JEWISH THEAT RE COLLABORATIVE

…and she lived …and she died …and she survived through art.

Charlotte Salomon b. 1917 d. Auschwitz 1943

Mixed Media Performance & Graphic Novel Exhibit

February 3-20, 2011

Disjecta 8371 N Interstate 97217

jewishtheatrecollaborative.org 503-512-0582

Photo painted by Trina Baucom

Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?

Jewish Theatre Collaborative takes you through the looking glass into the epic World War II pre-graphic novel of the little known artist Charlotte Salomon. Step into Life? Or Theatre?, Salomon’s 700 pages of images, text and music adapted into a 90 minute electrifying, mixed media performance.

Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? opens February 3th at Disjecta Interdisciplinary Art Center in the Historic Kenton Neighborhood.

As a preview to the performance, audiences will be able to take in the exhibit “The Graphic Novel – Not Just A Place For Super Heroes” focuses on the explosion of social and personal narratives in the graphic novel genre.

Talk backs held following all performances will feature special guests (artists, historians, mental health professionals and survivors) responding to and reflecting on the work.

Salomon’s paintings, over 100 of which are projected large scale during the performance, are masterpieces, some echoing modern artists such as George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Amedeo Modigliani. Her innovative fusion of image, text and music remains cutting edge today, 70 years later.

History of Performance: In 2008-2009 Jewish Theatre Collaborative partnered with Oregon Jewish Museum, securing an opportunity grant from RACC to adapt and workshop Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?

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Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?

Performers: Cantor Ida Rae Cahana Kate Mura Doren Elias Jamie M. Rea George Lederer Darrell Salk Michele Mariana

Designers: Sam Kusnetz, Mark Loring, Peter West, featuring commissioned songs by Rody Ortega, and original designs by Sarah Gahagan,.

About The Creation of the Original Work

1941, a 24 year old German refugee, Charlotte Salomon, painted day and night in a small room in the south of France, creating a 700 page opus of paintings riddled with text and musical references entitled Life? Or Theatre? A Play with Songs. The work weaves the personal narrative of a young girl striving to find her voice as an artist with the larger social narrative of the rise of the Nazis and how that rise transformed the lives of German Jews. Entrusting the work to a local doctor, Charlotte said, “Keep this safe. C’est tout ma vie. It’s my entire life.” Salomon was sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, but the work remarkably, survived, and Solomon, through the work, survives.

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Attending the program

Where: Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate in the historic Kenton neighborhood

When: February 3-20, 2011 Thursday–Saturday 8PM, Sunday at 2 PM

Student Matinees Thursdays February 10th and 17th

Tickets: $20 Regular/ Students $15 / Seniors $18

Run time is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission Exhibit is open an hour before the performance

Directions to Disjecta

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Talk back Speakers and Dates

JTC creates opportunities for audiences to ask questions and start complex conversations that will hopefully continue well beyond the theatre.

Survivors, Oregon Arts Leaders, Historians and others will join JTC for talkbacks to address the primary theme of Survival. Other subjects addressed in talkbacks may include The Historical context of German Jewry leading up to the rise of the Nazis German of the 30s Art and the Nazis The Epidemic/Phenomenon of Depression documented in the play How is this art related to the graphic novel scene?

Thursday, February 3 Friday, February 4 Saturday, February 5 Sunday, February 6 Thursday, February 10 Friday, February 11 Saturday, February 12 Sunday, February 13 Thursday, February 17 Friday, February 18 Saturday, February 19 Sunday, February 20 4

Archival IIImagesImagesmagesmages

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PartnersPartnersPartners JTC’s work with partners and community sponsors is the cornerstone to its ability to achieve a depth of programming and the breath of impact.

Disjecta Interdisciplinary Arts Center is an established hub of the contemporary arts scene, curated the recent “Portland 2010: A Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art,” and brings resources and knowledge to the table to curate and host the companion graphic novel exhibit Committed to contemporary art since 2000, Disjecta provides essential resources for artists to create and exhibit new work.

