The Way to the Depths

CHARLOTTE by Charlotte Salomon. 80 color plates. Harcourt, Brace & World. $8.50.

The girl anticipates her grandmother's suicide with a picture. Trees are aswirl in the heart of an olive forest.

In the distance, they have twisted into a vortex of somber terrors. The grandmother stands to one side, ignoring the menace of a sunflower that ignites the trees. Reflected fire gleams in the old woman's vacant eye. At the side of the painting, the girl adds a caption in verse:

Pain and terror overshadow the world,

The rule of law and reason is suspended,

Friendship and trust are destroyed.

There is no meaning left to life . . .

Hopeless Desert. Charlotte Salomon wrote those words when she was 25, and though she assigned them to her grandmother, they were her words. Each of the 80 paintings in her diary of despair echoes them--first with innocent uncertainty, then with primitive clarity, finally with resignation. Older than Anne Frank but, like her, a German, a Jew, and doomed to die, she recounts her life as a string of fatal instants that flash past like dagger thrusts.

Charlotte was born in Berlin in 1917; in her picture of the scene, her mother's face is as wan as her bed sheet.

When Charlotte was nine, her mother committed suicide; Charlotte's picture shows her just before she leaped from a window. Her father was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; her picture of him working under a guard's whip is a frenzied sketch, as if she could not bear to confront her easel. She fled from Germany; the scene of her last night at home is a lonely vigil over suitcases.

All her paintings were done in the garden of a retreat in Villefranche, where she fled at 21 to live with her exiled grandparents when the Nazi persecution of the Jews began closing in. From this oasis she clearly saw the hopeless desert around her. She painted her lost world in the palette of Provence, but as she turned in upon herself, her colors darkened with her thoughts. And with her shattering gift for picturing her emotions, her style swerved back and forth to the radical reaches of determination and despair.

Forged Card. The pictures recall Anne Frank's diary--but they are dimmer; there is no precocity in them. Charlotte Salomon had studied art, and clearly had been impressed by the paintings of Edvard Munch--works with all the intellectual content of a scream. She painted in pursuit of self-abandonment--only to find that she had created a new world for herself in which she remained the grey onlooker, helpless to change the course of things but committed, all the same, to watch. From this she adopted her only moral: "I wish everyone I know the experience of suffering so that they are forced to find the way to their depths."

Charlotte Salomon lived in Villefranche for four years. After her grandmother's suicide (like her daughter, the old woman leapt out of a window) and her grandfather's death, she was left alone. She fell in love. Her Jewish fiance had a forged identity card. When he applied to marry her, the authorities explained to him that as an Aryan he was forbidden to marry a Jew. He confessed the forgery and they were married. On Sept. 21, 1943 a Gestapo truck drew up to their home. Both died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.