The
individual story, as always, brings home the general history. Even more so,
when that story has been expressed in an extraordinary way. This is true of
Agnes’ jacket, a straightjacket of a woman in an asylum in the 1890’s, who
could only express herself by embroidering words and phrases onto her jacket.
Heartrending.
During the
last 2 years of exile in France before she was deported, Charlotte Salomon
wrote and painted her life in an amazingly touching pictorial story called Leben? oder Theater? The Jewish History
Museum in Amsterdam had it published in a voluminous tome, which has sucked me
in in its intensity, in its compelling power.