A SUITCASE IN THE OLIVE GROVE:Charlotte Salomon’s Fierce Waltz With History
The story starts with a battered leather suitcase, the kind that creaks when you unlatch it. Inside are 769 sheets of cheap French drawing paper, layered like stage flats: gouache scenes, penciled dialogue, and musical notes scrawled in the margins. Together they form Leben? oder Theater?—Life? or Theatre?—the autobiographical epic Charlotte Salomon painted in hiding between 1940 and 1942.
Several pages from Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theater?
ACT 1 — BERLIN OVERTURE
Salomon grew up in a cultured Jewish family in Berlin, her mother a pianist, her father a surgeon. She entered the State Art School just as Nazi decrees began prying “non-Aryans” from public life. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, her parents bundled the twenty-one-year-old onto a train to the south of France—their sole, desperate safety plan.
Charlotte Solomon
ACT II — PAINTING FOR DEAR LIFE
Exile offered no peace. Sharing a cramped villa near Nice with volatile grandparents, Charlotte discovered a litany of family suicides and watched her grandmother leap from a window in 1940. A doctor friend found her nearly catatonic and advised, “Paint your life, or lose your mind.” She took the prescription literally: sixteen-hour days, poster paints, and a hand-lettered libretto that turned memory into opera.
She staged every scene—Berlin classrooms, lovers’ spats, Kristallnacht shards—as if directing a musical inside her skull. She even assigned colours to characters and penciled cues for Schubert or Offenbach in the margins. The project ballooned into three acts, each labelled, numbered, and pinned to drying lines that criss-crossed the villa’s attic.
Self-Portrait
ACT III — GESTAPO CODA
In September 1943, Vichy police knocked at dawn. Charlotte, five months pregnant and newly married to fellow refugee Alexander Nagler, thrust the suitcase into the arms of a trusted neighbour with a breathless plea: “Take good care of it. It is my whole life.” Ten days later she was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.
The suitcase survived. After the war it travelled to Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, which now stewards the cycle and sends portions on cautious tour—most recently a full-scale presentation at Munich’s Lenbachhaus (March–September 2023) that spilled 124 shimmering panels along an underground Kunstbau gallery Mousse Magazine and Publishing. In 2024 the museum re-imagined the work as a 1930s cinema for Charlotte Salomon in Close-Up, tracing film’s influence on her storyboard style jck.nl.
WHY THE PAINTINGS STILL SING
Life? or Theatre? reads today like a proto-graphic novel: a mash-up of comic sequencing, German Expressionist colour, and Broadway blocking. Yet the punch is emotional: Salomon narrates her own erasure in real time, scene by feverish scene, refusing pathos in favour of crackling theatrical energy. Where most Holocaust art looks back in mourning, hers stares forward, mid-stride, insisting on invention even as the walls close in.
POST-SCRIPT — THE SUITCASE OPENS
Visitors who trace the panels around a gallery often describe a weird acceleration: the joyfully caricatured Berlin childhood, the sudden switch to ochre Vichy uniforms, the final pages where figures dissolve into bleeding reds and Charlotte scrawls, “Keep this safe, it is my whole life.” You exit the show blinking, aware you have just watched a young woman race history—brush in hand, suitcase waiting by the door.
And you realise the title question, Life? or Theatre?, was never rhetorical. For Charlotte Salomon, theatre—the act of staging memory—became the only way to keep life from vanishing altogether. The suitcase closed; the curtains never did.