Women in Dark Times (15 page)

Once again it is the resonances that are telling, suggesting that the ethical, aesthetic and political tasks are one and the same. The greatest danger is indifference, which draws up the ramparts of the soul. For the narrator of
Doctor Faustus
, the ironically named Dr Serenus Zeitblom (serene flower of the times), such disregard is key. Leverkühn’s tutor spoke of musical notes showing ‘regard’ for each other. The extent of the war’s utter destruction of human values can be measured by how it has trampled over each individual, crushing their self-worth, and by ‘a general indifference to each man’s suffering and perishing that had found itself into people’s hearts’, which is why in hell, as the Devil points out with relish in his one appearance in the novel, derision and infinite suffering are bedfellows.
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Recognising that much is also, for Zeitblom, a type of moral advantage which gives the defeated nations ‘something like an intellectual head start over the others’.
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Put simply, they are now meant to be familiars of the destruction they wrought and to understand how and why. Not all of them, of course. On the same page, he describes those Germans for whom the prospect of democracy imposed after the war was a ‘bad joke’ (freedom as a self-contradictory notion which is forced to negate itself).
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Indifference to the other is therefore the underside of fascism, its pre-condition and its drive: experientially (you cannot kill someone with whom you identify), but also politically. After all, it is true that the other’s freedom is always potentially threatening to your own. On this matter, Salomon is ruthless. The worst, she insists in the running commentary to her paintings, are those who cannot see anything beyond themselves. Nor does she dispense her own people from the charge. At her mother’s wedding banquet, ‘there is nothing to remind the gathering of the still-raging war’ (again it is the First World War where the tragedy begins).
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Then, just before her exile for France, she sits at a dinner of ‘German Jews’ (the title of the chapter), ‘of whom’, she writes, ‘each one is so preoccupied with himself that at a dinner party a silent observer feels as if he were in a goose pen.’
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Social life – the drawing or dining room – carrying on blithely as usual becomes the supreme barometer of moral health. Later, she will describe her grandfather’s insensitivity to her as merely typical, ‘applied to everyone at that time, so that no one was able to listen to anyone else’.
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As if the only alternatives were a fatal blindness or plunging, paintbrush in hand, into the dark core of the world.

*

We are nearing the end of this chapter but I realise that it might, at least partly, be giving a wrong impression, which would in fact undermine everything we have to learn from Charlotte Salomon. I have been in danger of making her sound way too good. Perfection is to my mind deadly for women, twice over: as a projected male fantasy but even more as what women might be tempted to ask of themselves. To present Salomon as morally unimpeachable would therefore be doing her a grave injustice, as well as being a mistake. In fact this has become all the more pressing an issue in relation to Salomon, since the publication of a missing letter, apparently withdrawn from the work by Paula Lindberg, that describes her grandfather dying of veronal-laced barbiturates while Charlotte watches by his side, and which has led many of those most deeply involved in her work to conclude that – in real life – Salomon must have killed him.
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Most recently, Griselda Pollock has argued, partly in response to this first discovery, that what lies barely concealed behind this moment – real or fantasised by Salomon – is the sexual abuse of her mother and mother’s sister by the grandfather (the precipitating cause of the two women’s suicides).
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My interest in this moment is different. For me it shows that, whatever the reality, whether murder or abuse or indeed both (and this we cannot know), Salomon had no interest in presenting herself as innocent, and that for this to be recognised by those around her was a struggle which, if her family had had its way, she would posthumously have lost (the victim is never a murderer, the one who suffers is – must be – good). This is to rob Salomon of the complexity of her inner life.

Salomon gives us a Charlotte who is a very good hater. She has to be to survive. Very near the end, she thanks Ottilie Moore for giving her the opportunity ‘to become fully acquainted with human beings of that era and to learn to hate/love or despise them’. Like ‘Jewish-human’, ‘hate/love’ is one word in the German – ‘
hassen/lieben
’ – with a painted red line barely separating the two words in blue.
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Love and hate are not alternatives, they are combined, and despising people is the opposite of them both. This, it seems to me, is psychologically astute. Contempt – the derision of hell – is the real antagonist to feeling which, in order to be feeling, has to encompass hatred as much as love. As we will see, Marilyn Monroe, a woman who knew all about the curse of perfection, will say almost exactly the same thing. Likewise Luxemburg’s ideal was a world where one could love with a clear conscience: ‘Striving after it, defending it, I might perhaps even learn to hate.’
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For Salomon, the only way to paint her way both into and out of her story is by knowing the inner rage that she is capable of. ‘How I hate them all!’ Charlotte exclaims after her grandfather’s friends have been congratulating him on how well she seems to be coping with the death of her grandmother – ‘really marvellous . . . she still looks the picture of health’. ‘I would like to kick them all down the stairs.’
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Alongside everything else
Life? or Theatre?
can teach us, it also displays the violence inherent in creative art. It is, however, only when you look at the manuscript in close-up that you truly get the fullest measure of this. As already mentioned, Salomon used both sides of her paper – recto and verso – more or less consistently as she painted. Felstiner must be right that Salomon did this partly in response to a paper shortage during the Nazi Occupation, especially towards the end, when the words run from back to front of the page as if it was not just paper that she was lacking, but also time. But I think this misses the point. These reverse images speak volumes of what Salomon has had to discard as she works. Some of these, most simply and poignantly perhaps, are scenes of Nazi demonstrations and humiliations – one image of anti-Semitic pamphlets in front of a synagogue, another of Salomon and a group of women pleading with the Gestapo for disappeared husbands and fathers: ‘Charlotte does not have much success at police headquarters which is full of sad women’
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– as if there were only so many images of Nazism that she, or that she felt her work, could finally take.

