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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?
Posted: February 27, 2016
From 1940 to 1942, between the ages of 24 and 26, the German artist Charlotte Salomon created “etwas ganz verrückt Besonderes” (“something really crazy special”). It was the product of the special, crazy times and situation she found herself in. In 1939, because of the Nazis’ mounting persecution of Jews, Salomon had fled Berlin, where she was the last Jewish student at the city’s art school. She sought refuge in France with her grandparents on her late mother’s side in the region of Nice. On March 4th 1940, she watched helplessly as her grandmother threw herself from a window to her death. Only then did her grandfather reveal the family’s secret: she was the last survivor of a maternal line, all of whom had committed suicide over three generations. When she was eight, Charlotte had been told her own mother passed away from influenza; now she learned the truth, that she too had jumped and killed herself. In exile and solitude, under the long shadows of this tragic heritage and the immediate menace of Hitler’s forces, Salomon would barely eat, drink or sleep to finish recording her family’s histories and her personal experiences in an unprecedented magnum opus in pictures and words. Read my new Article here…
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