After a period of uncharacteristic quietness, Disjecta announced the public opening of our new 10,000sf arts building at 8371 N Interstate in the historic Kenton neighborhood. The former bowling alley turned abandoned hydraulic shop underwent a facelift since and now houses five large, fully leased artist studios, along with 3,500 sf of visual exhibition space. www.disjecta.org

The Oregon Holocaust Resource Center (OHRC) an educational organization, applies the lessons of the Holocaust to teach the importance of promoting a just and humane society, which values respect and acceptance. As a not-for-profit, nonsectarian organization, the OHRC is dedicated to communicating the lessons of the Holocaust to teachers, students, and the general public in Oregon and SW Washington. This is in fulfillment of the legacy left by victims to survivors: To Remember; to Record; to Understand; to Explain, and to Enlighten Future Generations.

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WHAT IS JEWISH THEATRE COLLABORATIVE?

JTC engages people in Jewish Stories from the past and present exploring values, traditions and history in order to better comprehend the diversity of contemporary human experience. Central to our work are values of participation, depth and learning. JTC events, performed at both traditional and non-traditional theatre venues, bring together Jewish and non-Jewish audiences to explore the complex legacy of the Jewish existence in the modern world. Our performances provide an ideal environment for exploration, awakening curiosity, opening minds, and challenging stereotypes. We use collaborative strategies to help partner organizations achieve social goals through the power of theatre to inform and engage.

After the show, we invite our audience to ask questions, opening complex conversations about the content and its reverberation in our lives.

JTC’s work with partners and community sponsors is the cornerstone to its ability to achieve a depth of programming and the breath of impact.

Past Partners Cedar Sinai Park, German American Society, Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at PSU, Israel Consulate, Institute of Israeli Drama, Institute for Judaic Studies, Jewish Arts Month, Mittleman Jewish Community Ctr, Oregon Jewish Museum, Oregon Jewish Community Foundation /PJ Library, Oregon Area Jewish Committee, Oregon Holocaust Resource Center, Portland Jewish Academy, The Yiddish Hour

Past Community Sponsors Africa House, Artist Repertory Theatre, Mary Jo Tully and Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, Beit Haverim/South Metro Jewish Congregation, Cedar Sinai Park, Center for Intercultural Organizing City of Portland Office of Human Relations and Human Rights, Coalition Against Hate Crimes, CAHC, Community Relations Committee of the JFGP, Congregation Beth Israel, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, German American Society, The Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture, Greater Portland Hillel, Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies, Havurah Shalom, Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, Human Rights Comm. of Washington County, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, Miracle Theatre Group, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, Neveh Shalom, Never Again Coalition, Oregon Jewish Community Foundation, Oregon Jewish Museum, Oregon Nikkei Endowment, Portland Jewish Academy, St. Michaels and All Angels Episcopal Church

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Charlotte Salomon 1917 – 1943

by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner

www.jwa.org

“The war raged on and I sat by the sea and saw deep into the heart of humankind.”

(Charlotte Salomon, 1942)

Charlotte Salomon was twenty-three years old in 1940 when she made a painting of her face—a nameless, stateless, Jewish face. At the time, she was living as a refugee from in Villefranche on the French Riviera, and she had just made a startling discovery: that eight members of her family, one by one, over the years, had committed suicide. With this traumatic revelation in mind, she arrived at what she called “The question: whether to take her own life or to undertake something eccentric and mad.” Something “eccentric and mad” turned out to be an artwork in over seven hundred scenes, painted during one year (1941–1942), enriched by dialogues, soliloquies and musical references, arranged into acts and scenes, and titled “Life? Or Theater? An .” This massive artwork recounted the story of her Berlin Jewish family from World War I up to the day in 1941 when she decided to paint her life rather than to take it, then sat down by the Mediterranean “and saw deep into the heart of humankind.”

