A Chorus of Stones

The Private Life of War

Susan Griffin

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504012218
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Violenza nella società

A brilliant and provocative exploration of the interconnection of private life and the large-scale horrors of war and devastation. A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and a winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award, Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones is an extraordinary reevaluation of history that explores the links between individual lives and catastrophic, world-altering violence. One of the most acclaimed and poetic voices of contemporary American feminism, Griffin delves into the perspective of those whose personal relationships and family histories were profoundly influenced by war and its often secret mechanisms: the bomb-maker and the bombing victim, the soldier and the pacifist, the grand architects who were shaped by personal experience and in turn reshaped the world. Declaring that "each solitary story belongs to a larger story"—and beginning with the brutal and heartbreaking circumstances of her own childhood—Griffin examines how the subtle dynamics of parenthood, childhood, and marriage interweave with the monumental violence of global conflict. She proffers a bold and powerful new understanding of the psychology of war through illuminating glimpses into the personal lives of Ernest Hemingway, Mahatma Gandhi, Heinrich Himmler, British officer Sir Hugh Trenchard, and other historic figures—as well as the munitions workers at Oak Ridge, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, and other humbler yet indispensible witnesses to history.

VI

NOTES TOWARD A SKETCH FOR A WORK IN PROGRESS

If she had lived, what would she have done with the rest of her life? What would she have painted? And would she have gone on singing as she worked?

August 1990

My thought is to weave a journal into the pages of the sixth chapter. Here I will record notes about the process of writing this chapter and the book.

I ask this last question because Charlotte was singing all the time that she painted and wrote her great work, Life or Theatre? Marita Guenther told me this when I went to visit her in the South of France, two years ago. And how did Marita, who never knew Charlotte, know this intimate detail of her life? That is another story which perhaps I will tell later.

August

What I am seeking is the effect of a work in progress, a work that still continues off the page, and is only completed in the imagination.

My own fascination with Charlotte Salomon began over ten years ago. A thick book reproducing her major work, Life or Theatre? A Play with Music, was displayed in the window of a bookstore in my neighborhood. On the cover of this book was a painting of the face of a young woman. As she stared into the eyes of the viewer, her presence was extraordinary. This was a self-portrait in the tradition of Rembrandt, worthy of Käthe Kollwitz, penetrating, frank, evoking at one and the same time a feeling of intimacy and the desire for an equally clear knowledge of oneself.

August

So the chapter will include traces of my own process in telling these stories.

When I opened the book I discovered that this “play” consisted of a series of paintings, 769 in number, which depicted the story of the painter’s life. Words written on the paintings, together with an accompanying text, made the work like a play, with a plot, dialogue, drama. At certain points, Charlotte even indicates music to be played or hummed with it.

August

This last section of the book should be like a sketch for a painting. And not only the journal, but the text too should have, in places, this slightly unfinished quality.

I found the form innovative and exciting, but in the end what truly drew me was the simple fact that she had created this work to save her life.

August

I want the boundaries of the book to be opened, letting in the atmosphere of contemporary events.

Her story begins with a suicide. In 1913, a year before the First World War began, her aunt Charlotte, after whom she was named, jumped into a river in Berlin and drowned. This death was one in a long chain reaction of suicides in her mother’s family. In Life or Theatre? Charlotte traces the pattern back to her mother’s uncle who killed himself. After this there were cousins, then her aunt Charlotte, then her own mother, and finally, almost in her presence, her grandmother committed suicide. She tells the story so she will not repeat this cycle of destruction.

August

There is so much that is extraordinary happening around us at such an intense pace. The end of the Cold War. And the beginning perhaps of another war in the Middle East.

Why is it I find this so compelling, Charlotte’s effort to see herself and her family history honestly, and yet, at the same time, to render what she sees into art? What she has made is a beautiful mirror, but also a self-image that is not static, that lives in the imagination of the viewer, opening up new possibilities to the mind.

August

Events are happening more quickly now than we can absorb them. Borders are changing so rapidly, a map made today will no longer be accurate tomorrow.

At the end of this long book about many kinds of denial, I want to write about testimony. About bearing witness to events in such a way that they become lucid, their inner life revealed. When light is shed in this way, can it not change the course of events? I find Charlotte’s story especially pertinent now because she addresses the question of self-destruction. I have come to believe that our shared movement toward nuclear war is a movement toward mass suicide.

August

For months I have been saving clippings from the newspapers. There is a story, for instance, of the collapse of discipline in the People’s Army of East Germany. The newspapers describe it as an identity crisis.

Perhaps there is something within us as a social body that wishes to die. Or perhaps there is a dimension of ourselves that must be sacrificed if we are to go on living. It is not so much that I expect an answer. It is instead simply the desire to turn and look in that direction.

