Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life is inspired by the life and work of a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Fine Arts Academy during Hitler’s rise to power. In 1938 her First Place contest prize was denied because she was a Jew, and following that humiliation, her enrollment was annulled. After Kristallnacht, she was sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents on the Côte d’Azur, where she embarked on the making of her masterpiece, “Life? Or Theater?” The novel explores the creative process that gave rise to this unique work, while illustrating the power of art to transform trauma.

When Charlotte’s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old-World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides, including that of her own mother. She struggles against her grandfather’s insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too—all the way from their internment in a bleak camp in the Pyrenees through their arduous trek on foot across mountainous backcountry to Nice. The Vichy regime has ordered her to be bound to him as his caretaker or risk re-internment, but Charlotte is nearly driven mad by his abuse. She must decide whether to abandon him for the sake of her art. Haunted by the encroaching terror of the Third Reich and the threat of psychological disintegration, alone and without identity papers, Charlotte clings to her determination to become a serious modernist painter, to complete her monumental work and get it into the hands of safekeeping in a race against time before capture by the Nazis.