Art critics rave over 'Berlin's Anne Frank'

A Berlin-born Jewish artist and diarist who died in Auschwitz in 1943 is being hailed as Germany's own Anne Frank.

During the last 18 months of Charlotte Salomon's life in exile in France, where she fled before being betrayed to the Gestapo, Salomon created a personal artistic diary with the title "Life? Or Theatre?". Her unblinking vision of family relationships and experience of the Nazi dictatorship have brought comparisons to Frank, though she was 10 years older.

Hundreds of watercolours in the diary are being described as the work of a newly discovered major German artist.

An exhibition of Salomon's art is currently being held in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and is set to tour Germany before reaching the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

"For the first time, Salomon's work is being shown in Germany as art, and in major galleries," said Sabine Schulze, who curated the exhibtion. "Previously, [the diary] was just considered a historic document, and her artistic achievement was neglected."

Der Spiegel put the artist's watercolours in the same league as Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall.

"Everything is surprising about this work," the paper raved. "Charlotte Salomon was for an astonishingly long time an unknown quantity ... but now interest in her work is exploding."

Unlike Anne Frank's diary, Salomon's is not a daily narrative but reviews her past, documenting the key events and relationships of a dramatic and troubled life. Both her mother and her grandmother committed suicide; she started the project as a 23-year-old after seeing her grandmother jump to her death from a window in their house in the south of France.

She left the diary, now owned by the Jewish Historic Museum in Amsterdam, with friends before she was transported to Auschwitz. The pictorial narrative , an exuberant mixture of 850 watercolours and texts, starts three years before Salomon's birth, with the suicide of a relative. At the age of eight, she was told her mother had died of 'flu when she had, in fact, killed herself. Her father, a prosperous Berlin surgeon, subsequently married a noted singer, Paula Lindberg, who brought social prestige and excitement to the family - as well as many tensions.

After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, her father lost his job and was arrested several times. Salomon's diary recalls the words: "You stupid young miss, where are you going? Your father's locked up." Intimidation forced her to leave school, and when she applied to the Berlin Kunstakademie in 1935, her diary records, she asked: "Do you also take Jews?" But bullying made life intolerable at the academy, too, and she was forced to leave.

Despite the tragedy of her life, the diary often draws on brilliant colours at its bleakest moments. Love and sex loom large and are often treated comically. Salomon fell in love with a singing teacher who, though engaged, was in turn enamoured of her glamorous stepmother.