Home Mimetic Violence and Sacred Performance in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theatre?
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Mimetic Violence and Sacred Performance in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theatre?

  • Ben Wexler EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 12, 2025
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill
Naharaim
From the journal Naharaim

Abstract

Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theatre?, a collection of paintings arranged into a work of theatre, represents a semi-autobiographical response to the social and aesthetic crisis of German Jewry during the rise of the Nazi party. This article uses a theoretical background in mimesis, performance, and ritual to understand Salomon’s social and aesthetic intervention. Salomon uses structures of doubling and mimesis to emphasize the divergence of German and Jewish society. At the aesthetic level, she embraces Modernist art as an alternative to conservative fascist representational conventions. At the social level, she critiques the conformist character of the bourgeois German Jewish family, exposing its underlying patriarchal violence. Her own project seeks to reconstruct German Jewish society through the artist’s own creative performance of art and family history, constructing a ritual community in solitude.


Corresponding author: Ben Wexler, Graduate Student, History, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America, E-mail:

References

Alphen, Ernst van. “Autobiography as resistance to history: Charlotte Salomon’s life or theater?” In Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997: 65–89.10.1515/9781503616448-006Search in Google Scholar

Arppe, Tina. “Sacred violence: girard, Bataille and the vicissitudes of human desire.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 2 (January 2009): 31–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2009.9672747.Search in Google Scholar

Assmann, Aleida. Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee. Frankfurt: Campus, 1993.Search in Google Scholar

Bailey, Christian. German Jews in Love: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023.10.11126/stanford/9781503632790.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986.Search in Google Scholar

Bhabha, Homi K. “‘Race’, time and the revision of modernity.” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1/2 (1991): 193–219, https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.1991.009.Search in Google Scholar

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.Search in Google Scholar

Bohm-Duchen, Monica. “A life before Auschwitz.” In Reading Charlotte Salomon. Ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006: 21–33.Search in Google Scholar

Borch, Christian. “The Imitative, Contagious, and Suggestible Roots of Modern society: toward a Mimetic Foundation of Social Theory.” In Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. Ed. Christian Borsch. London: Routledge 2019: 3–35.10.4324/9781351034944-1Search in Google Scholar

Buerkle, Darcy. Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013.10.3998/mpub.4111310Search in Google Scholar

Chare, Nicholas. “To play many parts: reading Between the lines of Charlotte Salomon/cs’s Leben? Oder theater? Nicholas chare in conversation with griselda pollock.” RACAR : Revue d’art Canadienne 43, no. 1 (August 7, 2018): 63–80, https://doi.org/10.7202/1050821ar.Search in Google Scholar

Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.Search in Google Scholar

Fischer-Defoy, Christine and Judith C.E. Belinfante. “Life: biography 1917-1943,” in Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1998: 15–25.Search in Google Scholar

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge, 2007.10.4324/9780203969304Search in Google Scholar

Freedman, Ariela. “Charlotte Salomon, degenerate art, and modernism as resistance.” Journal of Modern Literature vol 41, no 1 (Fall 2017): 3–18, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.41.1.02.Search in Google Scholar

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.10.2307/j.ctv1198v7zSearch in Google Scholar

Fritsch-Vivié, Gabriele. Gegen alle Widerstände: Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941. Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich Verlag Berlin, 2013.Search in Google Scholar

Gillerman, Sharon. Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.10.11126/stanford/9780804757119.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, (Baltimore, MD: Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979).Search in Google Scholar

Harvey, Ryan and Aaron Ridley. Nietzsche’s the Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner: A Critical Guide and Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022.10.1515/9781474461382Search in Google Scholar

Hirsch, Lily E. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.10.3998/mpub.4757981Search in Google Scholar

Hoeven, Liesbeth. “A Religion En Plein Public. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory.” In Religious Stories We Live by, edited by R. Ruard Ganzevoort, Maaike De Haardt, and Michael Scherer-Rath, 279–90. Leiden: Brill, 2014.10.1163/9789004264069_022Search in Google Scholar

Levi, Eric. “Towards an aesthetic of fascist opera.” In Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945. Ed. Gunther Berghaus. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996: 260–276.10.1515/9781785330476-016Search in Google Scholar

