Eight Girls Taking Pictures (36 page)

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Authors: Whitney Otto

Tags: #Historical, #Romance, #Feminism, #Art, #Adult

BOOK: Eight Girls Taking Pictures
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And the wives said nothing.

 • • • 

Charlotte’s father and mother were still in the Netherlands when, on a day in July, she ran into her former classmate Ignacio Martín. They had first met when Charlotte was commuting to Dessau to study with Rainier Ermler. Like Charlotte and Ines’s friend Maria, Ignacio was interested in architecture as well as glass work, though he lacked the religious zeal of Bruno Blum.

Through glass Ignacio Martín and Charlotte Blum became friends. They were close enough to enjoy animated, unguarded conversations when they would run into each other at the Bauhaus, or have coffee or lunch or take in a film. On occasion, Ignacio had supper at the Blums’ when Charlotte’s parents were in town and Bruno invited him.

Charlotte liked talking to Ignacio because conversation with him was so much less one-sided than it was with some of the men at the Bauhaus, even the ones who wanted to impress her enough to get close to her father. She thought maybe it was because Ignacio was from Argentina, and not Germany, making her think that she would like one day to see the country that had produced someone like him.

On that July day in 1933, Ignacio ran into Charlotte near the train station in Potsdamer Platz and said, “It’s awful.”

Charlotte could feel a freeze in her chest. By now everyone knew someone who had been sent to a camp (the ones who came back barely “came back” at all), so naturally her mind went to the worst place possible even as she tried to tell herself whatever she hadn’t heard about couldn’t be that bad or she wouldn’t be hearing about it now, casually, on the street, from a sometime friend like Ignacio Martín.

“The Bauhaus,” he said.

In April the Nazis had raided the Bauhaus, arresting students, confiscating what they called “incriminating material.” Nearly everyone had been released in short order; it was harassment and nothing more, Ines said, though it was enough for Rainier Ermler to accept a permanent position at a Chicago university.

“They’re just looking for something to do,” said Charlotte to Ignacio, breathing a little easier.

“It’s over,” he said.

She slowly took him in her arms, there outside the train station in the busiest platz in the city, where five streets converge among the office buildings, department stores, cafés, restaurants, and news shops. There where the streets were mobbed with passersby, newspaper and flower vendors, strolling couples, nobles, capitalists, students, and working girls. There where the trams, buses, automobiles, horse carts, bicycles, trucks,
and motor scooters raced in crazy disarray. Amid all this, Charlotte held Ignacio as he wept.

kitten + kohl shot an advertisement for face powder, the silver compact held in the empty fingers of Grete’s beat-up leather gloves. Charlotte made a series of still lifes with flowers and milkweed; then she made a picture with ivy branches lying on a table, along with a seashell, a scattering of blouse buttons, two camera filters, two protractors, and a woman’s hand mirror that held Ines’s reflection.
My heart; your heart; my heart.

Charlotte and Ines produced a series of pictures,
The Strongman and the Flying Something
, the two girls in their striped, sleeveless T-shirts; Ines in her wings, Charlotte in her black boots. They posed side by side; they sat in a prop rowboat and pretended to be rowing; they drew fake tattoos on their upper arms; they pretended to sleep on the floor in the sun flooding in through the window.

Hannah Höch was scheduled to have a retrospective at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Charlotte and Ines looked forward to the show and to meeting Hannah with all the enthusiasm and elation of being in the same room with someone whom you can hardly believe exists, you love her work so absolutely.

Only this was in July. Only this was in the New Germany, the one that had shut down the Bauhaus forever with all of Höch’s fabulous images still leaning against the walls, waiting for all the people who would never see them.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Maria, “even after the arrests in April, even when you still tell yourself that life will go on because life always goes on.”

Charlotte and Ines were eating a picnic dinner with Maria in the Tiergarten as brave squirrels edged ever closer for a handout. Maria absentmindedly threw them pieces of her sandwich.

