Women in Dark Times (14 page)

*

As Felstiner points out, the form of
Life? or Theatre?
offers its own gracious – or precisely ungracious – riposte to the Nazi vision of ideal art: scenes which inflate some figures and unbalance others, liberties taken with colour and cropping, ‘a thirstiness’, as she puts it, for caricature and non-
volkisch
folk art.
58
The work, she concludes, parades its ‘affinity with every style the Nazis were working to suppress’, as the recent exhibition of art classified by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’ makes even more clear.
59
Systematically Salomon defies all the Academy lessons in proportion, even though in one early image she announces, after a shaky, humiliating start, that she has now completely ‘got it’ (to the tune of ‘
Allons enfants de la patrie
’).
60
There is something wilfully gauche in Salomon’s style of painting, much of which stems, I think, from her use of retained outline – each painted image somehow still seems to be the preliminary sketch or trace of itself – as well as from her use of colours which, while appearing at first glance to distinguish her characters, nearly always bleed or cut across into other figures and their surrounding world (which is why the predominant feel of each section is that its main subject, as much as the narrative, is whichever one of the three primary colours dominates). We are light years from Nazi monumentality as described by Edward Said, in the course of a discussion on music with Daniel Barenboim – ‘bombastic, loud, uncouth . . . in the colours and in the balance’ – far from a form of art where every section of a painting or building becomes the unequivocal boast of itself.
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It is as if, in Salomon’s hands, line becomes a tentative process of taking shape whose uncertainty she does not want to suppress. We might call this, after Milner, letting the line ‘call forth an answer from the thought’ (once again a form of freedom).
62
It is central to Milner’s account that one of the first things you have to reckon with as you start painting is that objects in the world, quite apart from the unsettling matter of your place in relation to them, are not really distinct or separate but are ‘continuously merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves’.
63
If you let yourself go, things in the world merge – with you, but also with each other. But you have to let yourself go first. What fascinates Adrian Leverkühn in
Doctor Faustus
, when he is not making his deranged, overwhelming music, is ‘the unity of animate and so-called inanimate matter’. We sin against the latter ‘if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous’.
64
There is, we could therefore say, line, but also not line (a bit like madness and no madness). Like Salomon, Milner also sits by the sea: ‘I wanted to draw’, she writes, ‘the tensions and sweep of “earth” by the shore, not outline or edge so much as stretch and spread and heave of the sea-wall and low shore cliffs – yet seen in terms of line.’
65
Neither outline nor edge, yet something seen in terms of line. The most cherished and ruthless distinctions must be allowed to crumble. Looked at through the eyes of painting, the objects of the world around us are always on the verge of melting into each other and themselves. If you look at the first painting of the Epilogue (see illustration section, page 3), Charlotte painting by the shore, the lines seem to sweep – stretching and heaving – in one over-riding arch which passes through her body, as she paints, from the earth to the sky.

Salomon does not blur her lines, but there is something about them which makes them seem to follow their own path across the painting, past the bodies they fitfully contain and out of the page on to the words of the transparencies (line upon line, we might say). As with the colours, something is not being held to its right place. For Milner, colour is the greatest challenge of all (‘The Plunge into Colour’ is the title of one of her chapters). Goethe famously described colours as ‘the deeds and suffering of light’.
66
Milner makes no bones about how much colour terrifies her. If colour always threatens to exceed its proper limits, it is also something that has to be let loose (like the larva of Salomon’s dream bursting its shackles). To demand that colour remain wedded to its natural forms is precisely an ‘omnipotent fiat from above’. It inflicts a type of bondage: ‘The colour flooded up from the earth,’ writes Milner, ‘once it was let loose from bondage to natural appearance.’
67
In Salomon’s painting of herself painting, quite what the orange curve is doing in the sky, how it got there, is unclear and doesn’t seem to matter. Milner is inviting us to watch the struggle for freedom – ‘part of a contemporary struggle in the whole social world’ – insinuating itself not just into the experience of painting (the struggle and dread), but also into the fine print, colour and line, of artistic form.

