Charlotte Salomon: Mutilation, secrets and a murder that remained in the dark for half a century
In 1959, Albert and Paula Salomon arrived at the Stedelijk City Museum in Amsterdam, carrying five fabric boxes and inquiring if the museum would be interested in their contents. These boxes, which had been stored in their home for over a decade, contained the work of Albert Salomon’s daughter, Charlotte, or Lotte Salomon, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26. On 20 November 1971, Albert and Paula donated this collection, comprising roughly 1300 gouaches, to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.
In 1961, the first exhibition of Charlotte Salomon’s work was held. Her art continues to captivate the world and serves as a profound source of inspiration for those who see art as a vital refuge in life.
Between 1940 and 1942, at the age of 23, Charlotte Salomon painted the story of her life over the course of eighteen months. Her work, entitled “Life or theatre?”, is a captivating body of art – a diary that she completed during the Nazi occupation. She moved it from her hotel in St. Petersburg to her home in Jean Cap Ferrat, entrusting it to Doctor Moridis in Villefranche sur Mer with the words: “It is my whole life.”
After the war, the doctor gave the work to Ottilie Moore, an American woman who had provided shelter to Charlotte and her grandfather in her villa in Villefranche. Charlotte had dedicated her works to Moore, who later passed them, along with a self-portrait of Charlotte, to her father and his second wife, Paula. They had been unaware of the existence of these works.
Charlotte Salomon discovered that eight women in her family had committed suicide, a revelation that took thirteen years to uncover. This led her to a pivotal decision: to paint her life, rather than succumb to the same fate.
Her story begins in 1913, with the suicide of a young woman, Charlotte Gunwald, daughter of a cultured Berlin family. Her sister, Franziska, shocked by the tragedy, began working as a nurse during World War I, where she fell in love with a young surgeon named Albert Salomon. Their marriage on 16 April 1917 led to the birth of their daughter, Charlotte Salomon, named after her aunt who had taken her own life.
During the interwar years, young Charlotte learned at the age of nine that her mother had died of the flu.
The tragic suicide of a woman who fell from a window was kept under wraps, as the surge in suicides among middle-class, educated German-Jewish women at the time was deemed dangerous and shameful. It took Charlotte Salomon thirteen years to unearth the grim fact that a total of eight women in her family had taken their own lives. This discovery led her to a pivotal resolution: to paint her life story rather than succumb to the same fate.
Young Charlotte spent her early years in solitude until 1930, when her father married Paula Lindbergh. An opera singer by profession, Lindbergh introduced Charlotte to the enchanting world of music, as well as to the synagogue and Jewish religion. Charlotte began crafting her first paintings at the tender age of 13.
The rise of the Nazis cast a dark shadow over the family’s existence. Her father lost his job and started working at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, while Paula’s opera career came to a halt, leading her to sing for the newly formed Jewish Cultural Society. Charlotte, meanwhile, dropped out of school. In 1936, she joined the State Academy of Art in Berlin, where Jewish students made up a meager 1.5% of the student body. Despite the odds, she received an exceptional education and was exposed to remarkable performances at the Jewish cultural centre. These experiences shaped her perspective and reinforced her belief that art is the wellspring of morality.
Charlotte fell deeply in love with Alfred Wolfson, a musician twice her age, who nurtured her relationship with painting. However, the infamous Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938 marked a turning point for the family. Albert Salomon was arrested and subjected to torture at the Sachsenhausen camp, following which Charlotte was sent to her grandparents in southern France. She arrived in Villefranche in January 1939. The subsequent year, her grandmother committed suicide, revealing the horrifying lineage of suicides in her family. Seeing herself as the inheritor of a family curse, she wrote to her parents, who had sought refuge in Amsterdam: “I will create a story so I don’t lose my mind.”
In May 1940, the Vichy French government incarcerated German citizens living in France. Charlotte and her grandfather were interned in the Gurs concentration camp in the Pyrenees. Upon their return to Villefranche, they found shelter in the home of Ottilie Moore. It was to Moore that Charlotte dedicated her work, even before she had begun it. The shocking revelation of her past led her to a crossroads: should she choose to end her life or embark on a daring, unconventional journey? She chose the latter and began working at a hotel in St. Jean Cap Ferrat.
