Women in Dark Times (2 page)

When Luxemburg steps on to the public stage for the first time, launching what will be a brilliant career of public speaking, she slowly but surely takes the measure of her own power. ‘Not that I am all fired up and bursting with enthusiasm,’ she writes from Berlin to her grudgingly appreciative lover, Leo Jogiches, in 1898. ‘On the contrary I am quite calm and look to the future with confidence . . . I am sure that in half a year’s time, I will be among the best of the party’s speakers.’
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The voice, the effortlessness, the language – everything, she writes to him, ‘comes out right’, as if she had been speaking for twenty years (she is twenty-eight at the time). Luxemburg is collecting herself, finding her voice in what is of course essentially a man’s world. A small, Polish-Jewish woman with a limp, she is – metaphorically but also literally – drawing herself up to her full height. She will be the equal of every man she addresses, and more than the equal of the many male revolutionary pundits and stars, including Lenin, whom she will take to task in the course of her life. Quite simply, she conquers their world.

At the same time, she has no doubt that what she brings to that world is uniquely her own. ‘Do you know what I have been feeling very strongly?’ she writes to Jogiches a few months later. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out . . . In my “soul” a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions. It breaks them by the power of ideas and strong conviction. I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds not by speechifying but with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction, and the power of my expression.’
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Fiery, intemperate, ruthless – Luxemburg could be all of these. But for Luxemburg, to be a political actor in the world is to usher into that world something as unpredictable as a new birth. Then she adds: ‘How? What? Where? I still don’t know.’ Appearances can be deceptive. Luxemburg’s hesitancy is the backdrop, the indispens­able companion of her poise. She is calling for a new language of politics, one which today is still met mostly with incomprehension or intolerance: a political vision that will not try to extinguish what cannot be controlled in advance or fully known. In this she is profoundly in tune with Hannah Arendt – from whose book
Men in Dark Times
I take my title – who, writing of totalitarian terror, describes the ultimate freedom as identical with the capacity to begin. Over such beginnings, she writes, ‘no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power because the chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, a new beginning’.
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It is therefore each new birth that totalitarianism hates. Terror is needed ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’.
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Raising a voice in the world would of course be one definition of feminism – speaking out, protesting, clamouring loudly for equality, making oneself heard. ‘Find your voice and use it’ was recently described as the first lesson feminism has to learn from the suffragettes.
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Mary Beard has recently spoken publicly of the high price women pay for being heard.
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Patriarchy has been very efficient in countering the noise of feminism with epithets – ‘shrill’, ‘hysterical’ – intended to send women’s voices scurrying back, abject, underground. The famous backlash against feminism is, we could say, not just aimed at restoring the ascendancy of men in the material world, but also, and no less forcefully, directed at women’s speech. An outspoken woman is a threat, not just because of the content of what she says, the demands she is making, but because, in the very act of speaking, her presence as a woman is too strongly felt. Drawing language up from inside her, she makes the body as the source of language too palpable in her person, giving the lie to the delusion that the body is sublimated in our utterances, that we can hide our mortal flesh behind the words that we speak. On this, Luxemburg’s opponents were unapologetic. August Bebel, self-proclaimed feminist, wrote of her ‘wretched female’s squirts of poison’; Viktor Adler called her a ‘poisonous bitch . . . clever as a monkey’. On another occasion he more simply complained that she had ‘proved herself too much of a woman’.
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‘We will hang her,’ he is reported as saying half jokingly after the 1905 Social Democratic Party in Jena. ‘We will not allow her to spit in our soup.’
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Women who speak out threaten and expose the limits of the human: vile liquid, animal, or both.

One reason women are often so hated, I would suggest, is because of their ability to force to the surface of the everyday parts of the inner life – its visceral reality, its stubborn unruliness – which in the normal course of our exchanges we like to think we have subdued. For me this is also their gift. Today we read much about the over-sexualisation of women’s and young girls’ bodies, which is of course also a form of potentially lethal control: bodies that must be perfect, but which must also shrink to the point where they more or less disappear. I see this, however, as something of a decoy, or even a distraction. Such idealisation, such diminishment (the two extremes are inseparable) is a way of concealing another impossible, but no less sinister, demand: that our bodies should never remind us of our failings, of the limits to what we can fully command or know about ourselves, that the surface of the world should never bear the visible marks of what we all carry most disturbingly – physically but also in our dreams and nightmares – beneath. As if women, always potentially the bearers of new life, were being asked to smother the messy uncertainty to which every new beginning, if that is what it truly is, gives rise. ‘Something is moving inside me and wants to come out . . . a totally new, original form is ripening that ignores all rules and conventions.’