Mostly, however, the scenes on the recto of the pages are ones that have already been staged, sometimes revisited with cruel hindsight. Thus her grandmother kneels by the radio listening to reports of ‘terrible excesses against Jews in Germany’, while the reverse image shows a poster of Paulinka in her heyday carried aloft in the streets (the voice of the world reduced from song to ugly radio reports).
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Or Daberlohn is seen urging Paulinka to freedom – he is citing Nietzsche on song – with Charlotte on the reverse applying for a visa at the French embassy while an endless row of people are condensed into what looks like a puddle on the floor (freedom no more). A much later image shows Charlotte at the foot of her grandfather’s bed, with the grandmother asleep, fainted or dead beside him, as he explains to Charlotte that she has attempted to kill herself five times before. This ghastly image has that earlier scene of Daberlohn exhorting Paulinka to freedom on the other side.
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These connections are brutal – from inspiration to fascism to suicide, although the idea of sequence is wrong since you can track in either direction. You can always, Salomon seems to be telling us, lift life out of death, and the reverse.

Charlotte Salomon,
Life? or Theatre?

Above all, something is being tracked here as the underside of what you are being allowed to see. Nothing, however, can convey the shock of seeing for the first time what Salomon actually does to these rectos of her page. Strips of tape are stuck all over the image, above all over mouth and eyes, figure upon figure mutilated almost – although never quite – beyond recognition. Why, Felstiner asks, did she use tape instead of just crossing the images through?
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These are bodies that can no longer – are no longer being allowed to – speak or see. What, we might ask, could be more devastating in a work dedicated to the singing voice and the painting eye? Beneath the surface of the page, as its inseparable counterpoint, Salomon is lashing out, assaulting the very same figures to whom she has given herself so generously.

There is, I think unarguably, a form of sexual rivalry or straight Oedipal dimension involved. Many of these taped images are of Daberlohn and Paulinka, whose intimacy Charlotte could not bear – any more than Paula Lindberg could bear the idea of Charlotte’s affair with Wolfsohn, which, in an interview with Felstiner near the end of her life, she dismissed as a dream. To read the shock of these images simply in such terms is, however, reductive. For me it is rather as if Salomon has found, alongside her bid for freedom and as an inherent part of the process, the perfect method for portraying destruction – a type of killing energy – which is its own pre-condition of art. In another striking affinity, Milner, to her own surprise and dismay, also found herself producing an image of a bare head with tape over its mouth (there are also a number of moments where Salomon strips her heads bare). ‘That head,’ writes Milner, ‘with its ears stopped, eyes shut, lips sealed, blind and deaf and dumb, it’s surely a picture of defending oneself against something too awful to know.’
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Our own lack of innocence is the knowledge we struggle most fiercely to defend ourselves against. In her early drawings, Milner notices that there was usually a harmless, innocent creature and a nasty one, ‘and that I myself was identified with the innocent one’.
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Salomon is no innocent. She may be scathing about her grandparents’ self-regard – ‘They could not get outside themselves in order to understand other people’ – but she also insists she is no better: ‘I belong to the category of people who seek and find their own profit.’ She would finish her work, she declaims, ‘whatever it may cost’.
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Marion Milner,
On Not Being Able to Paint

How much can we bear to know about ourselves? For Milner, such knowledge of one’s own demons, the hardest knowledge of all, is also part of the wager of freedom, ‘like the breaking down of a prison wall’.
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Remember Luxemburg struggling with her demons by means of the inkwell. Remember, too, her reach: ‘The fire of her heart melted the locks and bolts and her iron will tore down the walls of the dungeon,’ wrote Clara Zetkin, ‘[gathering] the amplitude of the coursing world outside into the narrowness of her gloomy cell.’ This is why, for me,
Life? or Theatre?
is a work not about memory, as it is often read, but about knowledge, about what you need to know, however painfully, in order to be alive. ‘I knew nothing of all that,’ Charlotte says plainly to her grandfather after he has told her the story.
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What saves Salomon is the knowledge that no one around her ever thought she could bear.