Jews From Germany

"One day her grandmother brought her to see me, and there she stood, slender, blue eyed.. .The conversation was of no interest for her. The only thing that absorbed her for the moment was the southern landscape Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. All this light and colour was new to her and struck a profound chord in her mystical, sensitive nature.. .All day long she sat in the garden, drawing and painting. Or she would lie for hours under an orange tree, looking in the blue sky.. .Wherever she happened to be, she pulled out her sketchbook. She had to unburden herself, and her language was pencil or brush.."

"...might possibly preserve her from suicide inasmuch as she remembered one of Amadeus's favorite utterances: Love, know thyself first in order to love thy neighbour. And then: one has to go into oneself - into one's childhood - to be able to go out of oneself. And he felt that the movie was the machine of modern man as a means of going out of oneself. And finally she recalled the famous couple embracing under a bathrobe, functioning as one person."

"And now something strange happened to our Charlotte. While busy painting, as she always was, she fell asleep in the midday sun. And when she awoke, the finished portrait of her once so ardently beloved Daberlohn [ = Alfred Wolfsohn ] lay before her. However, she tore the sheet into a hundred thousand shreds.. ..she sought for an explanation.. .Then her glace fell on one of her old paintings representing Death and the Maiden. And suddenly she knew..."

"...two things. First that Daberlohn's eyes seemed to say: 'Death and the Maiden, that is the two of us;' and second, that she still loved him as much as ever. And if he was Death, then everything was alright, then she did not have to kill herself like her ancestors.. .So she was in fact the living model for his theories, and she remembered..."

"...his book, Orpheus, or the Way to a Death Mask, of which he had said that he regretted not having written it as a poem. 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."

"And from that came: Life or Theatre?"

"Fashion drawing teacher: Yes, drawing is a difficult art. One has to have some talent for it - and unfortunately you haven't. Charlotte: 'No, I refuse to stay here with this stupid old cow, where through the dirty window even the sun's bright ray can only dimly play.. .Only he who dares can win. Only he who dares can begin."

"Daberlohn's diagnosis [about the etching she made as his portrait] holds encouragement for Charlotte.. ..Daberlohn (in his letter) 'In my opinion you are destined to create something above average.' .. ..'Above average.' She is elated by his letter and really feels quite proud.. .While beginning to paint the buttercup-strewn meadow where she happens to be sitting, she decides to make his prophecy come true and actually create something 'above average'."

"..even happens that each character has to sing a different text, resulting in a chorus. The varied nature of the paintings should be attributed less to the author than to the varies nature of the characters to be portrayed. The author [= Charlotte Salomon] has tried.. ..to go completely out of herself to allow the characters to sing or speak in their own voices. In order to achieve this, many artistic values had to be renounced, but I hope that.. ..this will be forgiven. - The author, St. Jean, August 1940/42"

"..Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must - like the creation as a whole so it seems to me - remain shrouded in darkness."

"Charlotte: 'I have some more [paintings she recently made] to show you'. Daberlohn: Well, let's meet this evening... .. Isn't it absurd to address each other so formally? You're such a baby – here, let me hold your hand.. ..Real painter's hands'. Charlotte: 'To me they're just ugly'.. ..'You would be a wonderful subject for a portrait -' Daberlohn (to himself) : 'Little girl, if you only knew what one has to go through to be able to paint'."

"The creation of the following paintings is to be imagined as follows: A person is sitting beside the sea. She is painting. A tune suddenly enters her mind. As she starts to hum it, she notices that the tune exactly matches what she is trying to commit to paper. A texts forms in her head, and she starts to sing the tune, with her own words, over and over again in a loud voice until the painting seems complete. Frequently, several texts take shape, and the result is a duet, or it.."

"Keep this safe, it is my whole life."

"I became my mother, my grandmother. I learned to travel all their paths and became all of them.. .I knew I had a mission, and no power on earth could stop me."

"The following pictures are those which to the author seem the strangest. Without doubt they have their origin in Michelangelo Rome series of the main section that was sung with the loudest and most penetrating voice of this entire opus. ('Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo')"

"..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 surface and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths. And from that came Life or Theater???"

"That which van Gogh attained later in life.. ..a brushstroke of unprecedented lightness, which unfortunately seems to have a distinctly pathological side, I have attained already.."

"Consisting of a 'Prelude', a 'Main Section', and an 'Epilogue' - (dedicated to Ottillie Moore)"

"'The tri-coloured play with music begins' (in Deutsch: Das Drei Farben Singespiel beginnt..) the cast is as follows Dr. and MRS. Knarre, a married couple Franziska and Charlotte, their daughters Dr. Kahn, a physician Charlotte Kahn, his daughter Paulinka Bimbam, a singer Dr. Singsong, a versatile person Professor Klingklang, a famous conductor An Art teacher Professor and Students at an art academy and Chorus.. ..The action takes places during the years 1913 to 1940 in Germany, later in Nice, France"

"My life began when my grandmother decided to take hers, when I found out that my mother's whole family did the same thing [told bij het grandfather c. 1941], when I found out that I am the only one surviving, and when I felt the same inclination deep inside of me, craving for despair and death."

