Crimes, confession and the everyday: challenges in reading Charlotte Salomon's Leben? oder theater? 1941-1942

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a Jewish-German artist murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 26. She left one massive artwork comprising 784 paintings with text, music and overlays. What is this work? Why was it made? Since its first exhibition and publication in the 1960s it has been treated as an autobiographical narrative and Holocaust testimony. Resisting both trends, this article reframes the work in terms of gender, the event and the everyday in order to examine the implications of a recent revelation, in a film form (2012), of new evidence that the work structurally functions as a crime narrative, even a confession, in the context of familial sexual abuse. Drawing on Pierre Bayard on detective fiction and Derrida on the archive, the article juxtaposes the visual rhetoric of Frans Weisz's 2012 film and the visual rhetoric of several key sections of Salomon's audio-visual Life? or Theatre?, to tease out the visual evidence for this claim.