August

The identity crisis they are talking about is probably one of national boundaries. But of course there are other identities placed in jeopardy now, such as the identity of the warrior.

And there is this also: Charlotte was a civilian who was trapped by the violence of public life, as we are all trapped and held hostage by nuclear weapons now. Her private troubles are depicted against a background of dramatic historical events. Her story is simultaneously a story about war and about a family.

August

Without the Cold War, warriors are not so necessary any more.

Charlotte was born in Berlin between the First and the Second World Wars.

August

One’s identity can be threatened by any change, even a change for the better. I notice it in my own process. The longer certain words remain on the page, the less I want to alter the text.

Charlotte’s family was Jewish, well assimilated into the German middle class. Is it only in her memory or was it true of the atmosphere of her grandparents’ home that all traces of Jewishness were effaced? In Charlotte’s depiction her grandparents’ home has a feeling which is almost international now among people of a class.

August

Met with Shirley Kaufman, who is visiting from Israel. She showed me a poem she wrote recently. I found it very moving. Images of the holocaust mingled, ending with a river of salt. It begins with a story a man told her. A survivor. His first sexual experience. At Bergen Belsen. A stolen moment with himself, touching himself, all the time looking over his shoulder.

Charlotte’s mother Franziska was beautiful, charming and “popular.” Her younger sister, the first Charlotte, felt diminished in her presence. I know something of jealousy among sisters. My mother loved my sister more than she did me. She told me once it was simply a matter of closeness. They had spent more years together before the family diaspora. From the ages of six to eight and then from nine to eleven, I was with my grandparents. I did not add the years up then, nor did I ask if seven years were not enough to form a bond between mother and daughter. I simply shrugged off her explanation as a reality I had long ago accepted.

August

Shirley is worried about the possibility of war. Might Israel be pushed by the United States into using nuclear weapons against Iraq?

When my mother and father divorced, I was sent to my grandmother’s house, and my sister was sent to live with my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, who lived six hundred miles away. Years later she held these miles against me. And something else, I suspect, came between us. My grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family, chose me as her favorite. Then I was blond and my sister dark in a culture that worships blondness and fears darkness. And in the years that I was married, she was a lesbian, marginal, marked with shame, only half visible.

August

When we first met, Shirley was living in California, and in another marriage, with three children. But she fell in love with another man, a teacher, critic and an Israeli. She left her marriage and her life here to move to Israel. I remember how much I admired the courage it must have required to make that change.

The feeling of not being acceptable or loved cuts deeply into the psyche, often leaving an unhealable wound. And what is played out in families is also played out in the schoolyard. Certain children are favored among their peers. Others excluded. Himmler never forgot the years when he was rejected in this way.

August

Now, twenty years later, we are drinking tea in the house of Shirley’s daughter, who is a mother now, and my friend too. “It is not what you would think it is, the Middle East,” Shirley says. The hostilities are predictable, but everywhere there are pockets of contradiction. She tells me about her friendship with a Lebanese poet. Because no mail passes directly between Jerusalem and Beirut they correspond through her daughters’ addresses in the United States. He is a German scholar too, and has translated Trakl and the Bible into Arabic.

Of course patterns of exclusion continue past school years. There is no saying where they begin or end. In the family, or in society at large. Jews. Homosexuals. A darker color of skin, hair. A different accent. Clothes or shoes that are not fine enough. All these prejudices accumulate in an intricate lattice of meaning and injury.

September

Language as both bond and division. Lenke telling me that in Sweden she and Nelly Sachs studied Kabbala together in German. Lenke had learned German in Auschwitz.

Charlotte’s mother was not the same after her sister jumped to her death. But the effect on her was not immediately visible. Except that she insisted to her parents that she be allowed to become a nurse and tend to soldiers wounded in the war. Finally, after much pleading, they relented but only on the condition that she stay away from the front.

September

There are so many stories I heard in the course of the writing that I would like to include in the book. But one cannot tell everything. The urgency of testimony, of bearing witness. A crowd pressing, like passengers, pushing to board a train already filled to capacity.

It was in a hospital in Berlin that Charlotte’s mother met her future husband, Charlotte’s father. He was a doctor. In one painting Charlotte depicts the two of them hovering over the body of a man who has a severe wound. It looks as if either his genitals or his intestines have been injured.

September

Even in the retelling of one story, so many details have had to be left out. And others are given a new prominence. That is, I give them a prominence. And then the book itself, moving with its own life, makes certain choices which I must obey.

Just after Charlotte’s parents are married, her father is called away to the front. Franziska’s parents want her to stay on with them. But she refuses. She goes to live in the apartment they are to share as a married couple. In the story as Charlotte tells it, one feels a sense of liberation and excitement as her mother leaves the suffocating environment of her childhood.

September

What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight wh...