A biography of Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who was born in Germany in 1917, and exiled to France in 1939 where she spent the next two years creating a lifetime's work--765 watercolors overlaid by written texts and tunes that captured the dramatic events of her life--finally to be transported to Auschwitz where she was a victim of the genocide in 1943. Includes 64 bandw photographs throughout and an 8-page color insert. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This is a poignant and graphic telling of the life of a young German Jewish woman taken and killed during the holocaust. Charlotte Salomon (Berlin, 16/04/17 - Auschwitz, 10/10/43) was an artist from a prosperous family whose mother committed suicide when she was just nine-years-old. One of several suicides within her family. She attended the School for Pure and Applied Arts until 1938 when the increasing antisemitic policies caused her to escape to the south of France to live with her grandparents. It was not the best of times. In 1941, now living alone she began painting what became over 1000 gouaches which she edited and added captions and overlays to create her life's work 'Leben? Oder Theater?' consisting of 769 of the paintings depicting a somewhat fantastical autobiography preserving the main elements of her life. She also made notes on appropriate music to accompany the art. In 1943 she handed the work over to the local doctor in a large suitcase with the wish that he "Keep this safe, it is my whole life." She had addressed it to wealthy American, Ottillie Moore in whose property she had stayed. By September that year she had married another German Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and the two of them were arrested and she was transported to Auschwitz to the gas chambers when five months pregnant.

This is the cathartic masterpiece of Charlotte Salomon. Entrusted to a friend before her deportation to Auschwitz, her gouache series Life? or Theater? live on as an artistic feat beyond category or comparison. Published here with the 450 most important pieces, including film-like sequences and musical suggestions, this fictional autobiography...

Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced – the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum. This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.

Secrets and Shadows is a novel about how the events of the Second World War can re-verberate into the future. Silman uses the fall of the Berlin Wall to explore the long marriage and divorce of her protagonists, Eve and Paul. When Eve agrees to accompany her former husband to Berlin, Paul recalls and narrates the past he has never been able to share with his wife. Eve begins to see how Paul's hidden childhood in Nazi Germany, shaped and influenced their marriage, and how his trauma exacted a price in their relationship. The novel is about the complexities of guilt, anger, love and lust, and above all forgiveness as Eve and Paul help each other confront a bitter past and move forward in their lives.