The story she recounted (a true one but in fictionalized form) started with the 1913 suicide of Charlotte Grunwald, daughter of Ludwig and Marianne Grunwald, highly cultured residents of Berlin, and sister of Fränze Grunwald, whose shocked reaction drove her to save others by becoming a nurse. In the hospitals of World War I she fell in love with a young surgeon named Albert Salomon. Their marriage resulted in the birth, on April 16, 1917, of a daughter Charlotte, named after the sister who had taken her life.

In the tense atmosphere of interwar Berlin, little Lotte Salomon watched her father overwork to become a professor at the Berlin University Medical School, and her mother turn to lonely despair. In 1926, when she was nine, Lotte was told her mother had died of influenza. In fact, she had thrown herself out of a window. This and other suicides in the maternal family were kept secret from Lotte for the next thirteen years, for the startling increase in suicides, most dramatically among educated, middle-class German Jewish women, was considered dangerous and shameful. The effect of loss and silence was to make Lotte Salomon both solitary and profoundly observant.

In 1930 Albert Salomon remarried, a dramatic singer named Paula Salomon-Lindberg, who brought into Lotte’s life many acquaintances from the musical world of Berlin, a strong Jewish practice that resulted in Lotte’s confirmation at a synagogue, and a profound relationship

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of love. In fact, the first paintings made by Lotte around the age of thirteen were prompted by the need to set down her stepmother’s face.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Lotte’s father lost his job and began practicing at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, Paula Salomon lost her opera career and began singing for the newly formed Jewish Cultural Association (the Kulturbund), while Lotte, at around age sixteen, dropped out of school and began drawing on her own. In 1936 she was admitted to the famous State Art Academy in Berlin which allowed only 1.5 percent of the school to be Jewish. There she received conventional but excellent training and probably observed modern art at the Nazis’ famous Degenerate Art Show in 1938. She also attended the Kulturbund’s many outstanding performances for Jewish audiences, where she learned to see art as a source of morale and a means of self-expression when little was allowed. During those years she also began a passionate love affair with a Jewish musician twice her age, Alfred Wolfson, who came into her household as an accompanist for Paula. He alone saw Lotte’s depth and skill, and encouraged her to search for her soul in painting, like Orpheus entering the underworld.

With the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 (“”), everything changed for the Salomon family. Albert Salomon was tortured in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and after his release Lotte was sent for safety to her maternal grandparents in southern France. Arriving in Villefranche in January 1939, she found her grandmother deeply depressed, tried to rescue her, but failed. In spring 1940, she witnessed her grandmother’s suicide, learned from her grandfather of seven other family suicides, including her own mother’s, and saw herself as designated heir to this terrible legacy. “Dear God,” Charlotte cries out in the paintings, “just let me not go mad.” To her parents, now refugees in , she wrote: “I will create a story so as not to lose my mind.”

In May 1940 France’s Vichy government imprisoned German nationals as France’s enemies, sending Lotte and her grandfather to the concentration camp of Gurs in the Pyrenees, where she watched many artists produce works amid wretched conditions. Released in summer 1940, they returned to the Villefranche home of Ottilie Moore, a generous American to whom Charlotte Salomon dedicated the artwork she was about to begin. Supporting herself by painting greeting cards and portraits for Ottilie Moore, she eventually moved away from her grandfather in 1941 and began creating her autobiographical masterpiece in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, where an innkeeper remembered her humming tunes while painting. Her technique was to paint scenes from her life, attach tracing-paper overlays with words and melodies, create a playbill introducing the characters, add a narrator, summon an invented audience, and announce “This play is set in the period from 1913 to 1940 in , later in .” The notebook-size paintings were done in gouache, with bright exquisite colors in the early scenes, darkening as the story proceeded, while the dialogues and narrations ranged from witty and sardonic to grave and desperate. Using all the devices of drama, the artist created something unique in the history of art and of autobiography. Yet at the same time, the idea of creating profiles and remembrances occurred to persecuted Jewish artists and writers all over Europe.

