Abstract
This dissertation investigates the role of grief in the visual text Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel (Life? or Theater? A Musical Opera) produced by the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon in hiding from the Nazis between 1941 and 1942. In this autobiographical material, consisting of a collection of over 700 gouache paintings that come with an accompanying script, Salomon creates a visual language for mourning and suffering related to the familial history of Jewish women’s suicides alongside the artist’s experience of displacement amidst the period of the Holocaust. My study traces the facets of Salomon’s multiperspectival visual storytelling in which the artist transforms grief and trauma into a creative language. My survey shows how this transformation can be regarded as a mourning practice enabled through aesthetic production. The study is incited by the following questions: How can we better understand the interrelationship between grief, gender, displacement, and aesthetic practice? How does the artist negotiate her human right to mourn in a period of ongoing loss under the threat of persecution? Drawing from contemporary autobiography theory, I argue that Salomon produced her work out of an impulse to not only preserve a life story amidst the threat of its obliteration but also to establish her artistic legacy. By analyzing both image and text in their intermedial interplay, I illuminate both the narrative and visual strategies that Salomon employs to tell her story. Doing so, I combine perspectives from cultural theory and literary theory that put Salomon’s idiosyncratic artwork into a new light and enhances our reading of it. Using the concept of life writing, each chapter investigates the visual narrative strategies with which the artist forms a story that gives testimony to and materializes an archive about the history of Jewish women’s suffering and grief that thwarts both the discursive and familial elision of this reality. With its focus on the performative facets of the narrative voices as well as the multifaceted textures of grief this study presents not only a new intervention into the Salomon scholarship but also into current discourses on the meaning of aesthetic production amidst ongoing crises. Scholarship on Charlotte Salomon has to date been situated primarily within art history and literary studies. This interdisciplinary study bridges fields, foregrounding auto/biography theory as its principal approach while simultaneously contributing to ongoing conversations in German Studies, Jewish Studies, art history, and exile studies.
Committee Chair
Caroline Kita
Committee Members
Aylin Bademsoy; Erin McGlothlin; Lynne Tatlock; Melanie Micir; Tabea Linhard
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
5-8-2025
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/dtf4-xp27
Author's ORCID
https://orcid.org/https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0539-0039
Recommended Citation
Finkenstein, Franziska, "Sitting with Wounds: The Visual Poetics of Grief in Charlotte Salomon’s Graphic Life Narrative Life? or Theater?" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3550.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/dtf4-xp27