#rikaseligson

Today Juni and I went to Weißensee cemetery. We found the family graves of the Seligsons. We saw blue-stained glass. We saw art nouveau ironwork and tumbled trees. We looked for Traute but couldn’t find her and Willi Caro but also couldn’t find him. We did, however, find Rika, huddled behind a grand corner mausoleum. The stone is modest. That she took her own life means no date is given, only her name and the grave number, equated in size. It was moving moment to find her grave and I wonder if to return on 8 August, the date of her death, to mark what the stone cannot

Darcy Buerkle, in her book Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide (2012), places Salomon’s ‎Leben? oder Theater? in the context of the cultures of suicide at the start of the twentieth century: among, specifically, Jewish women, such as Ricka Seligson, who gassed herself in August 1914, along with Fritz Heinle. A lecture by Buerkle is available here.