Something is being released from bondage at the same time as it is being orchestrated: ‘The only exciting bits,’ Milner writes, ‘are when the colours are split, making a sort of chord so that they seem to move and live against each other.’
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Move and live against each other – similarly Leverkühn’s teacher had described the ‘interweaving of independent voices that . . . show regard for each other.’
Like Salomon, Milner is writing about the ethics and aesthetics of freedom. Like Salomon, as part of that process, she crosses the border, marks the affinity, between paint and sound. You have to listen to colour.

*

It is perhaps almost too obvious to say that, when Milner describes the plunge into painting, the dread of annihilation it provokes, she is talking about the fear of death. Too obvious perhaps also to say that, although her experience of the war is not Salomon’s, any more than it is Thomas Mann’s, it is the war – the drum looming in her picture as the storm breaks across Europe – that Milner is somewhere writing about. In
Life? or Theatre?
the harbinger of death is Amadeus Daberlohn, modelled as already mentioned on Alfred Wolfsohn, voice coach and tutor, who enters the lives of Charlotte and her stepmother Paula trailing the detritus of the First World War (there are 135 faces of Daberlohn in the first nine pages of the Main Section, and no less than 467 scenes including him overall).
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He is at once maestro and buffoon, arch-seducer and deceiver. As well as taking him as her lover, she buries and crucifies him in her paintings more than once. But he also provides her with the verbal refrain that releases her into painting. Their orchestrated dance – the closest the work gets to pure theatre – begins when she hands him her painting
Death and the Maiden
, from which he immediately seizes for himself, or rather recognises in himself, the role of death. ‘Suddenly she knew’ – she writes in the verbal cascade of the final pages – that ‘if he was Death, then everything was all right, then she did not have to kill herself like her ancestors, for according to his method . . . in order to love life still more, one should once have died’ (she has just torn his portrait into a thousand pieces and thrown them to the wind).
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It is tempting, I think, but too easy to read these words – ‘one should once have died’ – as a premonition of her own death, although that must also remain an open question.
Life? or Theatre?
is not, as other commentators have stressed, a work
of
Auschwitz, but
before
Auschwitz.
71
This is important, not least because of the way Salomon has been appropriated into the Auschwitz narrative at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem (no foreign dignitary visits Israel without being taken there). Salomon is offering a death, not as anticipation, even if there might be that too, but as something much closer to what Milner is describing as the unconscious slipstream of creative life. This is death, not as suicide – ‘she did not have to kill herself’ – nor as imminent genocide. It is dying as a form of lived experience and as the pre-condition of art. Thus Salomon hauls to the surface and gives body and shape to the ugly historical reality behind Milner’s intensely felt but also more contemplative, restrained account (to call it ‘safer’ feels right, but also not quite right).

If Salomon is a painter of death, it is therefore in a very precise sense. This is death as something that is inseparable from creativity – neither death as calculus, nor death as suicide, nor death as forced choice. If Daberlohn can help her on this journey, it is because he himself first appears in the story as survivor and as living dead.
Life? or Theatre?
, so firmly anchored in the Second World War, also forces us to ask the question – existential and historical – of which war we are talking about. It thus ushers us back to the last years of Rosa Luxemburg, tightly binding the histories of these two women into one (this is just one moment in this book where I find myself wanting to introduce two of its women to each other). Born in 1917, Salomon is a child of the First World War. Spanning the two wars,
Life? or Theatre?
undoes that seeming space between them. If that first war is Daberlohn’s tale, Salomon also makes it her own (both Luxemburg and Salomon claim their place in a war which technically allots no role to women). Barely seventeen when he went to the front, Daberlohn was buried in the trenches among corpses, and woke up hearing the cries of a comrade he did not go to help (he knew that to do so would cost him his own life). ‘I was,’ he writes with no overstatement, ‘a corpse.’ Thereafter afflicted with seizures, he started to recover when he realised, in his own words, that what matters is ‘not whether life loves us, but that we love life’ (words that Charlotte will claim for herself).
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In his unpublished 1937–8 memoir of the war, ‘Orpheus or the Way to a Mask’, Wolfsohn, Daberlohn’s original, describes how no doctor could help him: ‘The doctor [ . . . ] who wants to cure me must first cure the whole world.’
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According to Felstiner, he lost his power to sing until he reached the point where he could bear to hear his comrades screaming again, and then dedicated himself to treating people with damaged vocal cords. Singing, for Wolfsohn, coaching others to sing, is therefore, quite literally, giving voice to the (war) dead.