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Essential to Lotte Salomon’s own safety, the Riviera was occupied by Italy in 1942, and Italians were not deporting Jews. Returning to Villefranche, she moved in with another German-speaking

Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and after she became pregnant, they felt safe enough to register their marriage, on June 17, 1943, at the Nice town hall. Although local antisemitism ran high, the Italian zone of France remained a kind of sanctuary. This anomaly so infuriated the Germans that when they occupied the Riviera in September 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent his best agent, SS Captain , to carry out roundup operations there. Meanwhile, a large-scale rescue plan by an Italian Jewish banker and a Capuchin monk persuaded many Jews, probably Lotte and Alexander Nagler among them, to remain near Nice. Brunner, however, moved quickly, and on September 24, 1943 arrested both of them in Villefranche, shipping them by train to the transit camp of Drancy outside Paris. In this camp, also run by Brunner, inmates had no idea where the deportation trains were going. Asked her occupation for a transport list, Charlotte Salomon said truthfully “graphic artist.” On October 7, 1943, Transport No. 60 left France and arrived three days later at an unknown destination. As with most transports from France and other places, the first selection beside the train was the crucial one, separating men from women and children. At this last station on the long road toward extinction, men like Alexander Nagler were sometimes sent into slavery. Women usually, pregnant women always, were killed on arrival. And so, in her very first hour at Auschwitz, Charlotte Salomon lost her life.

But she had packaged and hidden her work, “Life? Or Theater?”—saying to a trusted friend, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Her “whole life” was found in Villefranche after the war by Albert and Paula Salomon. Brought to Amsterdam, it was donated to the Jewish Historical Museum there. Albert and Paula Salomon had survived the war by hiding in Holland; later, Albert resumed his career as a physician and Paula became a distinguished teacher of voice, though never again a singer; Lotte’s lover Alfred Wolfson had fled to England where he trained singers in an unusually liberating method; Alexander Nagler died of exhaustion in Auschwitz; SS Captain Alois Brunner escaped to Syria where he designed antisemitic propaganda and torture machines for the government; though tried in absentia in several countries, he was never apprehended. “Life? Or Theater?” went on permanent exhibit at the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, while the collection also traveled in major exhibits throughout the world.

What remains of Charlotte Salomon herself is the great graphic power and the excruciating struggle to know and record the truth. In the thick of despair she wrote: “If I can’t find any joy in my life or my work, I am going to kill myself.” But at the end of “Life? Or Theater?” she realized that “she did not have to kill herself like her ancestors, for she could create her world anew, out of the depths.” On one of the late paintings appears a prophetic caption: “I will live for them all.”

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WORKS

The paintings of Life? Or Theater? and all studies for the work are owned by the Charlotte Salomon Foundation of Amsterdam and housed in the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. Paintings can be viewed on the museum’s web site: http://www.jhm.nl

Salomon, Charlotte. Charlotte: Life or Theater? An Autobiographical Play by Charlotte Salomon. Translated by Leila Vennewitz. New York: 1981.

The first full edition of the work published in English.

Salomon, Charlotte. Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?. London: 1998.

A smaller-format full edition, including essays, prepared for an exhibition at the Royal Academy, London.

Salomon, Charlotte. Charlotte: A Diary in Pictures. New York: 1963.

A first short edition of eighty reproductions.

Bibliography Felstiner, Mary. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. New York: 1994; Berkeley: 1997. Full-length biography with extensive illustrations and bibliography. Fischer-Defoy, Christine. Charlotte Salomon—Leben oder Theater? Berlin: 1986. Anthology of essays and interviews in German. Kaplan, Marion K. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in . New York: 1998. Overview of the condition of German Jews under the Nazis. Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore Weitzman, editors. Women in the Holocaust. New Haven: 1998. Anthology of essays. Films Herzberg, Judith, and Franz Weisz. Charlotte. 1980. First feature film with actors, in English. Dindo, Richard, and Esther Hoffenberg. C’est toute ma vie. 1992.

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