Overview

“This is my whole life,” Charlotte Salomon said when she gave her French doctor and friend the enormous suitcase containing her life’s work for safe-keeping. Life? Or theatre? is the result of months of restless work in a small room in a hostel during which Charlotte Salomon appealed to everything inside her: her perfect visual memory, her insight into family and friends, her education at the Art Academy in Berlin and, most of all, the inspiration of her short but intense love for her stepmother’s singing teacher. That is how Charlotte created this singular work of art, a graphic novel avant la lettre, consisting of 781 gouaches and hundreds of drawings—a mixture of paintings, texts, and musical annotations—which together tell the story of a family between the First World War and 1940. In more than one gouache, influences of George Grosz and Modigliani are recognizable, while others are foretastes of the contemporary graphic novel. The work shimmers with beauty and precision. This timeless masterpiece, now published for the first time in a complete edition including several recently discovered gouaches, is truly a unique work by an artist whose life inspired not only David Foenkinos’s internationally bestselling novel Charlotte, but also a movie, a documentary, an opera and a ballet.

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9780715652473

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The greatest book of the 20th century. -- Jonathan Safran Foer

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Charlotte Salomon (Berlin 1917-Auschwitz 1943) was the only child of surgeon Albert Salomon and Fränze Grunwald, and was raised in an assimilated Jewish family. In 1935, she was admitted to the Art Academy. When the persecution of Jews intensified after the Kristallnacht, she fled to her grandparents in France. After the beginning of the war, she and her grandfather were sent to the camp Gurs, in the Pyrenees. In July they were allowed, because of his advanced age, to return to Nice, where a doctor advised Charlotte to start again with her creative work as a way to help process her experiences: tragedy, death, her world collapsing around her. She completed Life? Or theatre? in 1942.

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