The villa Masséna is hosting an exhibition on Charlotte Salomon until May 24th. This young woman, the daughter of a Berlin medical professor, was born on April 16, 1917, and died in Auschwitz on October 10, 1943.
Her brief life, just over a quarter of a century, was very full. We had already discussed the visual artist and painter during an exhibition in her honor at the Villefranche citadel.
We will also dwell on her life, her family, and her tragic fate, which was sealed with the rise to power of xenophobia and racism in Germany. These two plagues re-emerge from poorly extinguished embers and must be promptly snuffed out. Let’s return to Berlin before the eclipse of freedom.
Her father, Albert Salomon, was a professor of medicine at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Charlotte wasn’t even 9 years old when her mother committed suicide in 1926. It was an open wound that would never heal.
In September 1930, her father remarried Paula Lindberg, a lyrical artist. The relationship between the young girl and her stepmother was difficult; Charlotte was sad and shy. In 1933, she was forced to leave school without being able to take her Abitur (the German equivalent of the high school diploma) and joined the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. She was prevented from participating in competitions because she was Jewish. Her father, banned from practicing his profession, was interned in 1936.
In January 1939, Charlotte left Germany first for Italy, then for the south of France, where she found her maternal grandparents in Villefranche. They resided in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the property of Ottilie Moore, an American who sheltered refugees.
In March 1939, her father and stepmother managed to leave Germany for Holland. From September 1939 until the armistice, German refugees were interned. Charlotte and her grandfather, whose grandmother had also committed suicide, found themselves in the Gurs camp in March 1940.
After the armistice, they returned to Villefranche-sur-Mer, then to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat at the Belle Aurore guest house. At the end of 1942, Charlotte joined her grandfather in Nice; he died in February 1943.
On June 17, 1943, Charlotte married Alexander Wagner, another Austrian refugee. The Italian capitulation brought the Germans to Nice, and after being denounced, she was arrested with her husband, deported to Drancy in September 1943, and then to Auschwitz, where she was gassed while four months pregnant on October 10, 1943. Her husband suffered the same fate on January 1, 1944.
In this haven of peace, an oasis protected from the racist laws of Vichy and Germany, Charlotte painted and created 1,325 gouaches or watercolors. The Italian occupant showing little zeal in its zone of occupation. Her painting is autobiographical. With three primary colors, she depicted her life.
Life or Theater? A very good question. Life, certainly hers, is what she expressed to Doctor Moridis when entrusting her works shortly before her arrest: “Take good care of them, this is my entire life.” And a theater, the theater of her existence, marked by the suicides of two close relatives.
Ottilie Moore returned to Villefranche in 1947, and Doctor Moridis gave her the precious deposit of Charlotte’s works. Her father and stepmother, miraculously surviving the camps, recovered Charlotte’s works and ceded them in 1959 to the Amsterdam museum, then Charlotte Salomon’s work was entrusted to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam.
Since then, the gouaches and watercolors of this talented artist and victim of Nazi barbarism have been periodically exhibited in museums and galleries.
That Nice and the villa Masséna can show Charlotte Salomon to the public is a privilege, whose full impact can only be appreciated at the end of the visitors’ tour.
Thierry Jan