When Rosa Luxemburg is murdered by government henchmen in 1919, Charlotte Salomon is barely two years old. Salomon’s war, both public and private, begins more or less at this moment, when the benighted legacy of the First World War is already being written. Because Luxemburg was murdered for her part in the Spartacist revolutionary uprising in Germany in 1918, we do not always remember that it was her opposition to the war that consigned her for the longest time to prison: first for a year in 1915 for inciting public disobedience, and then when that sentence ended in February 1916, under indefinite detention without trial for the rest of the war. If her support for the Spartacist uprising was at the outset cautious – she felt the revolutionaries were not ready, had not seized the right time – it was because she was painfully aware of the vulnerability of a defeated and humiliated Germany, notably its returning, mutilated army, to the blinding rhetoric of patriotism which would be so decisive in the rise of Hitler. ‘It is a foolish delusion,’ she writes in her famous anti-war ‘Junius’ pamphlet that was smuggled out of prison, ‘to believe that we need only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under a bush to await the end of a thunderstorm to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over.’
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Germany, she predicted, would learn nothing from defeat. ‘The Jew,’ Goebbels famously pronounced in 1930, ‘is the real cause of our losing the Great War.’
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Charlotte Salomon can fairly be described as her heir. As if in counterpoint and anticipation, she ushers in the next phase. Her monumental work,
Life? or Theatre?
,
is a unique record of what Germany became in the aftermath of the First World War for the Jews who were to become the victims of the next – she was the daughter of a distinguished German-Jewish artistic and medical family. Charlotte Salomon paints her way through that history, gouache upon gouache, which she created in the last years of her life and which were then bound into a book after she died. She was murdered in Auschwitz, but it is a fatal error to assign her work to the category of Holocaust Art, which has been the partial effect, if not the aim, of including her work in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel, Yad Vashem. Salomon is another woman whose creativity exceeds her final tragedy, both historically and in terms of the energy and exuberance of her work.
Life? or Theatre?
was painted in a cacophony of colours, often glaring, as if in defiance of the private and public anguish she charts with such deft and vivid precision. It spans the two wars, orchestrates the space between them, running its brightly coloured lines between now and then.

Certainly she creates a new form that ‘ignores all rules and conventions’ (specifically the rules of artistic form stipulated by the Nazi custodians of art). This has certainly been the view of the commentators – followers would not perhaps be an exaggeration – who have given her work almost a cult status over the years.
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Life? or Theatre?
is an in-mixing of genres, announced on the first page as a three-coloured
Singspiel
, a musical drama with a cast list, a series of painted images accompanied by words and songs which are spelled out in transparencies laid across each page. Salomon instructs her audience to look at the images with the accompanying tune running inside their head. She created the work in the years immediately preceding her capture and deportation, while in exile on the French Riviera when it was still under the relatively benign occupation of the Italians. According to one reliable report, she sat humming as she painted by the sea. Seizing her history against the encroaching dark, Salomon ushers us into a picture gallery which is also a poetry recital, history lesson and concert hall. The combination of sight and sound adds to the sense of historic urgency, as if to proclaim: ‘See this!’ ‘Listen here!’ You do not exactly look at, or read,
Life? or Theatre?
You enter into its world. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the work, has created a site where you can look at the images, read the transparencies, reverse each gouache to see what it carries beneath, and even listen to recordings of the music, taken from the moment, which Salomon intended to accompany her paintings.
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Salomon paints and rhymes her way out of an abyss which is as intensely personal as it is historical. It is the genius of her work to navigate across the two domains, uncovering the perilous foundations they share.
Life? or Theatre?
begins with the suicide of her mother’s sister in 1913 on the eve of the First World War. She is the offspring of that moment. In response to the death, her mother-to-be becomes a nurse, a sister again (like English ‘sister’,
Schwester
in German means both nurse and sister), who then travels against her parents’ wishes to the front where she meets her surgeon husband. Charlotte, named after the lost sister, will be their only child, steeped in unspoken tragedy before her life begins: ‘Little Charlotte did not seem at all pleased at being born.’
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‘There is’, the written commentary announces across the scene of her parents’ wedding, ‘nothing to remind the gathering of the still raging war.’
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Salomon is born into a world of secrets and lies. From the outset, she is instructing her audience to see what others are refusing to see: a nation at war which seizes its moments of elation in a type of grim desperation against a bleak and threatening sky; and her aunt’s suicide, hushed up because German Jews have the highest suicide rate of all population groups in the country, which makes them vulnerable to the charge of degeneracy (a charge which will of course fatally intensify). In fact there are seven suicides in her family, including her own mother when Salomon is eight years old. Salomon is told that her mother died of flu. ‘Nobody’, the text observes, ‘had ever told Charlotte how some of her family lost their lives.’
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In defiance of a future she could not have known in advance, Salomon makes her extraordinary bid for freedom. As a young woman, she had dreamt of herself as a larva bound by a thousand shackles, ‘a larva with the one burning desire to be freed one day from these shackles’.
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Only when she finally learns the truth, at the age of twenty-three, does she start painting her work. ‘Keep this safe,’ she said when she handed the completed work to her friend, Dr Moridis. ‘
C’est toute ma vie.
’ (‘It is my whole life.’)
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Dipping her brush into the worst, painting the unspoken and barely speakable, she makes herself the chronicler of her world. It is how, internally, she survives. In this, she can also serve as a model. Like Luxemburg and, as we will see, Monroe, Salomon draws her strength from the most disturbing parts of her history and her own mind. It is a central part of my argument that they can, therefore, only be understood if we are willing, unlike most of the people around them, to countenance – live with, one might say – what is most horrendous about their public and private worlds. You cannot close the blinds, or turn up the volume to drown out the sounds of war. Unsolicited, for the most part, by the official rhetoric, or more simply excluded, women have the privilege, or at least the option, of being less in its thrall. In search of her own talent, Salomon combs the depths (we might say that it is her talent that drives her there). According to Alfred Wolfsohn, her mentor and lover, she made death her familiar – as opposed to an ugly family secret or the buried dead of a nation marching defiantly to its next war (Wolfsohn was himself a survivor of the First World War). Writing of one of her early paintings,
Death and the Maiden
, he comments: ‘From the deeply moving expression of the girl I feel that the death’s head holds none of the usual horror for her . . . Maybe this is the reason why the expression of Death shows so much softness, tenderness, almost defeat.’
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