying, an
unconscious
problem. It is the problem of losing yourself in the night.

Salomon’s allusions to madness are important. After the suicide of her grandmother, whom she has done everything in her power to save, her grandfather urges Charlotte to use the dead woman’s quilt: ‘I’m in favour of what is natural.’
51
Later, when they have been rounded up and are travelling in railcars across France he will repeat these exact words when he asks her to share his bed. Two images later, Salomon stands contemplating whether to throw the quilt out of the window: ‘I am afraid it is starting with me too’ (both her mother and grandmother threw themselves from a window).
52
We then see her sitting on her bed, an over-large paint-book balanced precariously on her lap, one leg outstretched, hands clutching her forehead, her body rigid with fear, in a wash of red. The combination of the paralysed body and what feels like the slow spread and thickening of fire and flame make this for me one of the most disturbing images in the book (see illustration section, page 4). Written directly on to the image are the words: ‘Dear God, only please don’t let me go mad’ (‘
Lieber Gott, lass mich bloss nicht wahnsinnig werden
’).
53
As Griselda Pollock points out, the ‘
nicht
’ is in a different colour and out of alignment with the other words.
54
Pollock deduces from this the possibility that there was an earlier version, without ‘
nicht
’, expressing Salomon’s wish to follow the path of her mother and grandmother to suicide. In fact, if you remove the ‘
nicht
’, the desire she is expressing is to go mad: ‘
Lieber Gott, lass mich bloss wahnsinnig werden
’ – ‘Dear God, only let me go mad’.

On the recto of the image of her standing with the quilt at the window is a painting of her watching an anti-Semitic meeting in front of a synagogue (both sides of the image which show Salomon looking, observing, can be taken as an allegory of painting as a form of frighteningly suspended attention). This is not the only time that Salomon binds her personal agony so closely to the political tragedy of the Jews. Her grandmother’s breakdown which follows their flight from Germany is, the text explicitly states, a consequence of the war, a ‘greater force’ under which the self-control, the sharp intellect which had allowed her to live, breaks apart: ‘The awful pain that has pursued her throughout her life seems to have resurfaced into full consciousness as a result of the raging war.’
55
In fact, the German – ‘
Erinnerung
’ – is not so much consciousness as memory. The war is forcing the grandmother to remember the deaths that litter her past, including the suicides of her two daughters. One of the most powerful things about
Life? or Theatre?
is the way that it forces both of these tragedies on to the same page (literally recto and verso in this case). Neither takes precedence. We are talking about something inextricably bonded – so inextricably that I was told by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam that to turn over the images by hand risks irrepar­able damage to the page. Between these two tragedies, you do not have, indeed it would be obscene, to choose. ‘I can’t take this life any more. I can’t take these times any more,’ Charlotte exclaims (
Life? or Theatre?
is truly a ‘life and times’).
56
The insanity she pleads to be saved from belongs as much to the most intimate resources of memory as it does to the ugliness of her political world.

She will surface by creating her work. And yet, as that suspended ‘
nicht
’ already suggests, madness is by no means something she wholly turns herself against. It remains, I would argue, a question. Indeed only by holding it open as a question will she be able to paint. On one of the very last pages, she writes: ‘She found herself facing the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric.’
57
The translation ‘wildly eccentric’ is, however, again misleading, as if we were talking of something a bit wild but almost endearingly dotty. The German is ‘
verrückt
’, which, like ‘
wahnsinnig
’, means mad. Madness must be answered with madness (Milner’s sanity as madness put to good use). Salomon has perfectly captured the paradox of painting. In order to stop herself from going crazy, she must create something mad.