When the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Käthe Kollwitz was sixty-five and, by common consent, the moral conscience of German art. Her dark lithographs of hunger, rebellion, and mourning hung in museums across the country; newspapers called her “the mother of the nation.” She might have retreated into safe respectability. Instead, four weeks after Hitler became chancellor, she put her name to a petition urging the Left to unite against him.

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.