Months later, the hotelier recalled how the woman he was painting was always humming. Salomon created her autobiographical magnum opus, a piece akin to a performance program with painted scenes from her life on glued paper, accompanied by captions of melodies and words. The narrative she weaves is a tapestry of her life, family, love, death, and references to Nietzsche, Goethe, and Beethoven. The rise of the Third Reich forms a backdrop, but her work is primarily a deeply personal exploration.
She was born into a family with a history of dark secrets, mental illness, nervous breakdowns, abuse, suicides, and drug overdoses. To bring her vision to life, she drew from a variety of influences, including German expressionism, autobiographies, memories of operettas, and political commentary. Her work is a chronicle of the persecution of Jews across Europe, both witty and tragic, comprised of 700 images, 32,000 words, spread across hundreds of pages of vibrantly colored notebook paper.
Her work bears a striking resemblance to a storyboard for a film. It incorporates elements such as multiple shots within a single frame and sudden close-ups, mimicking the zooming in and out of a camera. At times, it evokes scenes from animated films where characters engage in lengthy monologues, their facial expressions constantly shifting. It’s an unclassifiable masterpiece, an iconic illustrated chronicle of an era and a family, painted by the Mediterranean, where she claimed to have “seen deep into the heart of humanity.”
When the Riviera fell to the Italians, Charlotte returned to Villefranche. There, she met another Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, whom she married in 1943 while pregnant. Her grandfather passed away in Nice and was laid to rest on February 12, 1943.
In September 1943, Eichmann led a major operation to purge the Riviera of Jews, arresting Charlotte and Nagler and transporting them to the Drancy transit camp outside Paris. The refugees were clueless about their destination. On October 7, 1943, Transport No. 60 departed France and arrived three days later at an undisclosed location. The men were separated from the women and children and sent to forced labor camps. Pregnant women topped the extermination list. Charlotte Salomon, four months pregnant, was murdered within the first hour of her arrival at Auschwitz.
So what became of the protagonists of this tragic tale? Her parents survived by going into hiding in Amsterdam. Albert Salomon is still recognized today for his pioneering study on mastectomies, considered the precursor to mammography. He passed away in 1976. Paula Salomon went on to become a distinguished music teacher and lived to the ripe old age of 102, passing away in 2000. Alfred Wolfson, the lover of Charlotte Salomon, first met her parents, Paula and Albert Salomon, in Amsterdam in 1947, after the war had ended. Wolfson passed away from tuberculosis in 1962 at the age of 65. It was only a year before his death that he discovered the profound impact he had had on Charlotte’s life and work.
Charlotte’s life and work have been adapted into a film, opera, and book by David Faenkinos. A startling revelation was made in a 2011 Dutch documentary by director Frans Weisz, which has sparked scholarly debate. In February 1943, eight months before she was sent to Auschwitz, Charlotte killed her grandfather.
Like many Jews, her grandparents had left Germany in the mid-30s, carrying a concoction of “morphine, opium, and Veronal” to use in case they ran out of money. Charlotte did not kill her grandfather to spare him from falling into the Nazis’ hands, but because, as she wrote, he symbolized “the people I had to resist.” Charlotte had been sexually abused by her grandfather, Dr. Ludwig Grunwald.
A recently surfaced letter, previously withheld by her stepmother from the collection given to the Jewish Museum, reveals in its 35 pages that Charlotte poisoned her grandfather by adding veronal to his omelette. She even sketched a picture of him as he was dying. The letter was intended for her lover, Alfred Wolfson, but he never received it. The documentary’s director saw the cut pages of the long letter, which her family had kept hidden for over 50 years, in 1975. Her stepmother asked him to keep them secret, which he did for decades. The contents of the letter have since proved to be shocking.
In 2015, the Parisian publisher Le Tripode published the letter in its entirety for the first time. In the end, what remains of Charlotte Salomon is her profound artistic expression and an unwavering spirit that stands as testament to the enduring nature of ideas.
