Charlotte Salomon, Degenerate Art, and Modernism as Resistance

Charlotte Salomon’s great and strange work Life? or Theater? A Song-Play incorporates word, image and music in ways that challenge aesthetic containment and definition. The Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937–1938 was an important source for Salomon’s innovative mixture of word and image. Where the Degenerate Art Exhibition’s text served to label, vilify, condemn and erase, Salomon’s use of text emphasizes ambiguity, not fixity. It layers the art rather than effacing it. Most importantly, it rejects the Nazi attack on Jewish German artists and people by reclaiming both art and language. Salomon’s creation of a künstlerroman soon after The Nazis’ display of repression and purgation defied the Kunst politik of the regime. Her project was all the more perilous because of her family history of mental illness. Salomon’s use of expressionist conventions and of image-text became elements of a therapeutic technique, a means of telling the story of her own life.