Something unspeakable enters, but also fails to enter, the mind. Today trauma is often described as an event which consigns itself to silence, but how often do we ask which dimension of the voice precisely has been lost? In
Life? or Theatre?
,
the destroyed voice, the one to be repaired, is a singing voice. As with painting, such a voice has to plunge into the lowest depths in order to find itself. Salomon is inviting us to trace the path from war into something barely articulable as coherent sound. She is inviting us to see how the very form of her work – billed as ‘
Singspiel
’ or ‘song play’ – bears testimony to her, but not only her, struggle to survive. So for example, as she gets ready to escape from Germany to France, the caption of the first picture of this series instructs us that the tunes from scenes 1 and 2 of the prelude are to be repeated. When her grandmother threatens suicide, she recites to her the ‘Ode to Joy’, with people dancing and singing everywhere. Although she will fail with her grandmother, we could say that in her invocation to song, Charlotte has made Daberlohn’s cause, and Daberlohn’s war, her own. In fact the whole work becomes his cure as much as it is hers. Visually this identification between them – easily obscured by the more obviously compelling tale of their love affair – takes her right into the heart of his war. In a run of hallucinatory gouaches discarded from the final version, Charlotte is portrayed sitting up night after night reading his manuscript, as the ghosts of soldiers crowd her space, one of whom seems to have thrust his hand through the dark and to be hanging on for dear life to the back of her chair, a transgression of natural space which shatters the barrier between now and then.
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It is as if, writes Felstiner, ‘she’d been stationed at the front three years before her birth’, or as if the only way for her to endure the pain of the Second World War was to enter the pain of the First.
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Salomon is not just sending us into the depths of her time. She is also making a plea for historical understanding. The germs of Nazism – on this Luxemburg would surely have agreed – were planted in the first war of the century. We do not yet know, to repeat her words of 1918, whether the Jews have played their role of scapegoat ‘to the end’.
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It is my belief that it is the burden of the suicides in Salomon’s family – silenced and yet, or for that reason, all the more deeply lived by her – that allows her, at least partly, to venture so fearlessly (although that is of course not the right word) into such realms. ‘From the deeply moving expression of the girl,’ to recall Wolfsohn’s words about Salomon’s painting
Death and the Maiden
, ‘I feel that the death’s head holds none of the usual horror for her . . . Maybe this is the reason why the expression of Death shows so much softness, tenderness, almost defeat.’
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‘The author has tried to go completely out of herself.’ By now we are close to some sense of what such a proposition, such an effort, might – both ethically and aesthetically – entail, what it might require you to embrace. At every level, Salomon lays waste to the borders, fractures the lines of distinction – as if there were no boundaries, not between herself and others, not between public and private dying, not between the two world wars. Historical analysis will of course bear her out on this, seeing the Second World War as consequence, or as the intensified repetition, of the first, rather than – as Nazi logic would have it – its redemption. Is this what it means, what it takes, to identify? A body that spills, pouring across its own edge. When Charlotte’s mother, her grandmother’s second daughter, commits suicide, ‘the grief spreads throughout her [grandmother’s] body. It transcends her own suffering. It is the suffering of the whole world.’ In fact the painting itself contracts her body into a dark smudge, while it is the body of her mother’s sister, Franziska – the first of the two sisters to commit suicide – in the preceding image, lying with her limbs splayed on the ground, that seems to spread across the face of the earth.
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No doctor can cure Wolfsohn unless he can cure the whole world. With no less reach, Milner describes resistance to colour as
resistance to infinite pain. ‘Later it was to become clear,’ she writes, ‘that the foreboded dangers of this plunge into colour experience were to do with fears of embracing, becoming one with, something infinitely suffering, fears of plunging into a sea of pain.’
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The fear is of course justified. After all, the world’s embrace is an ambiguous gift and to long for it unequivocally would indeed be mad.