Charlotte Salomon

Charlotte Salomon (16 April 1917 – 10 October 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin.

She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings ''Leben?

Charlotte was sixteen when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

She simply refused to go to school, and stayed at home.

At a time when German universities were restricting their Jewish student quota to 1.5% of the student body (providing their fathers had served on the front line in the First World War), Salomon succeeded in gaining admission to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Pure and Applied Arts) in 1936.

She studied painting there for two years, but by summer 1938 the antisemitic policy of Hitler's Third Reich meant that it was too dangerous for her to continue attending the college and she did not return, despite winning a prize.

Salomon's father was briefly interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in November 1938, after Kristallnacht, and the Salomon family decided to leave Germany.

Charlotte was sent to the South of France to live with her grandparents, already settled in Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice.

They lived in a cottage in the grounds of a luxurious villa L'Ermitage (now demolished) owned by a wealthy American, Ottilie Moore, who went on to shelter a number of Jewish children.

Salomon left L'Ermitage with her grandparents to live in an apartment in Nice, where her grandmother attempted to hang herself in the bathroom.

Her grandfather then revealed the truth to Charlotte about her mother's suicide, as well as the suicides of her aunt Charlotte, her great-grandmother, her great uncle, and her grandmother's nephew.

Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, Charlotte's grandmother succeeded in taking her own life.

Her grandmother had stockpiled Veronal and morphine for when the German army arrived, but when she was denied access to her medication, she instead tried and failed to hang herself before eventually succeeding by throwing herself out of a window.

Charlotte and her grandfather were interned by the French authorities in a bleak camp in the Pyrenees called Gurs.

Charlotte recalls in ''Life?

or Theater?'' that spending a night in a crowded train is preferable to spending one night with her grandfather:

"I'd rather have ten more nights like this than a single one alone with him."

oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel'' (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play), the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust, consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis.

In 1942, Salomon, whose residence permit depended upon her caretaking of her grandfather, joined her grandfather in Nice.

Soon after, she poisoned him with a homemade veronal omelette.

The event is detailed in a 35-page illustrated confessional letter Salomon addressed to her former lover Alfred Wolfsohn, who never received the letter.

In October 1943 Salomon, 5 months pregnant at that time, was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis soon after her arrival.

In 1943, as the Nazis intensified their search for Jews living in the South of France, Salomon handed the work to a local Villefranche doctor she was acquainted with, and addressed it to Ottilie Moore—the German-American millionaire who owned the villa Salomon was hiding in at the time.

She inscribed Moore's name at the top, and told the doctor: "Keep this safe, it is my whole life."

In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.

Charlotte Salomon came from a prosperous Berlin family.

Her father, Albert Salomon was a surgeon; her mother, Franziska (Grünwald), sensitive and troubled, committed suicide when Charlotte was eight or nine, though she was led to believe her mother died from influenza.

His constant request to share his bed with her and her own words in a confession letter of 35 pages, made public in 2015, suggest sexual abuse.

They were released on account of her grandfather's infirmity.

Her grandfather returned to his life in Nice, while in Villefranche, Salomon experienced a nervous breakdown that stemmed from her grandfather’s revelations and her disgust for him.

The local doctor, Dr. George Morridis, advised her to paint.

Salomon rented a room in the pension La Belle Aurore in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and there she commenced the work that would outlive her.

She began her series of 769 paintings – entitled ''Life?

or Theater?'' – by stating that she was driven by "the question: whether to take her own life or undertake something wildly unusual".

In the space of two years, she painted more than one thousand gouaches.

She edited the paintings, re-arranged them, and added texts, captions, and overlays.

She had a habit of humming songs to herself while painting.

The entire work was a slightly fantastic autobiography preserving the main events of her life – her mother's death, studying art in the shadow of the Third Reich, her relationship with her grandparents – but altering the names and employing a strong element of fantasy.

She also added notes about appropriate music to increase the dramatic effect, and she called ''Life?

or Theater?'' a "Singespiel", [sic] or lyrical drama.