Neile was drinking too much these days, with rumors of opium balls and morphine vials, holed up in her Grunewald house. When Grete Grun went to check on her plane two weeks after the incident with the caretaker’s sons, this time accompanied by Giselle’s boyfriend, she saw that it had been defaced with antilesbian graffiti and Stars of David, along with more epithets. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t Jewish; in the New Germany it was the company she kept and the girls she loved. The propeller was missing, and someone had used the fuselage for target practice. Without packing she went straight to the train station and bought a ticket for Switzerland, a place where she said they didn’t even speak “real German” but the people were nice, if a little dull, and she had met someone.

Giselle’s non-Jewish boyfriend wanted to marry her, but Giselle said that marrying a Jewish girl might not be the wisest decision just now, and he said she was being overly cautious, not all Germans felt as the Nazis did, and it was too late anyway because her fate was his fate. Maria didn’t have the money to leave, so she decided to hope for the best. She spent the better part of each day sketching houses she wanted to build and looking for work, even though she had recently had a job starring in a movie called
A Sunday in Berlin,
which followed two couples on what was meant to seem a usual Sunday, on which the couples have breakfast, go to the lake, sail on two tiny boats, fall asleep in the sun. Then, one of the girls wakes to find her boyfriend gone. She looks around their deserted beach area, until she hears a noise in the tall grass and stumbles upon the other girl, played by Maria, naked and engaged with the other girl’s boyfriend. The first girl can’t decide if she wants her presence known or if she should just return to the beach, prepare dinner, and act as if nothing has happened.

When the first girl returns to the beach, having decided on invisibility, the boyfriend of the girl played by Maria comes back from swimming to an early dinner of potato salad and schnitzel and wine. He asks her
why she seems so sad. She says, “Because it was such a perfect day and now it’s over.”

 • • • 

Not all the neighbors were menacing, but it took only one. It took only a single neighbor, someone the girls had had no problems with during their time there, to begin to take an interest in kitten + kohl. The neighbor asked about the square footage of the studio, and how many bedrooms did it have, and it appeared the back of the building received a good amount of sun, or were there trees or other buildings obstructing it? Was it quiet? How was the hot water? The heat? A fireplace perhaps? And a garden, was there a garden? Overgrown or kept?

There was the day they returned to a kicked-in front door. Alarmed, though it was only late afternoon, the girls cautiously went inside. Nothing was missing. They pushed furniture up against the door until the locksmith came by, paying him double and agreeing that he could come after dark, so no one would see him doing anything for a Jew.

Their neighbor came by the day after the door incident. “Someone’s temper getting the better of them?” he joked.

And then they knew. They knew that even the most neutral neighbors would be tempted to take what they had not even thought to covet until recent events had made them understand that possession was nine-tenths of a law that favored
them.
It was not uncommon for someone to show interest in your jewelry, your home, your job, your painting, maybe even your wife—it was as if the temptation was too much, the possibilities of possession too great to pass up. If you were Jewish, you began to spend all your time trying to go unnoticed. Or making your winter coat go unnoticed. Or your car, your garden. It was nearly impossible to have things and hide them at the same time. How could anyone fight what a Jew now represented to many Germans? It was as if they were walking catalogs of splendid goods and real estate and business and career openings. The trick was to disappear without disappearing.

And when Charlotte said to Ines, “I have relatives in London. We
can pack it all up and move our studio. Just until everything gets sorted out,” Ines agreed.

“They can’t make you go back there [“there” being Germany]. Who are you hurting by staying here? What space are you taking? What difference can one person make to them [“them” being the English]?” cried Charlotte.

Ines laughed a rueful little laugh. “It seems the entire equilibrium of the Empire rests on my residency.”

It was 1934, almost 1935, and Charlotte and Ines had been living and working in London, making portraits of literary figures, film stars, and people with money who were fairly open-minded in their ideas about photography. Advertising jobs were few and far between and often consisted of working with hospitals or other public service professionals, none of whom were very interested in anything visually groundbreaking. Though their style and the client seldom made for a sympathetic matchup, they could make ends meet by cobbling together work in addition to the small monthly stipend from Charlotte’s trust fund, the same one that had paid for Rainier Ermler’s equipment in what now seemed ages ago.

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