Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.
| ISBN: | 9780472118557 |
| Publication date: | 13th December 2013 |
| Author: | Darcy C Buerkle |
| Publisher: | The University of Michigan Press an imprint of University of Michigan Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 412 pages |
| Series: | Michigan Studies in Comparative Jewish Cultures |
| Genres: |
Literature: history and criticism Social groups: religious groups and communities European history |
Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.
Nothing Happened features in the following genres: Literature: history and criticism, Social groups: religious groups and communities, European history
Nothing Happened is available in Hardback
Nothing Happened was written by Darcy C Buerkle and published by The University of Michigan Press an imprint of University of Michigan Press
Nothing Happened has 412 pages
Yes it is part of Michigan Studies in Comparative Jewish Cultures series