Charlotte Salomon Quotes

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?] Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

And with dream-awakened eyes, she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.

There are now little brass plaques on the ground outside this address. These are Stolpersteine. Tributes to the victims of the Holocaust. There are many of them in Berlin, especially in Charlottenburg. They are not easy to spot. You must walk with your head down, seeking memories between the cobblestones. In front of 15 Wielandstrasse, three names can be read. Paula, Albert, and Charlotte. But on the wall, there is only one commemorative plaque. The one for Charlotte Salomon.

In February, 1943, eight months before she was murdered in Auschwitz, the German painter Charlotte Salomon killed her grandfather. Salomon’s grandparents, like many Jews, had fled Germany in the mid-nineteen-thirties, with a stash of “morphine, opium, and Veronal” to use “when their money ran out.” But Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal. It was Herr Doktor Lüdwig Grünwald, not “Herr Hitler,” who, Salomon wrote, “symbolized for me the people I had to resist.