Malkin, Jeanette R. and Freddie Rokem. Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010.10.2307/j.ctt20mvgktSearch in Google Scholar

McNeil, Jeffery D. “The mimetic sacred: girard and bataille transcending desire.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 30 (May 1, 2023): 103–29, https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.30.0103.Search in Google Scholar

Mendes-Flohr, Paul. German Jews: A Dual Identity. First Edition. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999.Search in Google Scholar

Mosse, George L. German Jews beyond Judaism. New York, NY: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985.Search in Google Scholar

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Case of Wagner, Nietsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. London: T.N. Foulis, 1911.Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Crimes, confession and the everyday: challenges in reading Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder theater? 1941–1942.” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 2 (August 2014): 200–235.10.1177/1470412914532319Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Life-Mapping: or, Walter Benjamin and Charlotte Salomon Never Met,” in Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis. Ed. Griselda Pollock. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007: 63–88.10.5040/9780755604050.ch-006Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Mapping the ‘Bios’ in Two Graphic Systems with Gender in Mind.” In Biographies and Space: Placing the Subject in Art and Architecture. Ed. Dana Arnold. London: Routledge, 2008: 115–138.Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Staging subjectivity: love and loneliness in the scene of painting with Charlotte salomon and edvard munch.” Text Matters vol 7 no. 7 (2017): 114-144, https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2017-0007.Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Theater of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon’s Modernist Fairytale.” In Reading Charlotte Salomon. Ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006: 34–72.Search in Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.Search in Google Scholar

Radhen, Tillie van. Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925. Trans. Marcus Brainard. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.Search in Google Scholar

Rauch, Leah Hansen, “‘Secure in the two-dimensional world’: the filmbühne and Jewish audiences in the third reich, 1938–1941.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31, no. 3 (September 2, 2017): 227–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2017.1371804.Search in Google Scholar

Rovit, Rebecca. The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012.Search in Google Scholar

Salomon, Charlotte. Leben? oder Theatre? (1941-1942). Amsterdam, Joods Cultureel Kwartier, charlotte.jck.nl.Search in Google Scholar

Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania UP, 1985.10.9783/9780812200928Search in Google Scholar

Schiermer, Bjørn, “Durkheim on Imitation.” In Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. Ed. Christian Borsch. London: Routledge 2019: 54–73.10.4324/9781351034944-3Search in Google Scholar

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains. London: Routledge, 2011.10.4324/9780203852873Search in Google Scholar

Scholem, Gershom. “Against the myth of the German-Jewish dialogue.” On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. New York, NY: Schocken, 1975: 61–65.Search in Google Scholar

Steinberg, Michael P., “Reading Charlotte Salomon: History, Memory, Modernism.” In Reading Charlotte Salomon. Ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006: 1–20.Search in Google Scholar

Steinberg, Michael P.“Charlotte Salomon’s modernism,” in Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New. Ed. Philip V. Bohlman and Sander L. Gilman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009: 125–152.Search in Google Scholar

Stompor, Stephan. Jüdisches Musik- und Theaterleben unter dem NS-Staat. Hannover: Europäisches Zentrum für Jüdische Musik, 2001.Search in Google Scholar

Timms, Edward and Deborah Schultz, Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon, and Arnold Daghani. London: Routledge, 2009.Search in Google Scholar

Timms, Edward, “Creative synergies: charlotte salomon and alfred wolfsohn.” In Reading Charlotte Salomon. Ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 105–113.Search in Google Scholar

Wagner, Richard. “Das Judenthum in der Musik.” Leipzig: Verlagsbuchhandlung von JJ Weber, 1869.Search in Google Scholar

Yovel, Yirmiyahu. “Nietzsche Contra wagner On The Jews.” In Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, 126–43. Princeton University Press, 2009.10.1515/9781400825332.126Search in Google Scholar

Ziporyn, Brook, “Durkheim, Bataille, and Girard on Sacrifice and the Sacred.” Online Appendix A, Supplement 9. In Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2024.Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2024-03-04
Accepted: 2025-06-12
Published Online: 2025-09-12

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 25.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/naha-2024-0011/html
Scroll to top button