To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon In The Nazi Era

To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era

From Booklist Who was Charlotte Salomon, and why has historian Felstiner devoted 10 years of her life to reconstructing Charlotte's? Lotte Salomon was a German Jew who died in the Holocaust but left behind an incomparable and profoundly moving work of art. Life? or Theater? An Operetta consists of more than 700 paintings accompanied by a running narrative and an assortment of lyrics. This imaginative, deeply affecting, illustrated songplay, which Felstiner characterizes as the most penetrating visual record we have from the Nazi era about a single life, fictionalizes the story of Lotte's death-shadowed childhood and all-too-fleeting experience of love. Felstiner's painstaking research into a past blasted by the diabolically thorough destruction of the Nazis is nothing short of remarkable, as is the survival of Lotte's poignant creation. As Felstiner traces Lotte's path from the heart of Berlin's Jewish community to her intensely productive, if brief, exile in the south of France, she enriches our lives with knowledge of Lotte but also sheds light on little-known aspects of the Jewish massacre, particularly the treatment of women. In fact, Felstiner ended up tracking down a notorious, alive and all-too-well, unpunished, unrepentant SS officer responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, including Lotte, who died at Auschwitz at age 26, five months pregnant. Lotte painted so that she and her people would be remembered; Felstiner has taken up the banner of truth and beauty to make certain we never forget. Donna Seaman A courageous Jewish artist who left behind a monumental archive of paintings comes alive in this extraordinary biography. Charlotte Salomon, born in Germany in 1917, exiled to France in 1939, spent the next 2 intense, suspenseful years creating a lifetime's work--more than 700 watercolors overlaid by written texts and tunes that captured the dramatic events of her own life. This luminous work stands alone in the history of art and of autobiography. It is the most innovative record we have from the midst of the Holocaust, a visual path through those dark times. Salomon's work survives intact in Amsterdam, but until now no one has unfolded the real life behind the painted one. Mary Felstiner spent 10 years of searching for & interviewing Salomon's relatives & classmates, her mentor's students, her acquaintances in exile, & survivors of the concentration camps. Felstiner shapes an immensely moving account of a woman haunted by personal trauma & trapped in grim historical conditions. TO PAINT HER LIFE resounds with the artist's own words & images. We see her losing her mother to suicide. Being admitted to the prestigious Berlin Art Academy and then expelled. Witnessing the rising tide of Nazism. Falling in love & suffering loss. Leaving her home for exile on the Riviera. Choosing whether to take her own life--or to put it into art. Painting secrets her family kept from her & secrets she kept from them. Making choices that speak to us all--to love someone, to leave a home, to face memories, to recount it all. TO PAINT HER LIFE also traces a shadow story behind Charlotte Salomon's--that of Alois Brunner, Eichmann's right-hand man, the notorious SS officer responsible for deporting to death camps more than 100,000 Jews. With Salomon & Brunner representing creation and destruction in sharp contrast, Felstiner brings together previously unknown facts of their 2 lives & opens provocative ne perspectives on gender and genocide. From Library Journal Felstiner (history, San Francisco State Univ.) has written a poignant, tragic biography of Charlotte Salomon, a Jewish artist who grew up in Berlin between the wars. In 1938, Salomon was sent to the south of France to join her grandparents as refugees. Shy and withdrawn, she sought escape from reality in her art and created an autobiography, Leben oder Theater?, for which she produced over 700 paintings and drawings. Felst