"Daberlohn writes: 'The creation of Adam is God's final act which He hurls from His heights into the depths. It is not the same God Who creates eve. This is the tragedy of the king who must hand over his dominion to his son…"

"..Thus in the presence of the scorching sun, purple sea, and luxuriant blossoms, the memory of an experience of her fervid early love [Daberlohn = Alfred Wolfsohn ] came back to her. And she tried to visualize that face, that figure. And Io, she succeeded, and she noticed that this was a very interesting occupation. For she discovered that that figure..."

"Franziska (mother of Charlotte): 'In Heaven everything is much more beautiful than here in earth – and when your Mummy has turned into a little angel she'll.. ..bring a letter, telling her what's like in Heaven..'. Franziska was of somewhat sentimental disposition."

"'Life? or Theater?' - A Play with Music - C.S."

"Daberlohn: 'One must first go into oneself to be able to go out of oneself. One means of going out of oneself is, for me, the movie, man's machine for producing himself'."

"Röhm coined the slogan that there must be ‘second revolution’, this time, not against the Left, but against the Right; in his diary Goebbels agreed with him. On April 18 he maintained that this second revolution was being discussed ‘everywhere among the people’; in reality, he said, this only meant that first one was not yet ended. ‘Now we shall soon have to settle with the reaction. The revolution must nowhere call a halt."

"He [Hitler] had learned much from Leon Trotzky, whose slogan of the permanent revolution he now adopted: ‘The German Revolution will not be concluded until the whole of the German nation is given a new form, a new organization, and a new structure.’"

"The twenty-six-year-old Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler youth, who could boast of standing close to Hitler, declared bluntly in those revolutionary June weeks: ‘A socialist and anti-capitalist attitude is the most salient characteristic of the Young National Socialist Germany.’"

"The great modern mass-parties, first the foremost the Fascists, have re-discovered an old historical truth which seemed long since buried: that men often and masses almost always pay service not to their interests but to their illusions."

"At Munich, at the time of the Soviet Republic, he [Hitler] interceded with his comrades on behalf of the Social-Democratic Government and, in heated discussions, espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists."

"They could resign themselves to the Republic no less than the big industrialists, who did not favour the various abortive revolts and did not, for the most part, encourage National-Socialism."

"Hitler expressed it in a form which made it intelligible to the masses. ‘We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.’"

"Before the war [World War I] the anti-Semitic movement was of no political importance in Germany."

"The Nazi party had been too hasty in incorporating the word ‘Socialist’ in its title, Hitler indeed wished it to be ‘Social Revolutionary.’"

"Karl Marx was himself an anti-Semite: that is to say, an opponent of bourgeois Jewry. Inversely, most Jews are anti-Marxist."

"The bourgeois, even the Nationalist Press, began to take fright and talk of Bolshevism and Hitler himself boasted: ‘In our movement the two extremes come together: the Communists from the Left and the officers and students from the Right. These two have always been the most active elements, and it was the greatest crime that they used to oppose each other in street fights.’… Our party has already succeeded in uniting these two utter extremes within the ranks of our storm troops. They will form the core of the great German liberation movement, in which all without distinction will stand together when the day comes to say: The Nation arises, the storm is breaking!’"

"At length a force of three million S.A. men was pushing on behind him [Röhm], and God knew whither they were pushing. There were large numbers of Communists and Social Democrats among them; many of the storm troopers were called ‘beefsteaks—brown and red within. Jest were retailed such as the following: one S.A. man says to another: ‘In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out."

"Now comes death, now one must hold one's head high!"

"Gustav Landauer wrote: “Uprising as basic law, change and overthrow as a rule for all times… that was the greatness and the holiness of the mosaic social order. We need that again: new rules and a spirit of change that does not fix things and laws definitively but declares itself permanent. The revolution should become part of our social order, the basic rule of our basic law”."

"Anarchy is not a matter of the future; it is a matter of the present. It is not a matter of making demands; it is a matter of how one lives."

"There is no "state" on the one hand, and people who live in it on the other. The "state" much rather belongs to what people do and understand. People do not live in the state. The state lives in the people."

"A goal can only be reached if the means are in consonance with its essential nature. One will never attain non-violence through violence."

"Now it can become clear to man that freedom and peace of the nations can only come when as Jesus and his followers, and in our time above all Tolstoi advised, they choose to fully abstain from any violence."

"In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor."

"Despite the 43 years I've devoted to cinematography, I must admit that I was scarcely prepared for the many problems which were to confront me upon my initial excursion into the realm of television with the I Love Lucy show. Fortunately, this motion picture experience helped to cushion many of the serious problems and aided me in adapting myself to this new medium."

"Retakes, a standard procedure on the Hollywood scene, are not desirable in making TV films with audience participation. Dubbed-in laughs are artificial and, consequently, used only in emergencies. Close-ups, another routine step in standard film-making, were discarded since such glamour treatment stood out like a sore thumb."

"The public acceptance of I Love Lucy and Our Miss Brooks has been a source of great inspiration for me. The challenge has been a real one — one I have found both stimulating and exciting."

"As I watch television films on my own set I am continually aware that I do not have a complete control of the end results. For there is an engineer in every television station control booth who can change the screen image according to his instructions and depending upon the condition of his equipment. And there are the TV viewers who are their own "engineers." I believe that the time is not too distant when the only engineers will be the technicians who actually create the film that is transmitted. Only when that day arrives will we really have film quality comparable to motion picture standards as we know them today."

"As faith in mankind, Israel's faith is hope. And it is this epitome of Israel's prophetism, this hope in mankind's future, that comprises the substance of the messianic idea."

"Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world."